Countries Are Cracking Down on FIFA Corruption
FIFA is corrupt. The giving of the World Cup to Qatar (a desert country in the Middle East with horrible human rights violations and, again, desert) and Russia (more or less the same as Qatar but without desert and with corruption) shows that the organization is easily willing to be bought by countries who are willing to throw money at its tax-exempt coffers. Even before the Qatar and Russia fiasco, I think that anyone who knows anything about the organization knows that it is corrupt, has been corrupt, and very well might be corrupt in the future. However it turns out that the US and Switzerland have had enough and are not only launching investigations into the organization and bidding process, but have also arrested at least 7 leading FIFA officials.
The news is still breaking as I write this, but it seems as though things are looking dim for the embattled sports organization. While FIFA president Sepp Blatter hasn’t been arrested yet, both the US and the Swiss investigations are still ongoing and there’s a good chance that he will be indicted. Blatter is already known as a sort of tyrant within FIFA, having stacked multiple elections so that he would win over and over again. It’s impossible to think that a man who rules the most popular sports organization in the world with an iron fist doesn’t know about the corruption of his underlings, if he isn’t actively involved with it himself. While the future of both FIFA and the 2018 and 2022 World Cups remain to be seen, things are looking bad and they’re going to get much worse before they get better. With extradition on the table and FIFA refusing to reopen the bidding process, it’s promising to be an interesting few weeks for soccer fans around the world.
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