FIFA’s Corporate Sponsors: Reliable Ethical Change-Agents?

In the wake of the U.S. Justice Department’s initial arrests of FIFA officials in May 2015 on corruption charges, could the public reasonably expect FIFA’s corporate sponsors to pressure the international governing body of footfall (soccer in the U.S., where “football” is reserved for “subconcussions being inherent to a sport”)? If so, would the pressure be sufficient to rid the powerful international organization of its squalid officials and practices? I contend that these questions come down to how the power was divided at the time between the sponsors and the organization, rather than to the sponsors’ respective ethical positions or even how strongly the executives feel about ethics in business, including FIFA.

The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.com.  

On the Nature of Entrenched Power: FIFA’s President Ensconced in Corruption

In May 2015, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch was “shocking FIFA like an earthquake,” according to the European newspaper, Das Bild.[1] She was leading “an American-led takedown of corruption in FIFA,” the Federation Internationale de Football Association, which oversees the sport of football, or soccer as it is known in the U.S., globally.[2] With great power comes resounding responsibility, even if the sound is ignored. When the head of an organization goes after the corruption-fighters rather than admitting to error at the very least in having presided over allegedly corrupt officials near the top—and in fact repeatedly dismisses calls to resign and not stand for re-election (but then is implicated and resigns just days after he was astonishingly reelected!)—the question becomes one of the intractability of squalid power, as if it were defying gravity—at least that of the ethical variety. 

The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.com.