FIFA Is Getting A New President, But What It Needs Is New Candidates

FIFA's enterprise is built on the shaky premise that it alone can put on a global soccer tournament, that it alone possesses the keys to the world's soccer market, and that it alone can unite the world through the sanctity of football. The organization's survival depends on every country buying into this.

But, as European soccer officials have never been shy pointing out, none of those things actually require FIFA. It's not difficult to envision a scenario in which UEFA—long bitter about the financial siphoning that distributes much of its soccer profits to less developed countries—takes advantage of a future FIFA misstep to organize a world tournament of its own, something it has plotted to do before. Just last week, England's FA Chief Executive Martin Glenn echoed these sentiments, telling The Guardian, "if there's another major scandal permeating FIFA, it may not withstand it."

But the major threat to FIFA is not necessarily new scandals, but the ongoing fallout of past and present ones. Although most of the focus remains on Qatar 2022 for its obvious corruption, logistical, and moral issues, Russia 2018 appears, day by day, to be the more politically troubling. Russia's winning bid involved as much nefariousness as Qatar's but has received a fraction of the backlash. Meanwhile, the success or failure of the 2018 World Cup depends in no small part on factors completely outside FIFA's control: the Syrian civil war increasingly looks like a Cold War proxy re-enactment, the U.S. is moving more and more military resources to NATO's Russian border, and the outcome of this year's (American) presidential election will determine much of the foreign policy rhetoric of the next four years. Increasingly, there appears to be a global shift that makes the 2018 World Cup a tournament of tremendous political import. Plus, let's not forget what happened the last time Russia hosted a major world sporting event.

Friday's FIFA presidential election, despite all the tepid promises of reform, integrity, and accountability, will have little practical impact on the next two World Cups. The candidates, particularly the frontrunners, don't support any drastic action. Prince Ali bin Al Hussein of Jordan, who calls himself a reform candidate, would stick with these two hosts. Sheikh Salman Bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa of Bahrain has said he would be willing to "revisit" the issue if previous "wrongful conduct" meets his Biblical proportion of burden of proof, but he also has said he's "confident" the 2022 World Cup will be held in Qatar, despite the tiny host nation dragging its feet on implementing even the most toothless human rights reforms.

Even if the candidates supported such a thing, they alone do not have the power to move World Cups. Indeed, FIFA is probably stuck with Russia and Qatar. The organization probably couldn't move the 2018 World Cup even if it wanted to: the only other World Cup to be moved, Colombia's in 1986, was shuffled to Mexico three years in advance.

As for Qatar, the executive committee would have to vote for it to be moved in the face of incontrovertible proof that the vote was rigged. If this burden of proof hasn't already been met, it likely never will. If they did vote to strip Qatar of its hosting duties, Qatar could fight it through a process nobody really understands because it's never been done before, which makes it likely they litigate and delay their way out of the problem.

Meanwhile, none of the candidates inspire a ton of confidence that they can mediate the politically thorny matters to come. The election cycle itself has occasionally bordered on farce. Sheikh Salman has publicly demonstrated that he neither knows nor cares how voting and democratic elections work, stating that the FIFA presidential ballot should be narrowed down to one candidate before the actual vote. Salman told the AP: "If we go to election there will be losers and maybe sometimes you need to avoid that result." In general, he has refused to address any matters of substance and offered only the vaguest suggestions regarding reform. This hardly comes as a surprise since Salman played a key role in squashing the 2012 independent audit of the African Football Confederation's finances.

Salman has also been tied to human rights violations in his native Bahrain, including the torture of pro-Democracy Olympic athletes. Apparently immunized from irony, he recently signed a "human rights pledge" put forward by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch—but only after removing specific references to the Russia 2018 and Qatar 2022 World Cups, and abuses against women and LGBT groups. He claimed this was to encompass "all minorities" and "all future hosts of World Cups and other FIFA tournaments." None of the candidates were willing to sign the pledge card over the full range of issues, and none "accepted the need for an independent advisory panel" to tackle issues like transparency and accountability.

Somehow, this is not the biggest joke of the election cycle. That honor belongs to Tokyo Sexwale, who issued a statement on "human rights" that appears not to have been proofread, referring to himself and his cohort as "candicates":

Fifa presidential candidate Tokyo Sexwale's statement on human rights: pic.twitter.com/iJtaPIMxCw
— Richard Conway (@richard_conway) February 12, 2016

Gianni Infantino, UEFA's general secretary and the most promising reform candidate, wants to allow the entire Gulf region to host matches in 2022, which hardly solves any fundamental problems. Infantino's campaign has also been plagued by rumors that he will drop out and push his bloc to Salman, who will then name Infantino general secretary of FIFA (Infantino denies these rumors). Sexwale is rumored to be up to something similar. Meet the new FIFA, same as the old one.

One of these men—most likely Salman—is going to have the pleasure of presiding over perhaps the most politically significant World Cup in history, sorting out the 2022 mess, cleaning up a massively corrupt organization, and dealing with any other annoyances that come his way. None inspire anything approaching confidence, and that's a problem. Everything is at stake here for FIFA; the organization's lofty, self-serving claims about developing the world's game always have depended on the revenue the World Cup generates, which in turn depends on the entire world letting FIFA administer and profit from a global tournament. What happens if and when the globe gets a good look at President Infantino or Salman's regimes, World Cups hosted by peace-loving Vladimir Putin and the not-at-all-repressive Qatari regime, and then decides that nothing has really changed?

Given the candidates on FIFA's slate, the next six years aren't shaping up to be about putting out a dumpster fire. Instead, they figure to be an exercise in diving headfirst into the rubbish bin, and praying the smoldering garbage protects you from the flames.