Opinion: FIFA Reform
A change in leadership is not enough
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No sooner had the largest World Cup ever finished than FIFA proposed selling a stake in its future to private investors. Within days, after opposition from confederations, associations, leagues, fans and heads of government, the proposal was withdrawn. That outcome is settled, but what happens next is not. The statements by football’s governing bodies tell us what is in play.
What confederations said
UEFA has called for a review that is “thorough and fundamental”, adding that “no option should be off the table”. The AFC says the affair has “exposed fundamental weaknesses in FIFA’s consultation and decision-making processes”. CONCACAF says the future of the World Cup was “advanced outside every established governance framework, without transparency, consultation or due process”.
What has been proposed
Their diagnosis is governance, but the solutions on the table so far are lacking. The only reform any of these bodies has proposed is UEFA’s, on finding a new way of distributing FIFA’s money to grassroots football, but there is no detail yet behind it. Whether it is meant to deliver a significant change in FIFA’s approach to funding, or to secure support elsewhere in the world for UEFA’s wider agenda, or both, is unclear.
It is early days and things are moving fast, so perhaps more detail will follow soon, including proposals for reforming structures, procedures and policies. But there is a real Groundhog Day risk here. A crisis for FIFA in 2015 led to its President’s departure and promises of reform. In practice those reforms led to a gradual consolidation of governance power in the hands of the President. Since then, big decisions - the expansion of tournaments, hosting decisions, partner choices - appear to have been pushed through by presidential fiat and tick-box committees rather than proper procedures. UEFA itself now says football cannot keep going on with “secret schemes on fast track timescales, cooked up by faceless individuals”.
The 2021 climate strategy
The 2021 FIFA Climate Strategy is a clear example of the kind of failure a real governance review would have to reckon with. It contained eighteen initiatives. On the last review by this newsletter in November 2024, four appeared to have been delivered or progressed, and no evidence has emerged since of substantial progress on the rest.
One of the key commitments in that strategy was to publish a progress report every two years. This should be governance 101 stuff, but five years on, no such report has been published. And this for an issue the strategy itself says threatens “FIFA’s own mission to make football truly global”.
This is not an argument about updating a document for its own sake, and it is not a side-issue. The failure to deliver it has real-world consequences for the funding questions that have just blown up: not only how much FIFA distributes, but on what basis it does so.
Climate and future funding
The Climate Strategy committed FIFA to “determine the current extent of the impact of climate change on football across the world”. FIFA’s own funding rules class an association as needing the most assistance where its revenue, setting aside all FIFA money, is under $4 million a year. Roughly half the membership qualifies. Many of those are in the places facing the sharpest physical climate risks with the least capacity to adapt.
It may well be that FIFA needs to fund differently to support the climate resilience of football in those countries, and to start now rather than watch the costs mount. But nobody can say, because the assessment FIFA committed to in 2021 has never been published.
The next Forward cycle
And funding for the next four years is being decided right now. FIFA Forward, the programme that distributes money to its 211 members, will hand out around $2.7 billion between 2027 and 2030 - a 20% increase on the current round. The regulations governing that money have not yet been published.
On paper the current rules include, among a long list of criteria, an obligation on associations to "evaluate and reduce the environmental impact" of their activities. The obligation is framed around football's impact on the environment, not the reverse. No reports have been published on whether this has led to any funding of climate projects, as FIFA does not report against the criteria it sets, and transparency is thin throughout the system. And nothing in the funding rules requires a pitch, stadium or headquarters built with FIFA money to withstand the climate conditions it will actually face.
Unless someone decides otherwise, the current jam-spreading approach will simply carry forward for another four years. Much the same base sum will go to every association regardless of circumstances, and the same limited nods to climate sit on paper only, whatever changes happen at the top.
This is governance failure in a nutshell - a system working as designed but not as it should.
The withdrawn proposal would have made all of this worse. FIFA offered each association an extra $20 million outside the existing formula, on a short deadline, funded by selling a stake in the World Cup. Its rejection is not the same thing as deep-seated funding problems being fixed.
What to watch
Leadership change is necessary, but not sufficient. On its own it will not fix the problems identified, a point an FT editorial has also addressed this week. And if warm words about reform with no plans for change win the day, real reform can wither on the vine. The same problems can emerge again and again.
What to watch, then, is not just the headlines about who should lead next. It is whether anything put forward requires the Statutes to be amended, whether rulebooks change, and whether the next FIFA Forward funding regulations help football develop where it is most at risk.
It is also worth remembering that each body now calling for a review is also a beneficiary of the arrangements under review. When bodies call for change while protecting the position they already hold, football risks ending up back at business as usual.
Fans
Supporters are outside of this system, which is why their voice matters here. The Independent Supporters Council North America asked FIFA to begin “a transparent process that includes member associations, confederations, supporters, players, and other stakeholders”. Football Supporters Europe has called on European institutions to consider a regulatory framework setting minimum standards for FIFA. Both proposals need proper scrutiny. What matters here is that both are more specific than anything any governing body has put forward. This shows the role fans could play in shaping reform. As things stand, nothing requires fans to be part of whatever process comes next.
In April 2021 the European Super League was defeated by fan pressure. In England that led to the Government fast-tracking a fan-led review of football that had long been called for, and eventually to a statutory regulator. However it is done, fans’ voices need to be at the centre of a genuinely open conversation about what comes next for football, globally.
The alternative is change designed in many of the same backrooms that got us here.
Endnote
Unlike most posts here, this is an opinion piece rather than an in-depth analysis. Many key points come from primary sources, but the conclusions drawn from them are open to argument. I'd welcome hearing where readers see it differently. FIFA reform could be done and dusted in the next few months. This is where things stand today, and I may return to it as the picture changes. The more argument there is about it now, the better.
Fran James (he/him)
Football and Climate
info@footballandclimate.org
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