The 2015 FIFA Scandal Revisited: Applicability As A Case Study In The World Of Academia

As academics, one of our primary responsibilities is to use the real world to convey pertinent and digestible information to our students. Specific to understanding the “why” behind fraud, oftentimes we look to those cases that have the highest levels of notoriety — the Theranos case would be an excellent example, as it included a narrative that seemed ripe for a Hollywood script. But simply telling a story is not necessarily how we can best use real-world cases to reinforce the product that we are attempting to sell to our students. Rather, it would make more sense to utilize the “lessons learned” to explore and answer questions starting with some of the most basic concepts: who, what, where, when, and most importantly, why? If an academic can find the “right” cases to take advantage of within the classroom, students are more likely to have a positive, meaningful learning experience that will stay with them as they enter their professional careers.

The recent completion of a little soccer tournament played every four years, known as the World Cup, opened my eyes to what is possibly the perfect case to utilize within the classroom. The World Cup is not necessarily an event that an American sports fan would place at the top of the list of their favorites, but to ignore its importance around the globe would be quite naïve. Perhaps the first question that might arise when speaking about the World Cup in this context is how it relates to fraud. The tournament itself is not the primary talking point, unless you want to discuss amazing soccer competition played by the world’s best players. No, the discussion revolves around the characters that committed fraud — specifically in the form of corruption and racketeering that spanned decades within the organization known as FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association). FIFA is the organization that controls the World Cup (and almost every other aspect of international soccer) and is the setting for one of the biggest scandals in sports history, which came to a head in 2015 when 11 FIFA officials were arrested and charged with various crimes. A broad overview of the scandal includes significant amounts of bribery (both in number and in dollar amount), the political interplay between countries to “award” World Cup hosting to countries that were not qualified for such a prestigious designation, and the construction of a sophisticated culture of corruption that displayed an amazingly analogous similarity to mafia-type organizations.  

The case study of the FIFA scandal can be quite complex and has been covered very succinctly in many articles, books and other forms of media that covered various angles of those involved, the crimes committed, and broad-based discussions on how such a large, publicly known organization could become incredibly susceptible to the kinds of fraud that were committed. Specifically, the book “Red Card” (Bensinger, 2018) and the recent Netflix documentary “FIFA Uncovered” (2022) provide excellent synopses of the case. The depth of how the case might be utilized in the classroom includes many possibilities. Specifically, the case could be examined from a tax, an accounting, a leadership, a marketing, and of course, from a legal perspective. Those perspectives provide the kind of case that could allow an educator to use a broad-view or a singularly focused analysis in helping students understand the complexities of fraud, especially from that always appreciated “real-world” point of view. 

One of the interesting slants that can be taken to help introduce the case study of the FIFA scandal of 2015 would be the application of some age-old idioms. For example, application of a concept as simple as “if it’s too good to be true, it probably is” would make sense when considering how the most recent World Cup was awarded to Qatar, a small country with a population of approximately two million, which had neither the soccer history nor the infrastructure in place to make it a viable candidate when selected back in 2010. Another applicable idiom to the scandal is “the devil is in the details.” An anecdote of the FIFA case that was found to be a major factor in the investigation was an official’s depositing of illicit funds into a U.S.-based bank account, which allowed investigators to use that “detail” to begin digging into financials that brought together the investigative resources of some of the world’s best crime-fighting organizations, including both the FBI and the IRS. A final idiom that might be used in providing an overview of the FIFA scandal is “a picture tells a thousand words.” One of the most interesting aspects of the case is how investigators used the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act to charge the officials for fraud that literally spanned the globe. The “picture” of the connections between the various officials involved in the scandal was one of the primary tools that allowed the investigators to “see” how RICO could be used to help expose the scandal, with subsequent successful charging and prosecuting of many top-level officials within the organization.