PROTECTING PRIVATE TRANSNATIONAL AUTHORITY AGAINST PUBLIC INTERVENTION: FIFA'S POWER OVER NATIONAL GOVERNMENTS
| Date | 01 December 2015 |
| Author | HENK ERIK MEIER,BORJA GARCíA |
| Published date | 01 December 2015 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12208 |
doi : 10. 1111/p adm .12208
PROTECTING PRIVATE TRANSNATIONAL AUTHORITY
AGAINST PUBLIC INTERVENTION: FIFA’S POWER OVER
NATIONAL GOVERNMENTS
HENK ERIK MEIER AND BORJA GARCÍA
Scholars have engaged in discussions over whether the rise of transnational private authority is
benecial or undermines public legitimate authority. While the recent focus on civil regulation has
emphasized the key role of public authorities and civil societies in such arrangements, the case of the
International Federation of Association Football (FIFA)provides strong evidence that global policies
can be formulated and administered by completely private institutions relying on strong enforce-
ment mechanisms and able to confront public authorities. FIFA’s power results from its control of
market access to global football, which represents a vital ‘club good’ for national football industries.
Therefore, FIFA is able to force European Union member states to deviate from national paths of
sport regulation. Without orchestrating their efforts, public authorities are unlikely to succeed in
challenging FIFA’s power. Although the recent corruption scandals might force FIFA to implement
some reforms, FIFA has a vital interest in protectingits regulatory powers.
INTRODUCTION
Football is not only a social phenomenon, but an expanding industry that is heavily
controlled by the sport’s governing body, the Fédération International de Football Associa-
tion (FIFA). FIFA, a private not-for-prot association with headquarters in Switzerland,
attributes to itself the powers to govern and regulate world football in collaboration with
continental confederations and national football associations (FAs), from the rules of the
game to the social and economic dimensions (FIFA 2015a, Articles 1–13).
At the moment, FIFA is engulfed in major scandals. An investigation led by the US and
Swiss police authorities resulted in senior members of the governing body being detained
to be extradited to the United States, where they face accusations of alleged large-scale cor-
ruption, tax evasion and money laundering, among others (Gibson and Gayle 2015). Mis-
conduct and corruption within FIFA have long been denounced (Jennings 2006; Calvert
and Blake 2014) and there have been numerous calls to increase FIFA’s accountability
towards stakeholders and public authorities (Lyons et al. 2014). After many years resist-
ing calls for reform, FIFA president, Joseph Blatter, decided to relinguish his position just
days after being re-elected by the 2015 FIFA Congress. However, Blatter announced that
he would implement structural changes before an extraordinary congress elects his suc-
cessor, to ensure that an improved FIFA remains strong and independent (FIFA 2015b).
Thus, even in the middle of its most important crisis in decades, FIFA has signalled its will
to keep control of the reform agenda.
While the corruption cases are outside the scope of this article, the way FIFA muddles
through them is perplexing and leads to more general questions that form the core of this
article: Why has FIFA successfully occupied a regulatory space that could have belonged
to public authorities given the importance of football as a socioeconomic activity? Fur-
thermore, how is it possible that a private not-for-prot organization with headquarters
Henk Erik Meier is at the Institute for Sport and Exercise Sciences, University of Münster, Germany. Borja Garcíais at
the School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences, University of Loughborough, UK.
Public Administration Vol.93, No. 4, 2015 (890–906)
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
FIFA’S POWER OVER NATIONAL GOVERNMENTS 891
in Switzerland is able to claim and maintain its autonomy from the so-called shadow of
hierarchy of public authorities (Chappelet 2010)?
Indeed, FIFA aims to ‘control every type of association football’ (FIFA 2012, Article 2,
emphasis added). Here, we explore the differentways in which FIFA defends its autonomy
to govern football privately in the global and transnational market, without the interven-
tion of public authorities. It is necessary to clarify from the outset that we do not argue that
FIFA has innite powers in every situation; what the article does is to focus on the balance
of forces of FIFA, as a private organization, vis-à-vis public authorities in the transna-
tional regulation of football. Thus, on a theoretical level, FIFA is not just a case study for
football enthusiasts as it reminds scholars to abandon ‘methodological nationalism’ and
to realize that global policies can be formulated and administered by completely private
institutions (Stone and Ladi 2015). Moreover, while scholars have focused on civil regula-
tion employing soft law,FIFA illustrates that transnational private regulators can confront
public authorities by relying on strong enforcement mechanisms.
The article proceeds in four steps. First, we review the academic debates on transna-
tional private regulation. Second, the article examines why FIFA rose as a transnational
private authority. It is argued that FIFA can impose its preferences on national govern-
ments because it controls access to global football as a club good vital for national football
industries. Third, as its main empirical contribution, the article presents evidence of how
FIFA exerted its power as transnational football regulator in three case studies against
the national governments of Greece, Spain and Poland. In the conclusion, we discuss the
extent to which FIFA’s multiple roles as regulator of the game, transnational corpora-
tion and grassroots movement can be contested by national governments on their own.
We argue that due to football’s character as grassroots movement, policy-makers at the
national level do not trust the electorate to reward them for confronting FIFA. Accord-
ingly, the present crisis might result in some organizational reforms, but FIFA is unlikely
to waive its regulatory powers easily.
TRANSNATIONAL PRIVATE REGULATION
From the time of Rosenau and Czempiel’s (1992) publication, governance by non-state
actors has increasingly occupied the attention of scholars (Mattli and Büthe 2005; Büthe
2010; Shamir 2011).Private actors can participate in policy implementation (Pattberg 2005),
transnational corporations (TNCs) provide public goods for failing states (Börzel and Risse
2010) or impose their demands on developing countries (Koenig-Archibugi 2004). More-
over, private actors are also engaged in transnational private regulation (TPR). Building
on Pattberg (2005, p. 593) as well as Graz and Nölke (2007, p. 3), TPR can be dened as the
ability of non-state actors to cooperate across borders in order to establish rules and stan-
dards of behaviour in a distinct issue area accepted as legitimate by agents not involved in
the rule denition. Thus, FIFA’s regimecan be conceptualized as a TPR since it establishes
rules accepted by national FAs and governments. This raises the question of how private
regulators claim power and how they exert it.
Scholars emphasizing the important role for TNCs in TPR claim that neoliberal ideol-
ogy and the pursuit of corporate hegemony account for the rise of transnational private
authority (Cutler et al. 1999; Johns 2007; Schäferhoff et al. 2009; Shamir 2011). More func-
tionalist approaches argue that globalization has created a mismatch between markets and
politics in terms of governance. Accordingly, demand for rules has given rise to a variety
of sources of supply (Hauer 2000). Thus, private actors have assumed regulatory powers
Public Administration Vol.93, No. 4, 2015 (890–906)
© 2015 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.
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