Backing from FIFA's members does not amount to accountability

Key takeaways

• Under FIFA's electoral system, support from most member associations is the normal state of affairs for a sitting president, so it reveals little about any particular decision.
• The associations that elect the FIFA president also depend on development money distributed from FIFA's centre, which weakens their incentive to challenge it.
• The bodies that formally oversee FIFA's leadership are themselves answerable to the Council and Congress that the president's supporters dominate.
• A mandate from members is legitimate, but it settles who governs rather than whether a specific failure has been properly explained.

The argument: majority support measures loyalty, not scrutiny

The BBC reports that Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, laughed off questions about whether he had thought about resigning over what the broadcaster calls the World Cup sell-off debacle, and that he said the vast majority supports him. The full details of the debacle are not set out in the material available here. That gap matters for this article, because the point is not to rule on the episode itself. The point is the answer the president gave.

When the head of an organisation is challenged over a specific failure, there are broadly two kinds of answer. One deals with the failure: what went wrong, who decided, what will change. The other deals with the person's standing: support, mandate, numbers. The second kind is not wrong in itself. Leaders of member bodies do depend on their members, and saying so is honest. But it answers a different question from the one asked. Being asked whether you thought about resigning is a way of asking whether the failure was serious enough to cost someone their job. Answering that most people back you replies to the second half of that question and ignores the first.

The argument here is that in FIFA's case the appeal to majority support is especially weak as a defence, because of how the organisation is built. The structure makes broad backing for a sitting president the expected result, almost whatever happens. A measure that barely moves cannot tell you much about any single event. If FIFA wants to show that the sell-off episode has been dealt with, it has to point to scrutiny, not to loyalty.

Evidence: one association, one vote flattens the electorate

FIFA's president is elected by the Congress, where each member association has a single vote. The national associations of the largest footballing countries carry exactly the same weight as the smallest. That rule has a defensible purpose. It stops a handful of wealthy football economies from running the global game, and it gives associations with few resources a real voice in a body that shapes their sport.

The side effect is that the electorate is spread across a very large number of associations, many of which have limited exposure to the commercial decisions at the centre of controversies like a World Cup sale. Where an episode mainly affects supporters, broadcasters or host-country markets in particular regions, most voting associations feel little direct consequence. Their reasons for backing or opposing a president lie elsewhere: development support, competition places, administrative help, and relationships built up over years.

This is why a claim of majority backing is close to built into the system. A president who looks after the broad base of associations can keep their support even through controversies that dominate coverage in the countries where football's media attention is concentrated. The voters with the most at stake in a particular failure are not necessarily the ones whose votes decide the outcome. So when the president says most members back him, that is very probably true, and it is also very nearly beside the point.

Evidence: the money flows from the centre to the voters

The second piece of the mechanism is money. FIFA earns most of its income from the World Cup, mainly through broadcast and commercial rights, and passes a large share of it back to member associations through its development programmes. For many associations this funding is not marginal. It can pay for pitches, coaching, youth and women's competitions, and the basic administration of a national federation.

Nothing about that redistribution is improper. It is arguably one of the better things FIFA does, and a good reason why one association, one vote has lasting support. But it creates a structural loyalty that has to be taken into account when weighing claims of backing. The associations deciding whether the leadership has handled a World Cup episode well are, in many cases, the same associations whose budgets depend on the World Cup making money under that leadership. In those conditions, criticising a commercial decision means questioning the source of your own funding.

That does not mean associations are bought. It means their incentives point towards continuity. A rational federation official with a development budget to protect will favour stability over a public fight, particularly when the controversy is about a tournament the association may never host. When support comes from a constituency whose finances are tied to the centre, you would expect it to hold firm. That is why holding firm proves little.

Evidence: FIFA's internal checks report upwards to the same body

The third piece concerns oversight. After the governance crisis of the last decade, FIFA reformed its structures. It split strategic decision-making in the Council from day-to-day management under the general secretariat, and it kept independent committees for audit, compliance, ethics and governance. On paper this is the apparatus that should examine an episode such as a disputed World Cup sale and report on it.

In practice, these bodies sit inside a system whose final authority is the Congress, and whose membership and leadership are shaped by the Council and Congress. The members of independent committees are proposed and elected through FIFA's own processes. The result is a circular line of accountability: the leadership is answerable to the members, the oversight bodies are answerable to the members, and the members are tied to the leadership through the funding and electoral arrangements described above.

No organisation can be fully independent of itself, and every member body faces some form of this problem. But it does mean that the formal checks are unlikely to be what drives a reckoning over a commercial failure. If the sell-off episode is going to be properly explained, pressure will most likely come from outside the electorate: from host governments, broadcasters, supporters' organisations, regulators and the press. These are the people asking the questions the president laughed off, and it is their concerns that an appeal to majority support does not address.

The case against: a democratic mandate is still a mandate

The strongest counter-argument should be stated plainly. FIFA is a federation of national associations, and those associations are its owners in every meaningful sense. If most of them, having seen the controversy, still choose to back their president, that is how the organisation is meant to work. Outside critics, however loud, have no vote. Demanding a resignation because journalists or richer football markets are unhappy would itself be undemocratic. It would hand an informal veto to the parts of the football world that one association, one vote was designed to restrain.

There is also a case that structural loyalty cuts both ways. Associations that depend on FIFA's income have every reason to punish leadership that puts that income at risk. If a World Cup sale really had harmed FIFA's finances or reputation in ways that threatened distributions, the same incentives that produce loyalty would produce revolt. Continued backing could therefore be read as a judgement by the members that the episode, however badly handled, has not damaged the things they care about.

Finally, it can be argued that resignation is the wrong test altogether. Organisations can admit and correct failures without changing their leader, and a president who stays and fixes a problem may serve members better than a leadership contest would. On this view, asking whether he thought about resigning is a media framing, and laughing it off is a reasonable refusal to accept it.

These are serious points. But they defend the legitimacy of the mandate, which this article does not dispute. They do not show that the mandate answers questions about a specific failure. A member body can be properly governed and still owe a proper account of what went wrong.

What would change the conclusion

Several kinds of evidence would weaken the argument made here. The first would be a published, detailed explanation of the sell-off episode by FIFA itself, setting out how decisions were taken, by whom, and what has been changed. If that already exists, or appears, the appeal to majority support would become an extra point rather than a substitute, and the criticism here would lose much of its force.

The second would be a real review by one of FIFA's independent committees, with terms of reference and findings made public. That would show the internal oversight machinery working on its own initiative, against the structural expectation described above.

The third would be visible dissent within the electorate that was answered rather than absorbed: associations raising the episode at Council or Congress and getting substantive responses on the record. That would suggest the vast majority's support had been tested, not just assumed.

On the other side, the argument would be strengthened if the details of the episode remain unexplained while the language of mandate and support continues to stand in for an account. At present, from the reporting available, it is not known which of these paths FIFA will take. What can be said is that broad backing, in a system built to produce it, cannot by itself close the question.

Sources and further reading

• BBC Sport: report on the FIFA president's response to questions over the World Cup sell-off and his claim of majority support.
• FIFA Statutes: the governing document setting out Congress voting, Council powers and the role of the independent committees.
• FIFA development programme documentation: published material describing how tournament revenue is redistributed to member associations.
• Academic literature on sports governance: studies of accountability in international federations and of the one member, one vote model.