The most pressing concern regarding Qatar’s World Cup bid, from an administrative point of view, was the heat. The idea to move the World Cup to the winter came much later, after Qatar was chosen as the host. So, as the bids were being evaluated in 2010, the heat was the “insurmountable obstacle”, as per Harold Mayne-Nicholls, chief FIFA inspector, 2018 and 2022 World Cup bids.
“We did our reports,” he says in the Netflix limited series FIFA Uncovered. “These were sent out. Any member of the ExCo (FIFA executive committee) could call me and ask me to explain anything. No one called me.... I reached the conclusion that not all of them had read it. If they didn’t care that you couldn’t play in May, June, July, why would they care about working conditions?”
FIFA’s misdeeds have been widely reported, but the brazenness of the wrongdoing is enough to keep you engaged―money materialises in brown envelopes before a vote and vanishes when it is earmarked for grassroots projects. Moreover, while we know that FIFA is corrupt, FIFA Uncovered does a brilliant job of explaining how it became corrupt. It traces FIFA’s journey from its humble origins to its current standing as a global giant and says the transformation began under João Havelange.
In the 1974 presidential election, Havelange beat the incumbent Sir Stanley Rous by projecting himself as an agent of change against the racist Rous. The Brazilian stayed in office till 1998, growing FIFA’s revenue and exploiting football to make himself richer. His protégé Sepp Blatter found out that his boss was corrupt and used this to obtain the presidency for himself. Blatter did his mentor proud, for under him, FIFA became a hotbed of corruption, if not institutionally corrupt. The Swiss held on to the post till he was forced out in 2015.
He keeps popping up throughout the series, looking like a weasel on steroids. But, his bytes offer only platitudes. Even worse, the 86-year-old, who projected himself as the champion of Africa and the smaller confederations to win elections, says he cannot be held responsible for what members from “other countries and cultures did”. It is easy to feel sorry for the blithering idiot he is made out to be till you remember that this is the political genius who manipulated world football for so long.
FIFA Uncovered tackles sportswashing and calls out Havelange for endorsing the 1978 World Cup in Argentina during military dictatorship. Russia 2018 features and there is a deep-dive into Qatar 2022 that offers almost all relevant perspectives. There is an interesting bit about how Nelson Mandela was used by FIFA officials. However, there is, notably, no mention of the 1934 World Cup in Mussolini’s Italy.
The four-part series is thorough―each episode is close to an hour. But, the runtime could have been easily trimmed by at least an hour. FIFA Uncovered is not an easy watch, but it is well worth a watch, even if you are not a sports fan. As former FIFA media director Guido Tognoni explains: “Why should the normal fan care? We should care because the sport gives the illusion that it is nice, fair, clean. It is not, but the illusion lives on.”