Skating on thin ice

While the global media relishes episode after episode of the FIFA saga, another - quieter - revolution could be taking place that could spell the end of sport governance as we know it. The names involved are arguably less glamorous (or notorious) than the Blatters, Platinis, or even Beckenbauers of this world

When Dutch speed skaters Mark Tuitert and Niels Kerstholt took part in an independent off-season event last year, they knew they were challenging the status quo in most organisations within the pyramid of sport governance. In several disciplines, professional athletes are barred from participating in competitions other than those organised or recognised by the association or federation they belong to.

Let's take football for ease of reference. Players cannot participate in competitions other than their domestic league or UEFA and FIFA competitions at club and national team level. When the top European clubs flouted the idea of setting up a league of their own outside UEFA - because they have enough demand and economic firepower to do so - they were 1) threatened with eternal suspensions, and 2) accommodated enough to stay put as UEFA bent over backwards to appease them.

Tuitert and Kerstholt were similarly threatened of being suspended from the International Skating Union (ISU) and consequently being unable to compete in major competitions such as the Olympics and the World Championships. Only that in their case the threat was carried out. 

For the record, Tuitert is the Olympic Champion in the 1500 meters and Kerstholt was World Champion in short track with the Dutch national team. Not that it matters much. Their claim would have been the same if they always placed last: here is an organisation, the ISU, that is abusing of its monopoly in regulating the sport, they maintain.

The two skaters complained to the Euorpean Commission. As they said in an open letter, "the numbers speak for themselves: an individual short track speed skater winning all the ISU competitions in a typical season would earn around €25,000. This is less than what the same skater would receive for merely appearing in a single, two-day Icederby event".

The European Commission is indeed investigating the complaint “because it raises specific allegations of breaches of competition law at the international level rather than wider issues of internal governance or rule-making in a sport federation". Back in June, as soon as a third of the FIFA Executive Committee was arrested in Zurich, the European Parliament has expressed the same concerns. 

When sport becomes an economic activity, it has to balance out its traditional autonomy and specificity on one hand, and compliance with market and employment rules on the other. Athletes can only compete at the highest level for a limited number of years, so there must be good reasons for preventing them to take part in events.

This case could well fizzle out if the European Commission deems there were good reasons behind the ISU position. It could be, however, that if the Dutch skaters' claims are considered justified, international sport governance would need to be redefined. International federations such as FIFA  would be restricted to governing the rules of the game, leaving the organisation of competitions (and the mountains of revenues) to others.

If that happens, you heard it here first.

Football is the game, FIFA is the shame

Don’t you just love America for going after FIFA? Even if only for that.

Take the press conference given by the Department of Justice. Whereas I would usually cringe at the way they make a spectacle of what should be a bland presser announcing an indictment, this time I enjoyed every minute of it. To think that they actually prefer baseball.

Americans just have a knack for it. “The World Cup of fraud” – that is how the Head of the Investigation Division termed it. There, you have the headlines ready to go to print. 

Here they were trying to explain in the best of terms the picture that ensued following years of investigation. The people at FIFA, tasked with upholding the rules to protect and promote the game, have instead corrupted it to serve their interests, turning football (ok, Americans keep saying ‘soccer’, but we can turn a blind eye to that, just this time) into “a criminal enterprise”, as the US Attorney General described it. 

Earlier, as people in the US were still fast asleep, a solitary FIFA Director of Communications gave his own press conference. Conspicuously alone, sitting at a grand podium that usually accommodates a gang of self-important, vain officials, I almost felt a degree of empathy for him. Almost.

He had none of the flowery language that would be used across the ocean. His were mostly one-word answers. The ‘line-to-take’ was that FIFA is actually the damaged party in all this. He must have repeated it half a dozen times, almost as many times as the instances he stressed that Sepp Blatter is not involved in the investigation.

Good old Sepp has been working at FIFA since 1975, first as technical director, then general secretary  for seven years, until being elected president in 1998. Today he is vying for his fifth four-year term. That would take him to the grand total of more than four decades, half of which he spent actually heading the organisation.


But he’s “not involved”. Even though a host of his current and former Vice-Presidents and Executive Committee members are currently under investigation. Accountable? What’s that?

Few would have thought the 65th FIFA Congress would turn out to be this exciting. We all predicted another circus that would smoothly re-elect Blatter. Not that he is going to budge. His lame speech in the only public appearance he made in the past two days proves it. Welcoming the delegates to the Congress he refused – once more – to take the blame. “I cannot monitor everyone all of the time”, he 
told us. He did acknowledge, however, that “more bad news may follow”.

The buck must stop with Blatter. Something tells me it soon will.

His only way out is to stay in. Yet, even if today he scrapes another election victory, staying in might not be enough this time round.

Whether his replacement is the antidote for the game is another matter (on its own, it is definitely not), but until then we’ll continue to savour the moment.