Bloomberg: it's time to sell the World Cup and the Olympics at auction

On Thursday, 28 May, the President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Thomas Bach, advised FIFA officials to restore order, as the IOC did to 15 years ago. His advice would have been more convincing if the head of FIFA, Joseph Blatter (Joseph Blatter), who is also a member of the IOC, did not introduce Bach as the Boss. International sports organizations too often abuse power to make their attempts at self-improvement successful.

The ambitious events organized by FIFA and the IOC - the FIFA World Cup and the Olympic Games - are the ideal tools for corruption. These projects embrace the vanity of governments because they put a particular country and city at the center of everyone’s attention, attract many people there and guarantee a great heritage to politicians. All this makes the leaders of states - and especially developing countries - not to spare any money for such events. In no case should they see representatives of the “third world” in them. Hence the enormous costs: 15 billion dollars to host the World Cup in Brazil in 2014 year, 40 billion dollars to the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing and 51 billion dollars to the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi.

It has long become clear that such ambitious events do not bring any long-term benefit to the countries hosting them. And this primarily concerns the developing countries, whose capital cost is always higher, as Victor Matheson and Robert Baade wrote in their work on 2003 of the year. They noted the following:

“From an economic perspective, the cost of building a new stadium is best measured not by the amount of money that will be spent on building that facility, but by the value to society of the same amount of capital spent on the second most important public project. The Nigerian government recently spent $330 million on a new national football stadium, more than the national government spent on health or education.”

But it is in developing countries that politicians and officials strive for excessive magnificence and are prepared to spend huge amounts of money on such vain projects - not only to establish huge monuments in the form of new stadiums, airports and roads, but also to enrich their friends and themselves. . Large infrastructure projects are an ideal platform for fraudulent tenders and skimming, and in this case the risk that the crime will be solved is much lower. No one ever went to prison for price increases in Brazil, China and Russia. However, the facts of corruption sometimes still surface - mainly in countries with more transparent governance. For example, this year after the World Expo in Milan, several officials and former lawmakers were arrested on charges of bribery.

Given the wealth of opportunities for corruption, it is not surprising that IOC and FIFA officials are constantly exposed to great temptation. The charge filed by US FIFA officials refers to millions of bribes allegedly offered and paid by applicants from Morocco and South Africa for votes of members of the FIFA executive committee. Compared to the subsequent costs of building infrastructure, this is quite modest money. However, FIFA officials will have enough of this money to guarantee a comfortable future for their children and grandchildren.

A major corruption scandal involving IOC officials broke out at the end of the 1990s, when the budgets of the games — and accordingly the size of bribes — were much lower. Like the current FIFA scandal, it also originated in the United States. The organizers of the Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City lured members of the IOC with gifts, expensive trips and - as is the case with the daughter of one of the members of the IOC - even studying at a prestigious American university. The consequences were rather sad: all IOC members involved in the scandal had to resign in disgrace. This organization has created two special commissions to carry out reforms aimed at eliminating the risks of bribery in the future. However, their recommendations were not very effective. The only effective anti-corruption measure was a ban on travel of IOC members to cities claiming to hold games.
Bach, a protégé of Juan Antonio Samaranch (Juan Antonio Samaranch), who headed the IOC during that scandal, took charge of this organization in 2013 and almost immediately raised the issue of lifting the ban: “If you want to bribe someone, be sure to come to you, ”he said. The ban on visiting candidate cities formally remained in force, but now it is difficult to say how useful it is. The choice of Sochi, a city located in the subtropical zone and almost completely devoid of the infrastructure necessary to practice winter sports, as the venue for the 2014 Winter Olympics was as controversial as the choice of Qatar as the venue for the 2022 World Cup. The DNA of this organization has remained the same, and the number of temptations has increased markedly.

Undoubtedly, Blatter, who promised to purge to restore FIFA’s reputation, will take a number of steps to demonstrate his desire to rectify the situation: he may create a hotline for whistleblowers and informers, develop a procedure for accessing applicants to FIFA officials, take a number of such symbolic measures, as a ban on visits, and announce that the job is done. He may even agree to more or less transparent holding of elections among the candidates, as the IOC does.

But the main problem will not disappear anywhere: politicians seeking fame will still strive to buy the votes of the members of the IOC and FIFA.

The obvious way out of this situation would be to sell the status of the host of major sporting events by auction. The prize will go to the highest bidder, and this will bring in more money for Olympic sports and football, and not for corrupt officials.

To guarantee the alternation of countries and cities, those bidders who have won at the previous auctions will have to wait for 20 years before taking part in them again. And richer countries will not necessarily win all the time, because poorer states can also collect huge amounts of money to take part in the bidding.

Blatter and Bach are not suitable for initiating this kind of radical change. The system that brought them to their posts is so permeated with old-style politics and corruption that it simply will not allow them to do so. It is likely that many more indictments and scandals around these organizations will be needed so that their officials understand that it is no longer possible to do business as before.