FIFA: Playing Ball with Imperialism

The workers are in constant competition among themselves as the members of the bourgeoisie are among themselves. — Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1844

The capitalist media is working overtime to hype a factional dispute within the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, or FIFA, the sport’s international governing body. Days before one of the most contested FIFA presidential elections in its history, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) revealed its investigation into a series of alleged bribes to various capitalist governments for hosting rights for the immensely profitable World Cup.
The international working class cannot be fooled by the FBI’s sudden interest in FIFA or the capitalist media’s new mission to expose corruption in sports! The FBI discovers and jails FIFA crooks but can’t investigate or jail a single Wall Street criminal responsible for stealing billions from the working class in the 2008 Great Recession. The FIFA scandal is another step toward an inter-imperialist war that will kill hundreds of millions of workers.
FIFA: Tool of Imperialism
Men’s football, called soccer in the United States, is far and away the most popular sport among workers. Teams in almost every country on the planet are organized into national and regional federations, governed by FIFA. Recognized by the United Nations, FIFA is a powerful instrument of international capitalist rule. Despite football’s British origins, the body’s headquarters is strategically based in Zurich, Switzerland, a center of U.S. and European finance capital.
Founded on corruption, FIFA is as shady as any bank on Wall Street. Given the sheer amount of profit a World Cup host country can exploit from workers in construction, advertising, tourism, entertainment and other sectors, the top FIFA brass wield tremendous power in global finance capitalism. While bribery for hosting rights is merely business as usual, the current scandal represents a new battleground for U.S. and Russian bosses in their escalating competition for global dominance. The U.S. ruling class has indicted top FIFA brass to further isolate Russia, both to damage the Russian rulers’ political standing and possibly to deprive them of a needed economic windfall in hosting the World Cup in 2018.
Blatter Allies with Russian, Chinese Bosses
Along with other high-ranking officials, Sepp Blatter, the longtime FIFA president who announced his resignation six days after seven associates were arrested in Zurich, is being hounded for his failure to play ball with U.S. and European imperialists. In 2005, one year after a kickback of $1 million Swiss francs to a FIFA official was exposed (with no repercussions), Blatter defied U.S. pressure to bar Iran from competing in the 2006 World Cup. Then he publicly endorsed Palestine’s admission as a full FIFA member, another move in line with Russian and Chinese interests. Beyond helping Russia secure the World Cup for 2018, Blatter went on record to say that China’s rising influence had created an “irresistible trend” toward China hosting the event as well (Time Magazine, 8/4/2010).
Stung by Blatter’s continued support from the vast majority of federations comprising FIFA, U.S. Senator John McCain called for Blatter’s removal from FIFA “for his continued support of Russia” (The Wire, 5/31/15). In the same online article, Thiago Cassis, a Brazilian sports writer, said: “All this talk about corruption is an attempt by Europe and America to bring the game back into their sphere of influence. There is a lot of corruption in European football too. They do not talk about it. This whole game is not about tackling corruption, but regaining control.”
Sports and Wage Slavery
People have played games since the dawn of our species. Class society perverted physical culture into “sport,” an instrument of class domination. Under capitalism, sports became riddled with racism, sexism and nationalism; they are one of the bosses’ top ideological weapons against the working class. Imperialist nations like Great Britain and Nazi Germany used sports to showcase their pseudo-scientific notions of racial and imperial superiority. Sports also provide a vehicle for the profit system’s core illusions: fair competition, equality under the law (or rules), the capacity of individual talent to triumph over all.
Football came to world dominance during the rise of the first capitalist state, Great Britain. As the factory system developed and workers spent up to sixteen hours a day in shift work, new cultural institutions arose to promote a sexist glorification of the male body. Amateur sports were designed to enable British workers to vent their rage at one another, rather than the bosses who exploited them. One early capitalist-financed group of this stripe was called the “Muscular Christians.” As it attracted more workers and opened numerous clubs, it adopted a new name: the “Young Men’s Christian Association,” or YMCA. The organization soon spread internationally.
Professional sports flourished with the rise of imperialism. Football, which prohibits hand contact with the ball, required leisure time to master that working-class amateurs did not have. The British exported this sport to its colonies, and it wasn’t long before it captured the attention of bosses in other imperialist powers. Football became a global phenomenon of tremendous importance to capitalism, a tool to build nationalism while distracting workers from their daily exploitation.
Whatever the outcome of FIFA’s current crisis, workers have no dog in this fight. Rival bosses are fighting for control over FIFA because of its usefulness in misleading the working class.
A Communist Vision of Physical Culture
The Progressive Labor Party fights to build a mass movement of millions to turn the bosses’ imperialist wars into class wars for revolution. It will also take millions to build a new, communist culture. We can look to an example from Christmas Day, 1914, when British and German soldiers defied their generals’ orders and played a game of football on the strip of land between their trenches. This expression of internationalism inspired workers and soldiers in every army.
PLP fights for communism and the aspiration of billions: an egalitarian society dedicated to the physical and mental development of every worker.