The Price of the Beautiful Game

FIFA, the World Cup, and the cost of being chosen.

The 2018 World Cup opened in Moscow with Vladimir Putin and FIFA president Gianni Infantino sharing the stage: football, state power, and spectacle in one frame. Attribution: Image: Kremlin.ru, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 4.0.

I learned football on small pitches in Hungary, long before I knew what FIFA really was.

I cannot remember the exact age when the game became my whole life, only that it did. I travelled to tournaments around the country, collected certificates and awards, spent weekends with teammates, and grew up with a ball never far from me. Back then, football was not an institution, an industry, a television product, or a geopolitical bargaining chip. It was grass, boots, buses, mud, nervous mornings, trophies, teammates, and the cleanest kind of obsession a child can have.

Football was my first real love as a kid. I had a ball around me everywhere, and for a while I genuinely thought the game would become my whole life.

Years later, in the court record of the sport’s governing body, I found a different image of football.

Paris. A briefcase. Bundled U.S. currency. Prosecutors alleged that Jack Warner, then one of the most powerful men in world football, directed his son Daryan Warner to fly to Paris, collect a briefcase full of cash from a senior South African bid official, and return to Trinidad and Tobago within hours. The money, according to the indictment, came in $10,000 bundles.

The briefcase is the image that sticks because it feels almost too crude to be true. The more revealing evidence sits in the route that prosecutors alleged came later: a $10 million payment from a FIFA account in Switzerland, through a Bank of America correspondent account in New York, into Republic Bank accounts in Trinidad and Tobago controlled by Warner.

That is where this story begins for me now: between the football I loved as a child and the corruption I can no longer unsee.

Football reaches people before politics does. It teaches belonging before most of us understand nations. It gives children rules, teammates, heroes, rituals, disappointment and joy. It can turn a patch of grass into a world. It can make adults behave like children again, which is lovely, and in the wrong hands, extremely useful.

The World Cup is the highest expression of that feeling. For a month, governments reorganise themselves around it. Cities hand over streets and squares. Sponsors pay fortunes to stand beside it. Authoritarian leaders sit in VIP boxes under the same lights as the world’s best players. Broadcasters sell it as unity. Fans experience it as memory.

FIFA learned to put a price tag on that feeling.

For decades, the governing body of world football has presented itself as a neutral guardian of the game. The public record is less sentimental. Read the bid files, court documents, annual reports, host-country guarantees, human-rights assessments and investigation summaries together, and a harder picture appears. FIFA’s corruption was never just a stain on the institution. It became part of a commercial order in which public sacrifice could be repackaged as celebration.

The villains are real, and some of them behaved as if they had been assembled from spare parts left over after a mediocre gangster film. The deeper scandal sits in the documents. FIFA controls the scarce asset: the right to stage the World Cup. Host states absorb much of the public cost. Cities sign obligations they often cannot fully explain to residents. Sponsors and broadcasters buy access to the largest sports audience on earth. Political leaders use the tournament to soften their image. Fans provide the feeling that makes the whole arrangement difficult to resist.

As a child, I saw the ball. As an adult, I keep finding the contracts behind it.

The institution that out-earned its disgrace

Part of what football gave me as a child was escape: ninety minutes in which the world became smaller and kinder. It gave me a playful side of life, a way to forget the problems outside the pitch and be fully present inside the game.

That is why the corruption around football feels so violating. It took something built on play and attached it to hidden money, state guarantees, political theatre, public manipulation and the exploitation of people already standing on the wrong side of power.

FIFA was dragged into the light and kept selling tickets.

In 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice brought charges in a case that it said involved a 24-year scheme of racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering in international football. Loretta Lynch, then U.S. attorney general, described the corruption alleged in the case as “rampant, systemic, and deep-rooted.”

Then came some telling numbers.

FIFA reported record revenue of $7.568 billion for the 2019–2022 cycle, including $949 million from hospitality rights and ticket sales. For the 2023–2026 cycle, FIFA’s own budget projected $11 billion in revenue.

The raids came, the indictments came, sponsors expressed concern, and FIFA closed the next cycles richer.

The World Cup remained the financial engine. The leaked Garcia material said the tournament historically accounted for roughly 80 to 90 per cent of FIFA’s income. Those figures explain FIFA’s durability better than any speech about unity ever could. Childhood memory became television rights. National belonging became marketing inventory. A month of shared emotion became a global sales platform.

The bargain is simple: host countries build, police and guarantee the tournament, while FIFA sells the scarcity.

The costs that make the tournament possible often sit outside FIFA’s balance sheet: infrastructure, policing, immigration control, public space, labour conditions, transport upgrades, legal exemptions, protest management, security operations. FIFA’s books capture the revenue. Public records capture much of the burden.

Even corruption found its way back into the accounts. After the prosecutions, the U.S. government treated FIFA and regional football bodies as victims entitled to compensation from forfeited funds. In August 2021, the Justice Department approved an initial $32.3 million remission after recognising losses of more than $201 million. In June 2022, it announced another roughly $92 million distribution.

So FIFA appears in the public record as both the arena in which systemic corruption flourished and a compensated victim of that same corruption.

The vote

The World Cup begins long before the opening ceremony. It begins in the room where the votes are counted.

For years, FIFA’s executive committee was one of the most valuable small rooms in global sport. A handful of football officials, many with regional power bases and opaque patronage networks, could award the most-watched sporting event on earth. Those votes could transform a country’s image, unlock billions in construction and infrastructure, direct contracts toward favoured firms, and give political leaders a month of global theatre.

The incentives were obvious, and the safeguards were weak.

The U.S. criminal record describes football’s commercial world as a marketplace for votes, broadcasting rights, marketing rights and influence. By August 2021, according to the Justice Department, the FIFA prosecutions had produced 27 individual guilty pleas, four corporate guilty pleas and two trial convictions. In a separate case, Bank Julius Baer admitted that it helped launder more than $36 million in FIFA-related bribes through the United States.

The strongest single World Cup bid allegation remains South Africa 2010.

According to the 2015 superseding indictment, officials tied to the South African bid and government agreed to pay $10 million to the Caribbean Football Union under the label of support for the “African diaspora.” Cooperating witness Charles Blazer understood the payment as consideration for votes from Warner, Blazer himself and another executive committee member in favour of South Africa over Morocco.

Prosecutors alleged that when direct payment from the South African government became difficult, FIFA officials arranged for the money to be sent from FIFA accounts using funds that otherwise would have gone to South Africa to support the tournament. The indictment traced three wires in 2008: $616,000, $1.6 million, and $7.784 million. The money allegedly moved from a FIFA account in Switzerland, through New York, into accounts controlled by Warner in Trinidad and Tobago.

Prosecutors also alleged that Warner treated the funds less like a development payment than a private reservoir. The indictment says he directed Republic Bank to apply $200,000 from one FIFA-origin transfer to a personal loan in his own name, and later moved more than $4 million through local intermediaries and into family-linked accounts.

Public aspiration became private paperwork.

The Paris briefcase gives the corruption record its grotesque little stage prop: a son dispatched across the Atlantic to collect bundles of U.S. currency in a hotel room. The wire transfers show how alleged vote-buying could move through respectable channels, formal labels and ordinary financial infrastructure.

The later U.S. filings went further. In 2020, prosecutors alleged that votes for Russia 2018 and Qatar 2022 were bought. They named alleged beneficiaries including Warner and Rafael Salguero in connection with Russia, and Nicolás Leoz and Ricardo Teixeira in connection with Qatar. These remain allegations in criminal filings, not final judicial determinations on the validity of the tournament awards themselves. That distinction matters. So does the pattern.

The host votes had been cast by secret ballot. Years later, criminal filings illuminated parts of the alleged vote market without producing a complete public map of every vote and every motive.

Even now, parts of the story remain hidden behind secret ballots, missing records, dead officials, settled cases, acquittals, fragmented jurisdictions and documents that arrived years too late.

The archive offers no clean confession, only a trail.

The report FIFA tried to summarise away

The Michael Garcia investigation shows FIFA’s internal self-protection in action.

Garcia, a former U.S. prosecutor, was appointed to investigate the bidding processes for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. His report identified what he later called “serious and wide-ranging issues.” The public did not first receive the full report. It received a summary from Hans-Joachim Eckert, the German judge chairing FIFA’s adjudicatory chamber.

Garcia objected. He said the summary contained “numerous materially incomplete and erroneous representations” of facts and conclusions. When he appealed, FIFA’s appeal committee did not answer the substance. It said the Eckert statement was not legally binding and therefore could not be appealed. Garcia resigned days later, citing lost confidence in the adjudicatory chamber and a “lack of leadership” inside FIFA.

FIFA’s own investigator produced a deep inquiry into the bidding process. FIFA’s public-facing process reduced it into a manageable narrative. Garcia rejected that narrative and left.

The leaked report explains why the summary never felt adequate.

Garcia’s material described a bidding culture saturated with favours, access-seeking and opaque advantage. It examined executive committee members seeking or receiving personal benefits, relatives being offered training opportunities, bid teams navigating officials who expected status, gifts or assistance, and a broader environment in which lobbying and inducement blurred.

One episode involved Qatar’s connection to the “African Legends Dinner.” Samson Adamu, son of executive committee member Amos Adamu, contacted Qatari officials about an event that could have involved a sponsorship arrangement worth about $1 million, although the report did not establish that a final signed deal or payment from Qatar 2022 occurred. Some of the most revealing material in the Garcia record lives in the space between planning and proof, where access, favour and plausible deniability all share the same table.

Another strand involved Qatar-linked offers connected to Aspire, the elite sports academy that appears in the report less as a school than as a possible instrument of influence. Garcia’s material discussed Qatar’s internal use of Aspire relationships in politically useful countries and examined requests by Harold Mayne-Nicholls, the Chilean football figure who chaired FIFA’s technical inspection team, that Aspire evaluate and train his son and nephew and assist his brother-in-law.

The report also noted that Qatar paid above market for a November 2010 Brazil-Argentina friendly. Contract records indicated that the Argentine Football Association received $1 million net while related intermediaries received $1.6 million plus a $400,000 commission. Another whistleblower allegation said that an adviser had recommended a $78.4 million payment to help the Argentine federation and improve relations with Julio Grondona. The report did not prove that such a payment happened. The allegation still shows the scale of influence-buying said to be circulating around the bid.

Then there was Qatar’s climate problem. FIFA’s own evaluation process warned that Qatar would present “very hot weather conditions” during the traditional summer tournament window, with afternoon temperatures seldom below 37°C and evening temperatures seldom below 31°C. FIFA awarded the tournament anyway, then later moved it to winter.

The global football calendar was rearranged around a problem FIFA had already been warned about before the vote.

Russia’s file showed a different weakness: a broken evidentiary chain. The public summary of the Garcia process said the Russian bid committee made only limited material available because the computers used in the bid had been leased, returned and destroyed, with some email accounts unavailable.

The official position was that there was not enough evidence to overturn the vote, even though some records that might have strengthened the evidence were gone.

The missing record left the air thick.

The host as guarantor

Leave the bribery files and enter the host agreements, and the FIFA story becomes quieter, less cinematic, and more revealing.

The World Cup is sold to the public as a festival that arrives in a country. The documents show something closer to a temporary legal shell. FIFA arrives with requirements. Governments sign guarantees. Cities accept obligations. Public authorities secure the tournament environment. Special rules appear around visas, commercial rights, transport, public space, security and intellectual property.

South Africa’s official post-tournament country report says government departments signed 17 guarantees with FIFA. Those guarantees covered access, finance, intellectual property, marketing rights, safety, health care, transport, telecommunications and other operational requirements. South Africa also passed a Special Measures Act to give effect to the organising agreement and government guarantees.

South Africa’s preparation documents show how those promises worked in practice. Government created event-specific visas, fast-track lanes and accelerated immigration procedures for FIFA-accredited entrants. Host cities had to fulfil obligations in host-city agreements, including official fan parks and compliance with FIFA marketing guidelines.

Brazil made the same logic even more explicit.

Civil-society groups described the Brazilian guarantees as a private contract of adhesion binding the state to FIFA’s demands. Their dossier described tax exemptions, weakened consumer protection, volunteer labour, special crimes, fast-track tribunals, proposed strike restrictions and commercial exclusion zones. Brazil’s General World Cup Law required authorities to secure FIFA exclusivity for marketing and street commerce in official venues, surrounding areas and access routes, with an exclusivity perimeter of up to two kilometres.

At ground level, the World Cup can turn public space into a controlled commercial zone under the language of national celebration.

The 2026 paperwork shows that FIFA has learned new language without giving up old leverage.

FIFA’s government-guarantees template for the 2026 World Cup asks governments to commit to human rights, workers’ rights, protection against resettlement and eviction abuses, freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and access to remedy. FIFA now knows how to write the vocabulary of risk.

But the host-city documents keep speaking in cost, control and obligation. Vancouver’s bid-stage report said the FIFA-specified Host City Agreement required host cities to provide local-government services at their own expense, including outdoor advertising, banners and decorations, traffic management, public transportation, crowd management, ambush-marketing enforcement, safety, security, fire protection and a FIFA Fan Fest. Toronto’s 2025 city budget put the city’s total host cost at $380 million, with $201.3 million offset by federal and provincial funding, leaving Toronto with $178.6 million.

Rights appear in the front matter. Control appears in the operative clauses. The public pays attention when the tournament arrives, which is usually too late.

Germany 2006: the clean myth

Germany 2006 long served as the moral foil to everything that came after.

It was remembered as the summer fairytale: efficient, welcoming, colourful, democratic, European, cheerful. The tournament looked like the World Cup people wanted to believe in. No comparable worker-death or displacement record emerged from the reviewed sources on the scale of later hosts. For a while, the spectacle seemed clean.

Then came the afterlife.

The long-running scandal surrounding a €6.7 million payment tied to the bid did not produce a final corruption conviction against key officials in the reviewed record, but it punctured the myth. The German football federation faced a major tax fallout. Allegations centred on a suspected slush fund reportedly linked to a loan from former Adidas chief Robert Louis-Dreyfus and possible efforts to secure hosting votes.

Germany belongs in a different category from Qatar and Russia. Its social record, from the sources reviewed, is not comparable. That distinction matters. Even the “good” World Cup carried a contaminated underside, less visible and more institutionally deniable.

The myth of innocence came first. The paperwork arrived later.

South Africa 2010: aspiration and extraction

South Africa 2010 was sold as a historical correction.

It was Africa’s first World Cup. It carried the emotional weight of post-apartheid aspiration. It promised to shift perceptions of the continent and present South Africa as modern, capable, open and globally connected. Millions experienced it as pride, and that pride was real.

That is why the record feels so cruel.

The official country report describes the tournament as a national project aimed at changing international perceptions. It also reveals how much the state had to bend to FIFA’s requirements: 17 guarantees, major public spending, security commitments, transport upgrades, immigration systems, intellectual property protections and operational support.

Then there is the $10 million allegation.

The U.S. indictment alleges that the payment was tied to votes. It describes the money as routed to the Caribbean Football Union under the label of supporting the African diaspora. It names Warner and Blazer in the alleged arrangement. It says the funds were ultimately sent from FIFA accounts using money that would otherwise have gone to South Africa.

A tournament promoted as continental uplift allegedly relied on a payment routed through FIFA’s own channels, using funds meant for the host, to secure the political support behind the event.

Meanwhile, rights groups documented the social cost. Amnesty International reported increased police harassment, arbitrary arrests, ill-treatment and extortion targeting informal traders, homeless South Africans, refugees and migrants ahead of the tournament. Hawkers protested evictions and the loss of livelihoods near stadiums. The public archive is weaker on named individuals here than it is on the institutions that managed the event. That gap is itself part of the story: the powerful leave contracts; the vulnerable often appear as categories.

The World Cup gave the host a month of transcendence. It gave FIFA revenue and prestige. It gave fans unforgettable moments. Beneath the vuvuzelas, it left behind guarantees, payments, policing and public burden.

South Africa is where liberation symbolism and extractive event governance appear in the same frame.

Brazil 2014: football’s nervous breakdown

Brazil did not need football explained to it.

That made 2014 especially painful. The World Cup arrived in the country most closely associated with the game’s beauty, then exposed the distance between football as culture and football as a mega-event sold through public contracts and private rights.

Official planning promised development, infrastructure and national renewal. By the time the tournament arrived, anger had spilled into the streets. Brazilians protested the scale of public spending while hospitals, schools and transport systems remained inadequate. Reuters reported tournament spending of around $11.3 billion, while many promised transport improvements failed to arrive at the scale originally sold to the public.

The stadiums became monuments to excess. In Manaus, a 42,000-seat arena was built in a city where local matches could draw around 1,000 people. Cuiabá and other sites raised similar questions about long-term use. The phrase “white elephant” stopped feeling like a metaphor and became a public-works category.

But the clearer human story sits in Rio, in Vila Autódromo, where a community was broken apart in the name of mega-event redevelopment.

Reuters followed residents as neighbours were displaced and homes demolished while the area was re-engineered for the Games era that followed the World Cup. Thomson Reuters Foundation quoted Terezinha Costa Martins, a former Vila Autódromo resident, saying that government officials had called the houses “visual pollution.” Reuters images from the same period show residents moving through demolition, including Wanderson Augusto holding his cats before his home was torn down.

That is what “urban transformation” looks like when the press release leaves the room: people carrying animals, memories and furniture through the dust.

The broader human-rights record was stark. Amnesty warned before the tournament that rights to peaceful assembly and expression were under threat. It cited excessive force by police, military-style occupation of favelas and evictions linked to World Cup and Olympic works. During the tournament, riot police used tear gas, rubber bullets and noise bombs against protesters in São Paulo. Civil-society dossiers described families threatened with removal, street vendors losing licences, commercial exclusion zones around stadiums and exceptional legal measures designed to protect FIFA’s sponsors.

Brazil was not the neatest bribery case in the archive. Its corruption legacy sits inside a wider national environment of cartelised contracting, mega-project politics and the later unravelling of the political order around Operation Car Wash. Sometimes the World Cup does not create one clean scandal. It plugs into existing channels of money and influence, then accelerates them under global attention.

Brazil 2014 was football’s nervous breakdown: patriotism, anti-corruption rage, police violence, stranded infrastructure and FIFA’s commercial universe colliding in the street.

The football was undeniable. The bill was real.

Russia 2018: authoritarian hospitality

Russia 2018 was one of the tournaments that made innocence harder to maintain.

Over time, I found myself wanting to watch the World Cup less and less. Watching it in Russia, then in Qatar, I kept asking the same question: what are we actually celebrating?

By the time Russia hosted the tournament, Crimea had already been annexed. Domestic repression had intensified. Opposition figures faced pressure. Civil society was constrained. The decision to award the tournament to Russia had been made in 2010, before the annexation of Crimea in 2014, but that does not make the later spectacle less revealing. FIFA could see the political context by 2018. The world could see it too. For a month, Russia appeared through renovated stadiums, cheerful fan zones, elegant drone shots and choreographed hospitality.

The tournament pushed authoritarianism outside the frame.

The award itself had long been controversial. The Garcia/Eckert saga raised questions about the strength of the evidence available for review. Russia’s bid records were limited. Computers used by the bid team were reportedly destroyed. In 2020, U.S. prosecutors alleged that Warner received $5 million to vote for Russia and that Rafael Salguero was promised $1 million for his vote.

The labour record was grim. Human Rights Watch documented exploitation on World Cup sites, including unpaid wages, retaliation, lack of written contracts, dangerous working conditions and fear among migrant workers of dismissal or deportation if they spoke. It warned that irregular status made workers afraid to complain. The report cited Building and Wood Workers’ International as reporting 17 worker deaths on World Cup stadium sites.

The public cost rose too. Russia’s preparation budget reportedly increased from 643.5 billion rubles to 678 billion rubles by 2017.

Human Rights Watch also argued that the tournament gave Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, one of Russia’s most notorious rights violators, a platform to wash his image. Russia 2018 became a month of hospitality theatre for Vladimir Putin’s state, built on vote allegations, labour abuses and a carefully managed international gaze.

In 2018, Infantino said the World Cup had changed perceptions of Russia. In 2019, Putin awarded him a state medal, and Infantino thanked Russia for hosting what he called the “best World Cup ever.” That is the soft-power exchange in its purest form: the host receives global rehabilitation; FIFA receives a successful show; everyone calls it football.

The world came. The world watched. The world cheered. The regime received its soft focus.

Qatar 2022: the perfected case

Qatar refined the World Cup’s worst habits into a polished global product.

This is where the personal contradiction becomes hardest to escape. I can still understand the beauty of a final. I can still understand why people watched. But I cannot separate the images from the conditions that produced them: migrant workers, unexplained deaths, recruitment debt, heat stress, compensation fights, public relations campaigns, partial reforms and a governing body that always seems to survive long enough to sell the next edition.

Everything was there: bid corruption allegations, extreme labour dependence, geopolitical ambition, vast infrastructure spending, expensive image management, elite Western complicity, polished reform language, and a tournament powerful enough to swallow much of the outrage around it.

FIFA’s internal inquiry did not reopen the award. Garcia rejected the official presentation of his findings and resigned. In 2020, U.S. prosecutors alleged that former FIFA executive committee members Nicolás Leoz and Ricardo Teixeira took bribes in exchange for supporting Qatar’s 2022 bid. French investigators continued to examine the bid, including the Élysée lunch involving Nicolas Sarkozy, Michel Platini and Qatari leadership, along with reporting on a broadcast contract said to include a $100 million bonus if Qatar won the vote. Those claims matter, but they do not all carry the same evidentiary weight in the primary record reviewed here. FIFA’s history is ugly enough without pretending every disputed claim is equally settled.

The human cost became the defining moral issue of the tournament. It also became a lesson in how ambiguity can serve power.

Madhu Bollapally was a healthy 43-year-old Indian worker in Qatar. His family was told he died of “natural causes” after his body was found on a dormitory floor, according to The Guardian’s investigation. That phrase, “natural causes,” sounds neutral until you understand what it can do. Rights groups have argued that migrant deaths certified in vague terms such as “natural causes,” “cardiac arrest” or unexplained cardiac failure can block compensation under Qatari law. Classification can erase remedy as effectively as any locked gate.

The Supreme Committee long maintained that there were three work-related deaths and 37 non-work-related deaths among migrant workers on World Cup stadium projects. Hassan Al Thawadi later cited a 400 to 500 figure, which Amnesty said referred to wider national work-related fatality statistics across sectors and nationalities rather than a clean World Cup-project count. In 2021, The Guardian reported that more than 6,500 migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka had died in Qatar since it secured the World Cup, while making clear that not every death could be tied directly to World Cup construction. Qatari officials contested the numbers and their connection to stadium projects.

The ILO’s work is the careful source. Its report One is too many identified gaps in Qatar’s occupational injury data and the need for better investigation of deaths that may be work-related but are not currently categorised that way. The WURQ registry recorded 50 fatal work-related injuries and 506 severe work-related injuries in Qatar in 2020.

Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, FairSquare and others argued that workers suffered wage theft, recruitment debt, heat stress, unsafe conditions and denial of meaningful remedy. Business & Human Rights Resource Centre later documented wage theft, premature contract termination and workers who still lacked remedy after the tournament. Rights groups called for a dedicated compensation fund. FIFA refused to commit at the scale they demanded.

And still, the tournament worked.

The stadiums looked extraordinary. The final was one of the greatest football matches ever played. Lionel Messi lifted the trophy under fireworks. Billions watched. The sponsors had not fled. FIFA sold every sponsorship package. The 2019 to 2022 cycle closed with record revenue.

Whatever the moral cost, the commercial case worked.

Qatar showed that the World Cup could absorb a vast labour-rights scandal if the football was good enough, the production polished enough and the emotional payoff large enough.

For FIFA, Qatar was proof that the tournament could survive almost anything.

Sponsors: concern, then continuation

The sponsor story is managed concern dressed up as corporate pressure.

In 2015, after the corruption crisis exploded, some of FIFA’s biggest partners expressed alarm. Visa warned it could leave if FIFA did not act quickly. Coca-Cola, Adidas and McDonald’s pushed for deeper reform. By August, McDonald’s had joined Visa and Coca-Cola in backing an independent reform body. In October, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Visa and Budweiser publicly called for Sepp Blatter to go.

Then came continuity.

Qatar Airways became a top-tier FIFA partner in 2017, covering Russia 2018, the women’s tournament and Qatar 2022. Hisense became an official Qatar 2022 sponsor in 2021. In 2023, FIFA renewed Qatar Airways through 2030. Adidas, Coca-Cola and Visa remained part of the broader commercial picture.

The Qatar labour controversy produced another round of pressure. Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and FairSquare urged World Cup sponsors to back remedies for workers. Business & Human Rights Resource Centre later reported that most FIFA and tournament sponsors failed to disclose meaningful information on migrant-recruitment risks and due diligence.

Some sponsors spoke. The money stayed.

The pattern is familiar. Alarm is expressed. Reform is welcomed. Values are affirmed. Inventory clears.

FIFA did not need sponsors to defend it. It needed them to stay.

They did.

United 2026: the reset that is not a reset

The 2026 World Cup is often presented as a clean break from Russia and Qatar.

The geography is different. The risks are different. The contracts are more fluent in the language of human rights. The underlying bargain remains familiar.

The North American bid’s own independent human-rights assessment warned of risks around immigration, workplace discrimination, the treatment of journalists and human-rights defenders, and uneven legal protections across the United States, Mexico and Canada. Those concerns were not discovered by critics after the fact. They sat inside the winning bid package.

The risks were known in advance. They became operational issues to be managed.

City documents from Toronto and Vancouver show the familiar mechanics of obligation: host-city agreements, FIFA approval rights, confidentiality, operational readiness, public budget exposure and procurement constraints. Toronto’s 2025 report put the city’s total host cost at $380 million, with $201.3 million offset by provincial and federal funding, leaving Toronto with $178.6 million. Vancouver’s public record, at least in this pass, is stronger on obligations than on one consolidated final bill. The distribution of risk is clear: local services, public space, policing, transport, fan events and sponsor protection are pushed outward from FIFA and downward into host institutions.

The fan experience points in the same direction. Supporters’ groups accused FIFA of a “monumental betrayal” over 2026 ticket prices, with the cheapest final tickets in one national supporters’ allocation reported at more than £3,000 and the highest supporter tiers above £6,000. FIFA later announced a $60 Supporter Entry Tier, but reporting by The Guardian said that tier would amount to about 1.6 per cent of available tickets. Even the affordable gesture arrives as a footnote to the pricing model.

The event arrives in a city and rewrites priorities around itself.

The politics are darker still.

Trump publicly pressured countries during the 2026 bidding contest, warning that it would be a shame if countries the United States supported lobbied against the North American bid. Years later, FIFA opened a representative office in Trump Tower and staged a Club World Cup trophy event there with Eric Trump. The White House also created a task force to coordinate federal preparations for FIFA events.

This is evidence of something more durable than a legal allegation: FIFA’s proximity to executive power.

Mega-events depend on state levers: borders, visas, policing, security, labour enforcement, public space, immigration control, procurement, surveillance and political protection. In that environment, closeness to power is not decorative. It is operational.

The office, the meetings, the praise, the access politics and the host-state dependency already tell the story. FIFA does not need to hand Trump a formal prize to show what it values.

Infantino and the new style of old power

Gianni Infantino did not invent FIFA’s political instincts. He inherited them.

Under him, the style changed.

The Blatter era looked like old patronage: confederation bosses, executive committee votes, envelopes, favours, regional barons, luxury hotels, opaque transfers. Its symbols were the Baur au Lac raid, the Caribbean cash envelopes, the Paris briefcase allegation, the secret ballots and the vanished computers.

The Infantino era looks more corporate, more presidential, more global. It speaks of human rights. It publishes governance papers. It talks about inclusion and sustainability. It expands tournaments. It sells bigger packages. It courts heads of state. It stages football as diplomacy.

The result looks less like reform than reputational repair backed by cash flow.

The arc is visible: Russia, Trump, Saudi Arabia. In 2018, Infantino said Russia’s World Cup had changed perceptions of the country. In 2019, Putin decorated him. In 2025, FIFA opened inside Trump Tower and tied that move to U.S. government support. In December 2024, FIFA confirmed Saudi Arabia as host of the 2034 World Cup, drawing criticism from Amnesty International and other rights groups, who said the decision put many lives at risk and accused FIFA of ignoring severe human-rights concerns.

The pattern is not personal affection for strongmen. That would be too small. FIFA keeps choosing proximity to executive power because executive power delivers borders, security, visas, public space and spectacle.

The old FIFA often seemed embarrassed only when caught. The new FIFA appears to have drawn a different lesson: criticism can be survived if the next event is larger, richer and more emotionally overwhelming than the last scandal.

It learned from Qatar. It learned from Russia. It learned from the DOJ. It learned from sponsors. It learned from fans.

Above all, it learned that the World Cup is almost impossible to cancel in the public imagination.

People will criticise FIFA for four years, then cry when their country scores in stoppage time.

Calling that hypocrisy is too easy. It is the emotional mechanism that sustains FIFA’s influence.

The game is still beautiful. The institution knows it.

The human-cost problem

A serious account cannot flatten every World Cup into the same moral category.

Germany 2006 did not have the same human-rights record as Qatar 2022. Brazil 2014 was not Russia 2018. South Africa’s legacy cannot be reduced to the $10 million allegation. Qatar’s death toll cannot be compressed into one clean number without misleading readers.

Precision gives the argument force.

The human cost appears differently in each place.

In South Africa, the clearest record concerns the criminalisation and exclusion of vulnerable people: informal traders, migrants, refugees and homeless people pushed out of the visible World Cup environment.

In Brazil, the record is evictions, protest repression, favela militarisation, vendor exclusion, stranded infrastructure and white-elephant stadiums. The host city was not just a venue. It was a place where people had homes before the event arrived with plans.

In Russia, it is labour exploitation, wage theft, retaliation, unsafe conditions, a reported 17 stadium-site worker deaths and the soft-power use of authoritarian hospitality.

In Qatar, it is a vast migrant-labour economy, contested fatality records, heat stress, recruitment debt, wage theft, unexplained deaths, partial reforms and inadequate remedies. Madhu Bollapally’s death matters because it shows how easily a life can disappear into a category.

For 2026, the record is still a risk file: immigration systems, labour protections, discrimination, public policing, homelessness, fan pricing, procurement opacity and the treatment of journalists and defenders.

The harms vary by host. The pattern lies in where the harms land.

FIFA’s model repeatedly pushes the burden onto workers, cities, residents, public budgets and host institutions.

The tournament is global. The harm stays with the host.

What FIFA really sells

FIFA says it sells football.

But football never belonged to FIFA. It belonged to parks, schoolyards, concrete cages, muddy pitches, weekend tournaments, teammates, parents shouting from touchlines, and children dreaming far beyond their ability. That was the game I knew first.

Football is beautiful in its simplicity. The politics around it have ruined parts of the game.

In practice, FIFA sells access to a global emotional monopoly.

That monopoly is why governments tolerate the guarantees, sponsors return after scandals, broadcasters pay, authoritarian leaders want the tournament, democratic leaders accept the costs, cities sign agreements they cannot fully explain to residents, and fans, even angry ones, keep watching.

The joy is real. The goals are real. The memories are real. Children do not fall in love with FIFA statutes or host-city procurement appendices. They fall in love with a goal, a save, a shirt, a flag, a player on television, a room full of people screaming at once.

That is why the loss feels personal.

I did not fall out of love with football. I grew old enough to see what had been built around it.

FIFA monetises that innocence. It attaches the game’s emotional force to contracts, governments, sponsors, security zones, policing operations, luxury boxes, executive networking and political theatre. It turns human attachment into institutional cover.

People know enough. They know about Qatar. They know about Russia. They know about raids and indictments and dead workers and empty stadiums and billion-dollar budgets. They know FIFA is corrupt in some broad, familiar way.

Awareness does not automatically become resistance.

Football reaches parts of people that politics cannot. It bypasses cynicism. It makes adults behave like children again. In the wrong hands, that is extremely useful.

FIFA’s deepest corruption is not that it stained the game.

It is that FIFA learned the stain would never be enough to make the world look away.

The next tournament is always the answer

The FIFA cycle is now familiar.

A tournament is awarded under questionable circumstances. Warnings emerge. Reports are buried, softened or contested. Rights groups document abuses. Sponsors express concern. Governments sign guarantees. Costs rise. Fans complain. The opening ceremony begins. The football is good. The final is unforgettable. FIFA reports record revenue. The next host is announced. The archive thickens.

Award. Denial. Leak. Inquiry. Partial reform. Commercial recovery. Repeat.

FIFA has learned how much pressure it can absorb.

By the time the documents surface, the next tournament is already being sold.

By the time the indictments land, the next sponsor deck is ready.

By the time the dead are counted, the montage has moved on.

Now the World Cup moves toward 2026, a North American tournament wrapped in the language of inclusion while FIFA courts Trump-era power, raises prices, leans on public agencies and prepares for its most commercially valuable edition yet.

The future looks grim because FIFA has learned from every scandal. It learned how much outrage costs, who leaves, who stays, and how quickly the next tournament wipes the glass clean.

The World Cup still gives people something they cannot find elsewhere: a month of shared time, national feeling, impossible goals, collective memory, faces in crowds, strangers embracing, histories condensed into one shot from outside the box.

That is why I cannot write this as someone standing outside football, sneering at those who still love it. I loved it first, before the documents, before the politics, before FIFA became, to me, a case study in how power feeds on joy.

As a child in Hungary, I saw the game in its simplest form. As an adult, I see the price attached to it.

FIFA took that beauty and made it serve power.

Until the world can separate the game from the institution wrapped around it, the tournament will keep doing what it does best: turning public sacrifice into private power, authoritarian hospitality into global celebration, corporate risk into brand halo, and human joy into a shield.

The final image is harder than the briefcase, the raid, or even Messi lifting the trophy in Qatar while the unresolved worker-death record sat beneath the fireworks.

It is FIFA closing a record revenue cycle, then receiving compensation as a victim of the corruption era.

That contradiction comes from the file, not from rhetoric.

I still know why people will watch. That is the part FIFA has always understood best.

The final whistle always comes.

FIFA is still there when the stadium empties.