Dealing with FIFA Corruption
However, we ought to recognise his genius. This 79-year-old understood very early that there’s a new world order in which westerners don’t matter much.
.. Each western bidding country, I now realise, imagined that Fifa thought much like the country itself did. The English and American bidders, instinctive capitalists, thought they could win because they had big soccer markets. The Spanish-Portuguese bidding team probably thought they could win because they had friends inside Fifa. Australia hired lobbyists with other friends inside Fifa. The Dutch and Belgians believed in their green and compact bid. They even cycled into Zurich to present it.
.. Given waning western power, asks Pielke, “how do you effect global change? It turns out it’s really difficult. If we can’t reform Fifa, my goodness, how can we deal with nuclear proliferation or carbon emissions or trade?”