Among the challenges for FIFA, the world governing body for football, when it was set up in 1904, was securing agreement on a shared set of rules for the game. It’s come a long way since then: it’s now a multi-billion-dollar behemoth, an unparalleled power in world sport. But on the eve of what it bills as ‘the greatest show on earth’ – the 2026 World Cup hosted in North America – it’s worth pausing to ask how well it serves the interests of the fans of the planet’s biggest spectator sport.
To discuss the past, present and future of FIFA, George Miller is joined by Alan Tomlinson, Emeritus Professor of Leisure Studies at the University of Brighton and author of What is FIFA for?
Tomlinson is the antithesis of the ivory tower academic; his interest in understanding FIFA’s inner workings has taken him on years’-long quests more akin to investigative reporting than abstract theorising. This book, which one reviewer called the ‘capstone’ of his long interest in FIFA, distinguishes the reality from the rhetoric, the better to map the possible future of the game.
Throughout the conversation, two themes recur: accountability and transparency. For Tomlinson, the greatest challenge FIFA poses is not its size but the difficulty of holding such a powerful organisation to account.
Available to listen here, or on your favourite podcast platform:
Alan Tomlinson is Emeritus Professor of Leisure Studies at the University of Brighton UK and a pioneer of critical sport and leisure research, blending cultural studies with investigative and in-the-field research.
Scroll down for shownotes and transcript.
What Is FIFA For? by Alan Tomlinson is available for £9.99 on the Bristol University Press website.
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SHOWNOTES
Timestamps:
01:22 – What is your football background?
04:22 – What is it about FIFA that has engaged your interest?
08:28 – How did your research approach affect what insights you gathered?
13:13 – Why is the question of what FIFA is for more complicated than it first appears?
18:45 – How transparent and accountable is FIFA?
29:18 – How vulnerable is FIFA to corruption?
33:28 – What are the top 3 priorities for a reformed FIFA?
Transcript:
(Please note this transcript is autogenerated and may have minor inaccuracies.)
George Miller: Hello and welcome to the Transforming Society podcast from Bristol University Press.
My name is George Miller and I’m the editor of What is it for?, a series in which each book tackles a deceptively simple question whose answer is usually anything but.
Today, I’m talking to Alan Tomlinson about the international football federation FIFA. Alan is Emeritus Professor of Leisure Studies at the University of Brighton and it’s no exaggeration to say he has spent decades of his life studying the inner workings of FIFA.
Over those decades the organisation has evolved from a relatively obscure governing body based in Switzerland into a multi-billion dollar behemoth and one of the most powerful institutions in global sport.
With that great power, has there come greater accountability, and transparency? Alan argues not. On the eve of a World Cup that FIFA bills as the greatest show on earth, Alan contends that change is needed if FIFA is to make good on the promise that the game is for the players and for the fans.
When I spoke to Alan, I started by asking him about his own involvement with the game as a boy…
Alan Tomlinson: Yeah, well, it was in the family, in a way. My grandfather played for Brentford for six years, and Blackburn Rovers before that, although he only got in the first team once or twice. In the Edwardian period, 1902 to 1907 or something, he commuted from Southport or Blackburn or somewhere in Lancashire to Brentford by train. And that was in the Southern League, actually, because the Southern League paid more money to players than to those in the football league.
So he was a professional footballer for years. And that just got translated into the family, really. My father was a copper, a policeman, but he played for the police as well. So lots of opportunities to play. And my elder brother, 12 years older than me, played a lot of football at grammar school. And so I just came into it, really, and started playing at junior school.
I do remember having trials for the town team, didn’t quite make it in there, but then played at the grammar school and we played a lot of matches, you know, we weren’t allowed in the grammar school to play against secondary modern sides. We were only permitted by the school to play other grammar schools.
GM: Right, and maybe, did that make you interested in the sociology of sport and the class dimension of sport? Maybe not aged 14, but…
AT: But it gave us regular trips to play across the county. So it was all very good. And then at university, I played for both the University of Kent and then at the University of Sussex. I was football captain at Kent and Sussex, and we travelled around the area. So it’s in the veins, really.
Essentially, I was studying philosophy and sociology and history, But I was also having a really, really good pitch at playing football, during which I also qualified as an FA coach, first kind of model of the FA coach. Didn’t go on to do any football coaching and qualified as well hilariously as a football referee.
GM: But you don’t practise that any longer?
AT: No, no. I found that being a referee in the local football cultures of the area, down here in the south, it was a risky business because there were so many people abusing me on a Sunday morning.
So it is rather in my blood, so to speak.
GM: It sounds very much like it’s in your blood. And I know that you’ve got very wide-ranging intellectual interests, but looking at your publications over the years, it’s clear that FIFA is one particular interest that keeps coming up. So I wondered, what is it about FIFA, which I guess probably quite a lot of people don’t think a great deal about, apart from if some scandal hits the headlines. But what was it that has engaged your interest and kept you coming back to FIFA as a subject?
AT: It began, really, when I was also creating programmes of study in the University of Brighton. This involved sociological and historical perspectives on sport and football. I edited a book for Pluto Press back then. One of the books that I did there was on football and the world. And that’s really something that alerted me to this body called FIFA.
And of course, in a certain sort of way, people in English football, British football, had a connection with FIFA because at that time, up until 1974, from 1961, Stanley Rous was the boss of FIFA, an Englishman. (The third Englishman to have been FIFA president. )
And also another thing that did happen was that England men won the World Cup in 1966. And Rous had done some very gentlemanly-type deals and so on to get the event to be in England and then win it. So FIFA there, you could see it being operated on a very small scale in a way that actually benefited English football and global football. He wasn’t a complete English nut. He was a very interesting figure.
So I began to think, well, there’s this bloke who lives in London and pops over to Switzerland a lot and goes globally all over the world, you know, developing football and awareness of football and so on. And it just struck me that there was virtually nothing written on FIFA in any deep scholarly fashion and so on. And so I started to develop that. And of course, I was developing that interest in the late 70s and into the 1980s. And things were becoming very, very interesting there in the Havelange period.
GM: Yeah, I mean, it’s not just that you’re interested in the structure of large international organizations. How best to put it, did you feel there was something anomalous about it or something that really merited closer scrutiny than it had got, not just as a structure, but as a whole sort of culture and a way of organising the sport?
AT: Well, it was, and of course it fit alongside the issues about the nature of the IOC, International Olympic Committee, which was very well established. Those sorts of bodies have become extremely interesting because of the nature of their autonomy, really, and the power that they’ve got to create whatever their ambitions are.
So FIFA, in a way, lines up alongside the IOC as one of the extraordinarily interesting forms of international organization that in their own way go along whatever path they choose with very little form. We might talk about this later, but definitely form of accountability or transparency.
GM: And am I right, Alan, that the way that you were pursuing your research wasn’t the kind of usual academic way of sitting in the library and reading journal articles? You were actually doing what might look more like investigative reporting some of the time in order to try to understand what was going on?
AT: I think you’re spot on there really, George, and the interesting thing is that in all my time at Sussex as a graduate student I did sit in libraries reading philosophical texts and a lot of critical theory in social and political studies and so on Literally, I had a little booth in the library. That’s where I lived for several years.
And then out to football and other aspects of life. So the emphasis there really was on getting out. Because also, sociologically speaking, I was very interested in sociological methods. Really. Getting into situations that those kind of immersion methodologies that we were quite big on. And there was a big leap for me to be doing that, as opposed to sitting in those corners of the library in your own little personal booth. So that animated me a lot in terms of the nature of the social science involved.
GM: Did that give you insights that you couldn’t have got any other way? Did that give you some kind of sense of the culture of this organization? Because I guess that’s what makes it interesting, is the very peculiar, enclosed, hermetic, quite secretive culture of this organization. So did you feel that you were, if not penetrating it, at least getting some kind of insight you wouldn’t have got any other way by being up close?
AT: Definitely, definitely. I have to say that at times in that kind of observational role, you have to make certain decisions about ethical acceptability and so on. And at times, the ways of presenting yourself when you’re in that kind of observational context are quite interesting.
So one enters that gently in a way. Can you get into a certain area? And I started through contacts in FIFA itself, well, and UEFA, actually, but FIFA and UEFA both settled in Switzerland and so on.
I introduced myself as an historian interested in the context and the background and then met a lot of people and spoke to them in various ways. And they were very forthcoming. And then when I started writing a book, one of the big books with John Subton, which was a very big book on FIFA and the contest for world football, as we called it, I gathered many, many documents.
And at one point, people were very, very helpful. At one point I was doing a week’s talking to people and looking at documents in Neon in Switzerland where UEFA was based and I was given a little corner and people said, yeah, I said have you got a photocopier . And they said, yeah, just around the corner and I came away with I think a unique set of documents about the background the history the ambitions and so on of these big bodies
So it wasn’t just FIFA, of course, it was UEFA. And then I became very interested in all the other confederations that affiliated these bodies to FIFA itself. So, I mean, in the end, I visited the headquarters of five of the six continental confederations gathering materials. And people did not always approve of what I did with the materials.
GM: Yes, I can imagine that you get access once perhaps, but if you come back again after you’ve published, that perhaps you find the doors are not open to you any longer.
AT: No, that has been the case. Sepp Blatter, for instance, who’s taught a lot to us and Havelange I had interviews with. He called me and John Sugden, he called us ‘the English professors’, because we always seem to be turning up.
GM: So, Alan, often with books in this series, there’s a kind of obvious, easy answer to the title question. And I guess in the case of FIFA, the answer to what is it for would be for the governance and development of football internationally. And always the question I ask authors is, well, why is the obvious answer not enough? What is lacking in that answer that necessitates a book about this subject?
So what would you say to somebody who thinks, well, you know, FIFA organize world football, here comes the World Cup, it’s going to be a massive event, it’s going to attract more people to the game, the women’s games flourishing, all these things.
Why is that straightforward, simple answer not satisfactory? And I realize you’ve written a whole book to explain that, but why would you, if you had just summarize for a minute, how would you say, well, hang on, there’s more to the story than that?
AT: It’s very important to recognize that people, along with the other comparable bodies like the IOC, the International Olympic Committee, that they have achieved quite remarkable dimensions of profile. There’s very few things culturally which can surpass them really you know in terms of the the profile they’ve got and the regularity that they have of events and so on. So it’s very important to recognize that that is established and it’s going on and it’s important like you just said, the basic premise of the creation of people was about, precisely as you just said, George, it was about the governance of world football.
In order to allow different countries, different nations and so on, to play each other and to get into a bit more detail on it, to share the rules. You can’t have a good product in sport unless you’ve got people, opponents, who understand what the rules are. You’re right to point out that before FIFA, different teams, different countries played by slightly different rules.
GM: There wasn’t international agreement, was there?
AT: No, no. They changed things as they went along at half-time and all these sorts of things. So there’s more to FIFA than just that, than just the international governments. It then creates a great range of possibilities for development of international relations and so on.
But, I mean, your question is very interesting there, because I think then you have to think, well, what are the things that it could do that it’s not been doing? So in a certain sort of way, I would, if I were to suggest changes, FIFA has got in its scale and in its profile and in its sense of non-accountability and those sorts of points. It’s lost, I think, credibility in terms of transparency of what it’s for. Its current president, Gianni Infantino, often is struggling to justify how it’s expanded in all its ways and so on.
And so to a certain extent, it has not got the credibility that you would expect such bodies to have. And the really big problem here about it is that it really needs, and along with all the other big sporting bodies, the international sporting bodies, they need to be able to justify themselves more acceptably.
They’ve got a global audience. They’ve got an expanding global audience. But it’s not always clear to that expanding worldwide constituency just what it’s up to and what it’s doing with these extraordinary levels of money.
And so to some extent, I think we have to ask for forms of reform in its practice. And the big general response that analysts, if you like, and commentators are critical about the situation there is really that you cannot really achieve this without some form of external regulation.
Problem here is nobody knows what body could be created that could reliably provide forms of external regulation. So without that, these levels of organization, and FIFA is a great model of it, these levels of organization are uncontrollable effectively.
GM: So you talked earlier about the days when you had access to their photocopier and you could copy lots of their documents and how you wouldn’t get that welcome today. If you were scoring it on transparency and accountability, the way that countries are assessed in league tables, how secretive, how enclosed, how difficult to actually penetrate as an organization would you say FIFA is today?
AT: I think it’s very unaccountable. I think you’d give it really a very low score. Out of 10, I mean, it’s got to be two or three.
GM: And just to give us a benchmark, where would you put the IOC, the International Olympic Committee, as a sort of comparison? Are they doing worse or better than the IOC? Is it more accountable?
AT: Yeah, maybe the IOC is four or five.
GM: So not a ringing endorsement in either case… But if a football fan is listening to this and thinking, “But, you know, I’m looking forward to the World Cup. It’s going to be the biggest celebration of football ever. The women’s game is going from strength to strength. The audiences are growing. Yes, I know there’s a lot of money in it, but that’s just the price that we’ve got to pay today to have this kind of international spectacle on this scale”. So if you if you say in the book it should be for the fans, do you think that fans feel ill done by? Or do you think a lot of fans actually think, well ,okay you know it’s it’s doing what it has to do and I get the matches that I want to see?
AT: The fans issue is very interesting, but I mean there are all sorts of categories of fans as well that that don’t go into in what is FIFA for. What is really happening? A couple of things on the Men’s World Cup that is coming up mid-June. It’s labelled and it’s written in the [FIFA] documentation as the greatest show on the planet. Now that makes me think of Elvis Presley and the crook who ran his career, who talked about Elvis in Las Vegas, the “greatest show on earth”. This is now the greatest show on the planet. It’s nonsensical. It’s not acceptable as, I think, a rationale and a justification, but the forms of expansion that people are actually making.
In June, 48 teams will scramble into North America. And this will last, I don’t think people have looked at their diaries – it lasts five and a half weeks virtually. This greatest show on the planet is going to be the greatest bore in the world in certain ways. Football and other forms of sport generate wonderfully committed hordes of spectators, followers, supporters, fans. But even they will tire of some of this.
It needs to be spread out more differently. And also 48 teams, well 47 of them are going to be unsuccessful, aren’t they? But a lot of them are not going to last very long. I mean, there is a system now to qualify to get into that, to be in the 48. The system is that they have qualifying areas in the different parts and regions of the world based on the confederations. That’s good. But some of the scorelines at times, you know, 10-0 or 12-1 or something, they’re the kind of score lines where people then don’t qualify.
But to take the number to 48 in this way is to, I think, almost downgrade the product. Because what can be achieved more regionally is more sensitive, and I think it’s better for development, despite the arguments that a lot might make that, oh, this is the first time you know that the island x has ever been in the world cup finals, I think it’s just the kind of cultural and economic phenomenon now that’s just being accelerated and there could there could be a backlash.
The Athletic, which has nearly 180 sports reporters on the go at the moment looking at these things, the Athletic, New York Times, they are giving us some great data as they go along. And one of these things just recently, last week, I think, the Athletic wrote that four seats have been sold, possibly in resale, for a prime position in the World Cup final at $2 million plus each. For a seat! For each, not for a block.
And if you or I wanted more and more to find a seat behind the goal, you could get one actually for £11,793 or something like that. Well, who are the fans? It’s turning into a kind of party-cum-celebrity-event for rich people who might just be wanting to sit behind Donald Trump, believe it or not.
I think the whole phenomenon has got way out of touch with what FIFA was initially for.
GM: But would you accept that the genie of commercialisation is out of the bottle and is not going to be put back in the bottle? So it’s a matter of just how you manage that.
You know, you’re talking about reining things in, about things having gone to a sort of grandiose level of development. But it’s hard to imagine a world in which we even go back to the mid-1960s and the sort of scale of how football was perceived. Because as a phenomenon, it’s just exploded, hasn’t it? And it’s in many ways a great success. But commercialization is something we’ve got to manage. It’s not something that we’re going to sort of wind the clock back and completely disappear from the horizon.
AT: It’s not, but inevitably its market has become more and more distant. Essentially, most of us will experience these big events on screen. So it is the marketing, the sales, the money that comes into people from the television companies and so on.
We can see that that’s what’s happened since the 80s and 90s. That’s been the moment of transformation, really. But we’re getting further and further away from it. Watching these things in our front rooms or back rooms or pubs, it’s fun and it’s nice, but you’re not there. And also, you cannot really afford these things. I mean, Gianni Infantino, the president himself, conceded last week that he did not know that these tickets could be on resale in Canada and in the United States. Well, that’s a bit naive, you think, in terms of financial planning, whatever the FIFA model is supposed to be.
But everything is getting more and more expensive nearer and nearer the date. These things do happen with these big sporting events a lot. I mean, the IOC at times, everybody thinks that it’s going to be very expensive to go to a city where the International Committee is having its events and things like that. And when you get there, things have got cheap because people stay away because they hear it’s too noisy, it’s too this, it’s too that.
Now, what’s happening is that near the event, hotels are in crisis because they’re having to drop their prices. The price of forms of transport in cities where football games are going on, those prices just to get to the game are ludicrously high. So it’s getting more and more expensive for people to experience the genuine events. Now that will carry on as long as essentially the global media want to keep coverage and keep buying coverage of it. But it’s becoming in its own way more and more atomized.
You cannot really have a party in a pub with Brazilian people if your team is playing Brazil or something, or your nation is playing Brazil. But you can dance along a pier in a city by the seaside if you’re there with them. I mean, I’ve seen Brazilians and Italians dancing together in California, in the World Cup finals, not abusing each other, just being together and really experiencing that. I think there’s going to be less and less authentic contact, culturally, politically, and so on, between football followers. And this model is going to be the defining one.
GM: Alan, we’re drawing to a close now, but we’ve talked about the game becoming very commercialized and very big as an international phenomenon. And we’ve talked about FIFA as an organization that doesn’t welcome transparency. Now, you put those two things together, on one hand money, on the other hand lack of transparency, inevitably there’s a risk of corruption. And we all know that in the past there have been some real corruption scandals. You talked about the transparency index earlier, a sort of notional transparency index what about the corruption index how would you score FIFA today in terms of its vulnerability to decision-making being corrupt and to money flowing in ways that it wouldn’t if we could see more clearly what was going on?
AT: It’s tricky, you know, Sepp Blatter, who everybody has heard of, is still speaking in the background and so on. Sepp Blatter managed to keep himself out of jail for the heart of the corruption, all that you might remember in the summer of 2015. The reform model might have thought, well yeah, that was beyond corruption. Gianni Infantino was one of the people on the reform committee before he became president of FIFA, when he was at UEFA.
Many people I speak to on this say, and this includes fans as well as people, administrators in the world of FIFA and football, say they believe that President Infantino is not perhaps a dodgier figure as Blatter, but they feel that he is more of a dictatorial-type figure than Blatter. Blatter would have arguments in committees. Blatter would really bring people in. He could speak to people. This is not the case now.
People are not seriously accountable. Committee structures are kind of full of few fine people from different parts of the confederations, the world and so on. And I think there is a culture of fear within the body of FIFA, because these people are, A, they are afraid to speak out, and B, wanting to hold on to their whatever it is, quarter of a million quid for turning up online mostly now for a few smiles with Infantino, who essentially is performing to a body that is supposed to be in a way supporting him and in a way monitoring him.
It’s a very, very dictatorial sort of position that Infantine occupies. I think that is a great problem really, with development. It’s not necessarily outright corruption, but there is a vulnerability to this, with the way the money flows, the way in which there is little democratic consultation within the organization.
GM: Alan, let’s end with, I asked you in advance to have a think about three key changes you think, or what you think the top three, I mean it sounds like there are quite a lot of potential changes, but what would you say the top three priorities would be for a reformed FIFA?
AT: Okay, I’ve done a bit of thinking on this one.
A, more transparency, i.e. more genuine transparent, transparency auditing for forms of accountability. This needs to be really important. Living online now, bodies like FIFA, it really confuses rather than clarifies. So models which would have more transparency in terms of overall auditing and important accountability.
Second, there’s too many blokes running the show. So really there needs to be a gender balance. We’ve seen the strength of the women’s game coming through in New Zealand and Australia, the last Women’s World Cup, was a big success run by women. As well, essentially, women, because there are women, they’re not high profile, you don’t see, you’re going to see suited men usually most of the time. So I think there’s got to be a stronger gender balance to help people cover everything.
And I think the third thing is that I would cut back on that kind of hyperbole, such as the greatest show on earth. And then I’d ask people to cut back with those almost meaningless terms that they adopt at times to keep themselves going and to find a different kind of model to explain what they’re there for and why.
GM: Alan, thank you very much indeed for talking to us today.
AT: Thank you very much, George. Good to see you.