International soccer officials gather in the Swiss city of Zurich Friday to vote for the next president of FIFA, the corruption-wracked governing body of the “beautiful game” that has been compelled to suspend several of its top leadership in recent months.
Six candidates are vying for the president’s post, but there are two front-runners. And one of them, Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim al-Khalifa of the Gulf Arab Kingdom of Bahrain, has sparked justifiable fears that his victory will deepen the rot within FIFA.
A scion of the Bahraini royal family, Sheikh Salman has spent most of his gilded life
as a soccer administrator, becoming the president of the Asian Football Confederation in 2013. That group, which carries 46 of the 209 available votes in the FIFA election, has pledged its support for Salman.
So has its counterpart in Africa, which owns 54 of the votes (though there are whispers of a rebellion in the African ranks).
A Salman coronation would mean that the upheaval at FIFA over the last two years was all in vain. Most obviously, Salman has remained a stalwart ally of Sepp Blatter, the FIFA president who was banned for eight years from soccer back in December.
Blatter, who ruled FIFA for almost two decades, was ousted in the wake of a massive corruption investigation launched by the Justice Department last year involving bribes worth over $100 million. This put the spotlight on other FIFA scandals, including the award of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar — in keeping with the long-established FIFA tradition of honoring authoritarian rulers in exchange for envelopes filled with dollars.
Already, FIFA is quietly rehabiliating Blatter, whose eight-year ban was reduced to six by its Appeals Committee just a few days ago. Given Salman’s record in supporting Blatter to the hilt, the notion that the Bahraini sheikh will carry out the structural reform that the most disgraced body in global sport so desperately needs is laughable.
Yet there’s another, more important point here, and it goes far beyond the immediate challenge of how to run international soccer accountably.
Alienated by and angry at current U.S. Middle East policy, and rightly fearful of rising Iranian power, the Gulf Arab states are having to sharpen their images in a bid for international sympathy.
Abuse of human rights is a natural bedfellow of corruption, so there shouldn’t be any surprise that Salman has been dogged by allegations about his role in the violent suppression of pro-democracy protests in Bahrain in 2011. Given that Bahrain’s Shi’a Muslim majority lives under regulations reminiscent of South African apartheid, that iron-fisted response was entirely predictable.
Salman is specifically accused having identified a number of athletes, including three soccer players, who participated in the protests. Some of these athletes were tortured after being detained.
But even if Salman’s claim that he is the victim of “dirty tricks” turns out to be true, as Jordan’s Prince Ali bin al-Hussein, another challenger for the FIFA presidency, has argued: “The simple, basic fact of the matter is that person did not protect or stick up for his players at that time.”
It’s unlikely that the FIFA delegates in Zurich Friday will endure sudden pangs of bad conscience; after all, this is an organization that used to have at its table no less than Udai Hussein, the sociopathic son of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. As president of the Iraqi Football Association, Udai personally whipped the soles of his players’ feet for the crime of losing a match.
Of course, FIFA’s shameful indifference to the crushing of human rights in the Middle East doesn’t extend to Israel, which last year escaped a Palestinian bid to oust it from the world body at the 11th hour. The fact that the expulsion of the Middle East’s only democracy was even discussed shows just how easily FIFA is used as a political tool.
Many insiders are predicting that Friday’s election will lead to a second-round run-off vote between Salman and his main rival, the European candidate Gianni Infantino. Should Salman win out eventually, then the European nations will have to begin thinking about an alternative to FIFA, which will have chosen to die rather than change.
Ben Cohen is the senior editor of The Tower magazine and a regular commentator on international politics.