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    Abolishing FIFA

    Why is sport organized around nation-states? Why does the spot where some clown in the nineteenth century drew a border have to rule the way we organize sport?

    FAs suck. They are almost without exception anti-democratic. Why should these people be the only ones with a say in the way the game is run?

    Why do FAs have to be national? Why can there only be one FA per country?

    FIFA operates according to Westphalian terms - every FA is sovereign in its own area and can never be touched (even when they are corrupt as all hell); and only the FAs may speak at FIFA (even though clubs and leagues are where the real action is).

    Imagine you could abolish FIFA and start from scratch. How would you create a body to govern world football? Would you retain national FAs? How would you give clubs and fans a say? How would you combat the obvious possibilities for corruption?

    #2
    Abolishing FIFA

    If I could abolish FIFA and start from scratch then obviously I'd put me in charge and take it from there.

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      #3
      Abolishing FIFA

      Not that I'd defend Fifa or national FAs, but if you abolished them how would you deal with the administration of domestic leagues? Or would you abolish them too?

      Comment


        #4
        Abolishing FIFA

        I'm agnostic. I could be open to it, but why do leagues need an FA overseeing them? Or at least, why do FAs have to stop at national borders?

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          #5
          Abolishing FIFA

          What an odd question. If you're asking 'why wasn't sport the instrument of a radical policy to remake the identity politics of the world in some post-national fashion' then the answer's pretty obvious. No-one thought about it, was into it, or would have been successful with it should they even had the notion. FAs are Westphalian because the world is. Nations states still are the primary loci of self-identification that have legitimacy and traction. people have been predicting the death of the national identity for most of my life, yet international football tournaments have grown ever bigger. Fancy!

          I'm all for democratising national associations but most already are democratic internally. The problem is the electorate, which is usually clubs and others involved in the administration, with no space for fans, and in most cases, players. It retains the Victorian ethos of gentlemen and players from its inceptions. That's a worthwhile reform, as is better co-ordinating their efforts. At present, UEFA don't really have any regulatory power - only the ability to regulate their tournaments and matches they sanction. The power is with FAs and with FIFA, and giving continental confederations real power is necessary reform.

          As for why their can't be one FA per country, are you serious? FA regulate football, which needs regulating. You can't have two regulatory bodies if you want to have a conception of a national football system. You can delegate, sure, but if you think there's something called Canadian football which you would like to see developed and thrive, you need someone at the top keeping everything pushing in the same direction.

          But the main reason is that as appalling as FAs are, the only alternative is the market, which is so, so much worse. Clubs and leagues will be dominated by the interests of the largest and most popular, and will kill the interests of the smaller. We see this happening anyway, and it would be much worse without the football structures we have in place. If you value diversity in football, in smaller clubs as well as stronger ones, you need a regulator.

          Comment


            #6
            Abolishing FIFA

            I wasn't asking it as a historical question, NHH - I know why it happened. I'm asking why it has to continue to be that way or if we could imagine different ways.

            The power is with FAs and with FIFA, and giving continental confederations real power is necessary reform.
            Funny, I always got the impression you were a bit of a eurosceptic, but perhaps I was wrong.

            I`m not sure I buy all your arguments. US football has come a long way without its main leagues having more than a passing relationship with the USSF. And they are open enough to let teams from other countries (i.e. Canada) play, which doesn't seem to have caused any major ruffles. Why can't the Austrians and the Swiss combine and create one decent league? Or the Belgians and the Dutch? Or the three Baltic countries? Why not have joint regulators where leagues are concerned? Or allow clubs to choose which country they want to be regulated in?

            And that's all assuming a regulator is an unalloyed good. Regulators have done as much harm as good, historically, primarily because they have tended to act as a check on players' wages. The value of competing leagues with different sets of regulations (the US in the 20s, Colombia in the 50s) both acted to increase player bargaining power in Europe, much as (I think) the new Indian cricket league will have in that sport, or the WHL had in hockey in the 70s. Competing regulators might actually be a bonus.

            Comment


              #7
              Abolishing FIFA

              FAs suck. They are almost without exception anti-democratic.
              I'm not sure about this, but I think you'd find that most FAs - certainly my experience of people who work with the English FA, some of whom are on this board - are far more "democratic", inasmuch as people have to work their way up through the decision making structures, and generally represent the "grass roots" of schools football, etc. If you go the other way, handing the game over lock stock and barrel to billionaire chairmen of clubs, then there would be now World Cup, no Euro finals, just an endless procession of Man United v Chelsea "World SuperLeague" finals, probably after a 39-game season of matches between Milan and Newcastle played in Bangkok, if Richard Scudamore and his mates got their way.

              Is that really how we want the game to go?

              Comment


                #8
                Abolishing FIFA

                But Rogin, that's clearly not how the game would go. The free-for-all you describe is more or less (geography aside) how the game was prior to the formation of the football league in 1882 or 1883 or whenever it was.

                The idea of a league is a damn good one. It's impossible to imagine football (or indeed almost any sport) without leagues now. Fans would demand them. They just might not demand the ones they have now.

                Most North American sports leagues manage to self-regulate - and not with results that are obviously worse that european football.

                It seems to me that the only thing leagues can't do on their own is ensure a pyramid.

                Comment


                  #9
                  Abolishing FIFA

                  No, it's not how it goes. Forget pyramids, you let the owners take control, you naturally end up with a self-governing cartel of owners, who all want to keep their club in the money trough (which, to be fair to them, is understandable). Look what's happened to Rugby League in the UK, and to pretty much the same extent Rugby Union - both of which, twenty years ago, had pyramid league structures that have now been well brushed aside. Domestic Rugby Union, in England, indeed, has lost its equivalent of "international" football - the county championship - players used to play for clubs to be recognised by the counties, who in turn were the only teams international selectors used to go and watch. Now, you've got a Super League of 12 clubs, which is actually about 10, 8 of whom entertain ideas of grandeur with 2 or 3 mucking about getting promoted or relegated each season.

                  Not sure it's an improvement overall. It might be better for the fans of those clubs - all and any decent players are in those franchises - but it's not great for the overall grass roots development bit, nor in any way democratic. If football went the same way without the FA to say "Oy, no chance", the Premier League would be down to eight clubs, ten if they could entice Celtic and Rangers in, and there wouldn't be promtion or relegation except if a "franchise" went bust, like Man United will in 2010.

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Abolishing FIFA

                    Not sure I agree with you AG. American sports generally self-regulate and if it weren't for the fact that most of the rest of the world isn't interested in our sports, they would go the way Rogin explains. We don't have relegation or promotion. New franchise owners basically pay the existing owners for a right to print money and their exclusivity helps them squeeze free stadia from municipalities.

                    Someone on this board once remarked that the NFL was like a league of Manchester Uniteds. That is true to a large extent.

                    If football were set up like NFL/MLB/NBA. There'd be two big teams in London, one in Manchester, one in Dublin, one in Glasgow, one in Amsterdam, maybe one in Ediburgh, one in Paris, one in Munich, etc (keep going til it adds up to 30). They'd all be set up in a superleague that could negotiate a massive fee for TV rights and share exactly zero of it with any other clubs or levels of the game.

                    If the owners of one of those teams was doing a shitty job, there'd be nothing for the local fans to do about it other than to support their local "minor league" side which has been forced by economics to affiliate itself with a big club which actually controls their players.

                    There'd be no promotion or relegation because that just reduces the "franchise" values.

                    Comment


                      #11
                      Abolishing FIFA

                      It does feel as if one is stuck between a rock and a hard place, but the national associations are that we have in order to prevent the owners basically doing what Reed describes above. And to think that they wouldn't is flying in the face of more or less everything that we know about them.

                      Comment


                        #12
                        Abolishing FIFA

                        It reminds me. Especially when MLS was coming into being, but even to this day, whenever a soccer writer does a radio show or web chat in the U.S. about the state of soccer in America in general, somebody (who clearly doesn't know much about America and or how businessmen think or both) always asks "When are we going to get relegation/promotion like in a proper league?"

                        The answer is almost always "you're likely to see that go away in Europe before you ever see it installed in the US." Investors want stability and as much certainty as possible. They don't want to invest in a major league team and end up with minor league attendances and a minor league tv deal. Likewise, they don't want to have to splash out a lot for a better stadium and better players if there's a chance they might go back down.

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                          #13
                          Abolishing FIFA

                          You're all assuming, off the bat, that losing an FA would mean everything would go into the hands of owners. Why, exactly?

                          National laws dictate the structure of team ownership far more than do FAs. You could abolish the German FA and the clubs would all still be community-owned because that's what German law says.

                          In fact, in the US, the absence of a regulatory body in baseball has in a sense given Congress a stick to use with owners (anti-trust legislation) when it feels owners are stepping out of line. It doesn't use it much, but it's there.

                          And anyways, Reed, I already conceded the difficulty with relegation/promotion and suggested that any new regulatory structure would have to take this into account. My point was - why does the regulatory oversight structure on leagues have to be national? Club regulation probably does have to be national because they are commericial entities and commercial law is national. But leagues?

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                            #14
                            Abolishing FIFA

                            As usual, I'm with Nathan here and think that many of your initial premises are just wrong.

                            Yes, Jack Warner should be in jail rather than Zurich, but that isn't the intrinsic fault of the FA system; it's the fault of the particular c*nts who are running it at the moment. And thinking that football would some how be better off with a series of competing national leagues strikes me as absolute nonsense; much of the game's value comes from its universality.

                            The lack of that universality is what allowed the North American (and Australian) leagues to go off on their own, but even there, they never broke entirely with the global system so as to risk their access to overseas talent (just look how the evolution of those relationships as overseas talent has become more important in hockey, basketball and baseball, and the fact that neither the NASL nor MLS have ever been willing to seriously challenge FIFA).

                            The "real action" isn't with professional clubs and leagues; its with the millions of people who play the game at every level. And given that the rest of the world doesn't have the almost entirely cost-free player development systems that the North American leagues have benefited from, the FAs do a pretty decent job of taking care of that part of the game.

                            Comment


                              #15
                              Abolishing FIFA

                              Of course, the one exception to the rule of national FAs is the UK. So there is a clear precedent that FAs do not have to be national.

                              Comment


                                #16
                                Abolishing FIFA

                                Ah, NHH is NHH. It's an excellent post, as have been many on the thread.

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                                  #17
                                  Abolishing FIFA

                                  Yes, great thread and thanks to AG for raising the topic.

                                  Instinctively I agree with him, there ought to be "other ways" for professional sport to operate rather than the traditional European and North American models. However, speaking as someone who has problems sorting out his laundry, I'm pretty much stumped. A particular flight of fancy of mine though is to wonder whether long established smaller clubs couldn't be partly supported by council taxes, as a local cultural amenity.

                                  Comment


                                    #18
                                    Abolishing FIFA

                                    Antonio Gramsci wrote:
                                    I wasn't asking it as a historical question, NHH - I know why it happened. I'm asking why it has to continue to be that way or if we could imagine different ways.
                                    I'd wonder why we were asking it, what the faults of the current system were, how the new system was going to remedy them, and whether the problems of a new system are enough to accept. As has been said, the current system isn't perfect, but I just don't see any sever flaws that can't be tackled within the system. Indeed, if one posits (as I do) that the major problem in football is an inequitable distribution of resources, then the current system

                                    Funny, I always got the impression you were a bit of a eurosceptic, but perhaps I was wrong.
                                    I'm an internationalist, but EU sceptic. In football, I think (along with the German FA), UEFA are the most progressive force in world football.

                                    I`m not sure I buy all your arguments. US football has come a long way without its main leagues having more than a passing relationship with the USSF. And they are open enough to let teams from other countries (i.e. Canada) play, which doesn't seem to have caused any major ruffles.
                                    The fact that soccer was essemtially controlled by a variety of enthsiasts, stadium owners, chancers and dreamers is arguably a major factor in it. If you read the WSC history of the game there, the lack of a strong hand guiding development is stunning; that the body which did exist seemed to lack any competence or legitimacy was not a function of national FA structures.

                                    And, at the risk of being patronising, comparing how sport developed in backwaters is of limited exemplary power to places where development was pretty much nailed over 100 years ago.
                                    The North American system of sport is now radically different to Europe. Your business culture is different. Pyramid structures and open promotion and relegation are crucial to football in pretty much every established football country, and to preserve such a structure, with its huge fortune changing potential, requires a disinterested regulator taking a longer term.

                                    Why can't the Austrians and the Swiss combine and create one decent league? Or the Belgians and the Dutch? Or the three Baltic countries? Why not have joint regulators where leagues are concerned? Or allow clubs to choose which country they want to be regulated in?
                                    Regulation has two facets - implementing technical provisions of rules and agreeing those rules in the first place. The former is easily done by pretty anyone with the competence to do it. The latter is a political process which needs a final arbiter- a sovereign. As a canadian once said, there can be only one.

                                    As for those leagues, there's been talk about all of those things, none of which are because people think they're a brilliant idea, more attempts to boost the value of peripheral leagues, which is a function of inequitable distribution of resources in European football.

                                    And that's all assuming a regulator is an unalloyed good. Regulators have done as much harm as good, historically, primarily because they have tended to act as a check on players' wages.
                                    That's a strange one. The levelling impulse of the maximum wage was a reasonable idea; it was recognised that a free for all would favour the largest clubs and lead to overstretching. They were right. The problem was the failure to make the maximum wage keep pace and it stayed the exact same from 1910 until it was abolished in the 1960s. The failure wasn't one of regulation per se, more that the regulators were club chairman who saw their players as employeees and thus to be treated with the contempt in which they felt all workers should be treated. In other words, a good idea also made a small fortune for small-minded men who had no compunction in treating people like slaves.

                                    It's a side issue though. Of course regulation has side-effects, as does lack of regulation. The issue is where you think most harm is done, and the evidence of English football over the last 20 years as the regulator has been emasculated, is that some regulation would be a fucking good idea. Report after report after report, academic paper after paper points out the need for it (apart from those by free-market fundies).

                                    The value of competing leagues with different sets of regulations (the US in the 20s, Colombia in the 50s) both acted to increase player bargaining power in Europe, much as (I think) the new Indian cricket league will have in that sport, or the WHL had in hockey in the 70s. Competing regulators might actually be a bonus.
                                    That's not competing regulators, that's competing employment markets. Totally different thing to what I'm talking about.

                                    Let's put it another way - if your objection to the current system is that clubs can't choose what league or country they play in, then that seems like a pretty good system to me TBH. What's the problem?

                                    PS - German law doesn't require football clubs be at least 51% owened by a verein - the German FA insists on that. The legal framework of the verein is of course a facet of German law. Other countries are less specific about what legal form to use, so you end up choosing one designed usually for something else (a particular problem in somewhere like the Uk with a poverty of legal options)

                                    As for the point about leagues - the point is that each club must operate under the same basic taxation structures, or else you have a significant advantage (one of the understated reasons why the PL as able to pay more was the ability to avoid tax, making the English club buck get a bigger bang. Then you have the problem of transnational relegation and promotion, which is hard to do.

                                    As for why owners would control it - we're all kind of assuming that ownership matters, that power springs from it and that until such time as players had complete freedom of movement (and even then, they'd still be powerful - there's a tangent here about Hollywood and the star system), and unless there's been a revolution in property relations which no-one told me about, ownership of the means of production in a capitalist system is really important.

                                    Comment


                                      #19
                                      Abolishing FIFA

                                      Amor de Cosmos wrote:
                                      A particular flight of fancy of mine though is to wonder whether long established smaller clubs couldn't be partly supported by council taxes, as a local cultural amenity.
                                      I have flights of fancy that clubs should be charities, but that's a whole different debate.

                                      In short ADC, many clubs are. There's soft support, such as Real Madrid's from the City authorities where the local authority buy land from the club paying off debts, or give rent holidays to grounds they own, or give land freely for new stadia. In quite a few UEFA associations, there is direct support for teams from local or regional government in varying degrees of openness.

                                      Comment


                                        #20
                                        Abolishing FIFA

                                        Even if you abolished them all, it's only a matter of time before you get another lot of twats running the show.

                                        The revolution eats its own you know.

                                        Comment


                                          #21
                                          Abolishing FIFA

                                          AG, I don't see why leagues should be confined to one country. In fact, given the top-heavy structure of a lot of European leagues, I think it's sort of stupid. The Scottish League, for example, is just asinine. Celtic and Rangers are simply not playing the same game as the rest of Scottish clubs.

                                          In North America, hockey does reasonably ok with two separate but cooperating federations.

                                          At just about every level, at the top professional level, the one below it and the major junior level, leagues straddle the border without much difficulty.

                                          Sometimes there are problems with the dollars get way out of whack and Canadian taxation is obviously a lot higher, but especially under the new salary cap structure and the weakening of the US dollar, it all seems to be evening out.

                                          What the people who run successful American leagues (baseball excluded) understand is that the product being sold to the public is the league as a whole, not just the individual clubs, although the individual clubs have work to do to sell themselves to their local community as well.

                                          I don't see any of this attitude in European football. The overwhelming popularity of the game seems to just be taken for granted and club owners just worry about how they can get the biggest piece of that pie. If there's a Wellington Mara or Art Rooney of European football, I've not heard of him.

                                          Comment


                                            #22
                                            Abolishing FIFA

                                            A US/Mexican soccer league. La Liga Norteno. It does have a ring to it.

                                            Winners and runners up qualify for the Copa Lib.

                                            Comment


                                              #23
                                              Abolishing FIFA

                                              Sorry, imp, but Nathan should be the all powerful poobah of football.

                                              I'm sure that he would need retainers, and would welcome your joining me in angling for a place as one of his "people".

                                              Amor, French clubs in the 80s were in fact subsidised by local authorities on exactly that basis, with local politicians explicitly arguing that they were no different than museums, orchestras or opera companies. Unfortunately, what happened was that certain councils became engaged in a financial arms race devoted to "living the dream" that left large holes in the public fisc while contributing to a very uneven playing field, as not all councils had similar resources or inclinations to participate. The practice was eventually banned as constituting illegal "state aid" to private enterprises, but there are still deals in place under which local authorities buy thousands of tickets for distribution to youth groups and/or buy sponsorship space on club's kits.

                                              Comment


                                                #24
                                                Abolishing FIFA

                                                Dear oh dear oh dear.

                                                There is a big problem in running football and it came about in about 1907/8. The Football Association (an association of County FAs, who in themselves are an association of clubs and leagues (who are an association of clubs)) has to "regulate" professional football and amateur football under the premise that they should play under the same rules.

                                                They kind of do, but they kind of don't. The laws of the game are consistent across both sides, however, how the laws are applied, and the formation of a game vary widly. From professional football to senior football there are 4 match officials, in grassroots football there is one (and often not that). Etc.

                                                The whole undemocratic thing is always the biggest pile of shit I've heard..
                                                anyone can represent Fifa through nomination from their regional body
                                                anyone can represent Uefa through nomination through their national FA
                                                anyone can represent the English FA through nomination from their county FA (or pro club)
                                                anyone can represent the county FA through nomination through their club (or league)
                                                anyone can represent their club through nomination from the rest of the members
                                                anyone can be the member of a club

                                                I sit on the Exec committee of the biggest amateur league in Europe if not the world, I got their by being on the committee of my club. If I so choose (and I probably will one day) I can sit on a county FA committee, I need 2 clubs to nominate me. From their I could try to be elected by the other council members to be the FA reprsentative. From there I could stand as one of the FA's representatives to UEFA, from there I could stand to be a Uefa rep to Fifa. I could be a future Sepp Blatter, and so could you.

                                                Comment


                                                  #25
                                                  Abolishing FIFA

                                                  Judging by Andrew Jennings' book Foul! Sepp Blatter is not very keen on other people having his job and is prepared to go to considerable lengths to ensure that he retains it and the millions it brings.

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