While that’s a lot of money, to put it in perspective, Roger Goodell, NFL commissioner, makes something like $42 million per year.
While I’m in no position to comment on anyone’s guilt or innocence, I will note that there is a ton of money floating around out there in the sports industry-college and professional.
Roger Goddell does not set his own salary. He works for the owners of the league and they can pay him what they think he is worth. The NFL is easily the richest sports league on the planet.
The FIFA guys are self-dealing. They don’t really answer to anyone. If Roger Goddell was caught stealing from the company kitty he’d be floating in a river by now.
FIFA also isn’t really analogous to the NFL. They one of the within–nation soccer(ahem, football, but I’m disambiguating from NFL here) leagues would be more like that.
That’s exactly right. The heart of FIFA’s problem is the one-country, one-vote system of governance, which gives an insider like Blatter the opportunity to line his pockets on the back of corrupt deals for support from football powers like Montserrat and Kiribati.
Bit of trivia here, but the countries that don’t call it football are English speaking ones that decided to come up with their own versions of rugby football 120-140 years ago–,Australian rule football, Canadian football, American football, even Gaelic Football).
The NFL is probably more egalitarian, but they have strict accountability standards. FIFA, not so much
FIFA’s only real job is to award this giant prize and under their current structure all the incentives are towards corruption. I would not be surprised that Russia or Qatar paid big bribes to FIFA execs and to member countries, but I am a little surprised at how much the top three guys simply skimmed off the top for themselves.
And the neat thing is, being right there in Zürich, they don’t have to go out of their way to open a Swiss bank account.
The payments appear to break Swiss law. Don’t think the same can be said about Goodell’s pay. There are many over compensated CEO’s but while most are obnoxious they aren’t illegal.
Listen, people talk a lot of smack about FIFA, and clearly the organization has had its problems.
But I simply WILL NOT believe that these gentlemen, charged with responsibility for the governing body of a sport that brings joy to billions, helped themselves to barely $5,000,000 per person per year.
It has to be more than that. Check again, maybe you dropped a few decimal places.
Right - and you know how the compensation committee actually functions at the NFL. In a different form, it is as corrupt as FIFA. Goodall writes his own ticket OR he will sing like song bird on the league!
Yes. I am part owner of the Vikings. You?
I think it is on top of the salaries and eh um er, gratuities from Uncle Qatar.
Right. This is what they’re taking on top of their skim. (And from the reporting I’ve seen, they weren’t just taking bribes from people who tohught they might want to host the world cup, they were pretty much taking money from everyone just as part of the price of being involved in FIFA. Sometimes “merely” lavish treatment instead of bribes, but all in all a very profitable life.)
From Steven Wright:
I was walking by this gas station the other day. There were two signs in the window: Help Wanted - Self service.
So I hired myself.
I made myself the Boss.
I took all the money and I left.
The notable exception being any/every team that wants a new stadium. They are always losing money while delivering billions in benefits each year to the local economy – benefits that would gadzuple if the new stadium was built.
They earned it with all the cost-saving initiatives they put in place, such as the hundreds of thousands of dollars they saved by accepting artificial turf fields for the Women’s World Cup.