FIFA’s Decision to Shutter Anti-Racism Task Force Is Just Bad PR—For Now

On Friday, FIFA sent a letter to the members of its anti-racism task force informing them that they had "completely fulfilled" their mission and that the task force was being disbanded, as the AP reported on Sunday. But as far-right politicians extolling white-supremacist and xenophobic party lines gain stronger footholds in the United States, Germany, the UK, and Austria—to name just a few examples—FIFA declaring "mission accomplished" for its part in fighting racism comes off as either hopelessly obtuse or willfully ignorant.

Of course, FIFA still has plenty of discriminatory concerns in its own fiefdom. The 2017 Confederations Cup begins in nine months in Russia, home to some of the most glaring examples of racism in recent history. The country will stage the World Cup a year later.

The timing and optics of FIFA's decision could hardly be worse.

For Piara Powar, executive director of the Fare Network, which fights discrimination in soccer around the world and works with FIFA on such issues, the disbanding itself is little more than a public relations disaster, at least for right now. The news wasn't exactly a surprise to him, since task force hadn't convened in a year. It was obvious that FIFA, for whatever reason, didn't believe it to be the best mechanism for addressing racism. (One possibility as to why FIFA disbanded it: to distance itself from its creator and former chairman, Jeffrey Webb, who was indicted last year as part of the widespread FIFA bribery case.)

"The issue for me isn't whether the task force exists," Powar told VICE Sports. "[It's] neither here nor there. [FIFA] has to correct the misapprehension that they don't care about these issues."

FIFA has, in fact, taken up several of the task force's recommendations, including an antidiscrimination monitoring system during World Cup qualifiers, in partnership with the Fare Network. This resulted in "groundbreaking" sanctions, as Powar called them, for homophobic chants last May for six Latin American countries. The sanctions were light—ranging from $15,000 to $35,000 per federation—but punishing homophobic chants at all was, indeed, groundbreaking.

The main concern for Powar is the broader signal FIFA's decision sends members prior to the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. "We're far more concerned about issues in Russia and how we deal with those and how we make discrimination not a feature of Qatar," he said, referring to the hosts of those tournaments.

Certainly there is still much work to be done in Russia, where soccer officials are notorious for paying anti-racism the most casual of lip service while doing nothing to discourage it. Most famously, Alexei Smertin, a former national team player and ambassador to the World Cup bid, set a world record for most efficient tautology by telling the BBC that "there's no racism in Russia because it does not exist," despite black players being routinely taunted and jeered using racial epithets. And then there's Qatar, host of the 2022 World Cup, where homosexuality is illegal—an issue former FIFA President Sepp Blatter once addressed by saying gay people just shouldn't have sex while attending.

Asked if tackling these issues becomes harder now, Powar was cautiously optimistic. "I don't think it makes it harder yet. We will have to assess that. But what it does it send a mixed message." He thinks this might embolden those within FIFA who want to ignore the issue or don't understand it to further dismiss discrimination as being a problem in the first place.

Still, Powar expects FIFA to continue being "proactive" on issues of discrimination and racism in soccer. "For us it is the need to move on from the clumsiness of the letter and the task force [getting] killed off to the things that need to be done." The question is whether disbanding the task force is a minor blip or a sign of things to come.