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This report provides detailed evidence that FIFA is not fit to govern world football and should be subject to external regulation. It describes how an organisation that was set up to govern and regulate the world’s most popular sport has been transformed over time into a predatory commercial entity that feeds off the game’s global appeal, and causes or exacerbates a wide range of social harms. The report, which is intended to be the first in a series of thematic reports, explains how the key problems afflicting the organisation are structural and how these prevent the organisation from meaningfully reforming itself. A very large body of evidence supports these arguments...

This report has three closely related aims: to demonstrate that FIFA’s 2016 reform process has been critically undermined by structural flaws that predate the presidency of Gianni Infantino; to explain the link between misgovernance and FIFA’s extractive business model, and the serious social harms that are linked to its operations; and to demonstrate that FIFA is not capable of regulating itself and that its problems can only be resolved by external regulation...

In the absence of external reform of the organisation, the social and human cost of FIFA’s misgovernance of the game will continue to mount. As noted by former members of FIFA’s Governance Committee, “FIFA cannot reform from within” because “those responsible for leading such reform are politically dependent on the associations and officials they need to reform”.4 There have been multiple efforts to reform FIFA and to institute policies that will enhance internal governance procedures and effectively mitigate the impact of its operations. The key conclusion of this report is that these initiatives, however laudable, will continue to fail, and that the consequences of these failures will be serious and far-reaching and will extend far beyond the pitch. The necessary f irst step of any meaningful reform of FIFA – and the one that all previous efforts at reform have ignored – involves breaking up FIFA’s patronage network. FIFA’s development money is redistributed in such a way as to encourage the member associations’ support for the President. FIFA will remain unfit for its highly critical purpose until that link is severed, if necessary via an institutional separation.

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