Challenging FIFA can be global philanthropy’s biggest win

FIFA has finally overplayed its hand. Following the Qatar World Cup in 2022, the institution appeared entirely invincible, confident that on-pitch spectacle would indefinitely shield it from accountability. That perceived immunity has led to mounting operational failures during this World Cup cycle, culminating in FIFA’s proposed $20 billion commercial subsidiary to sell equity in future World Cups. The responses of various confederations and politicians globally have shattered the long-held illusion of FIFA’s untouchability and exposed a deeply vulnerable institution, creating an unprecedented window for genuine structural change.

Unlike previous tournaments, where off-pitch controversies faded once the football began. But not this time: supporters were openly priced out by predatory dynamic pricing algorithms, geopolitical visa disruptions fractured tournament logistics for teams and officials, and brazen political interference actively shaped sporting outcomes.

These are not isolated mishaps or logistics challenges. They are symptoms of a deeper governance problem. For philanthropy, this should raise an uncomfortable contradiction. Foundations invest billions each year to address human rights abuses, labour exploitation, gender inequality, democratic accountability, and the climate crisis. Yet a highly influential governance system affecting all of these issues receives remarkably little attention from systems-change funders.

Why sport governance matters for systems change

If an international development institution controlled billions in funding, operated across more countries than the United Nations, dictated municipal public policy, and influenced labour standards for millions of migrant workers, philanthropy would aggressively resource civil society organisations to monitor and challenge its governance.

Yet global sport occupies a bizarre exception.

Today, FIFA functions far beyond the boundaries of competition administration. They are a powerful transnational institution that shapes public spending priorities, influences government decision-making, directs major infrastructure projects and their labour standards, and increasingly acts as a geopolitical actor in its own right.

Labour rights, climate justice, gender equality, and democratic accountability are all affected by decisions made inside sporting institutions. Yet philanthropic funding continues to focus overwhelmingly on programmes that use sport as a tool for social change, rather than supporting efforts to make the institutions governing sport themselves more accountable.

FIFA’s governance problem

The problem is built into the legal architecture of global sport.

FIFA, like many other sporting federations,  are registered as a non-commercial association under the Swiss Civil Code. This grants them an extraordinary degree of autonomy while shielding them from many forms of external oversight. 

The commercialisation of football under João Havelange and the redistribution politics of Sepp Blatter’s Goal programme created clear incentives for corruption and patronage inside FIFA. Where previous administrations operated through informal networks, Infantino has formalised and entrenched those dynamics.

Under Swiss association law, every member must possess equal voting rights. In practice, this requirement has enabled an extraordinary concentration of political power. By distributing development grants equally across its 211 member associations regardless of size or need, FIFA’s executive leadership has created powerful incentives for political loyalty.

Smaller federations often depend heavily on these grants for their survival, as Infantino emphasised at the 2024 FIFA Congress, “70% of you would have no football without the resources coming directly from FIFA.”

When institutions can effectively determine the financial survival of their own electorate, questions about accountability become difficult to avoid.

It’s exactly for this reason that a change at the top isn’t enough. Removing Infantino is crucial, but without structural and governance reform, a new version will emerge, just as Infantino did after the corruption scandal that sank Sepp Blatter before him. 

The social consequences

Governance failures matter because they produce tangible social harms:

Labour rights and the loss of lives

• Qatar’s 2022 World Cup starkly illustrated the human cost of unmonitored tournament preparations. Thousands of migrant workers from some of the poorest communities paid illegal recruitment fees to secure employment on projects linked to the tournament. Many worked in extreme conditions and thousands of deaths were recorded under vague and uninvestigated categories.
• While FIFA generated billions in commercial revenue from the tournament, basic compensation efforts for affected families were met with sustained institutional resistance.

A system prioritising commercial delivery and power accumulation over human dignity will inherently externalise its costs onto vulnerable global supply chains.

The subjugation of the women’s game

• While FIFA highlights record commercial growth in the women’s game, severe structural inequalities persist. Major disparities in investment, player compensation, and safeguarding protections remain.
• The governing body’s reliance on national federations creates significant accountability gaps, particularly where local institutions fail to protect players from psychological, physical, or sexual abuse. 

Without accountability mechanisms, these governance failures that philanthropy seeks to address elsewhere will continue to exist.

The climate emergency

• This World Cup has become a test case for the environmental limits of the mega-event model. The 48-team expansion and the geographical scale of the tournament dramatically increased travel requirements. Independent assessments project emissions substantially higher than those associated with Qatar 2022.
• At the same time, FIFA has strengthened commercial relationships with major fossil fuel interests, most notably through its $400 million sponsorship agreement with Saudi Aramco.

These developments raise important questions about whether current sporting governance structures are capable of aligning with broader environmental objectives.

Adding structural accountability to the sport for good ecosystem

The persistence of these systemic harms raises a critical question: why is independent sports governance advocacy so chronically underfunded?

Even with limited budgets, civil society organisations are proving that FIFA’s entrenched power structure is not bulletproof. FairSquare’s investigative research provided the initial blueprint by exposing the potential for, and realised harm within, FIFA’s governance model. Building directly on this groundwork, the Reboot FIFA campaign is eroding the illusion of FIFA’s untouchability,  mobilising 55 EU MEPs to back a formal legal complaint and opening up a genuine political fracture point in the battle to force institutional change.

Yet, precisely at this moment where meaningful change is structurally possible, the operational funding required to scale this momentum remains scarce.

Across the philanthropic landscape, a rigid funding orthodoxy persists. Foundations remain comfortable financing “sport for development” programmes at the community level. While these interventions deliver undeniable local benefits, they are a drop in the ocean compared to addressing the grassroots impacts of the well-documented mismanagement of FIFA development funds. 

Sports governance must be viewed as a cross-cutting leverage point. Investing in campaigns like Reboot FIFA provides a high-impact route to protect human rights, defend climate targets, and challenge corporate capture all at once.

Until philanthropy shifts its capital, the human and environmental costs of global sport will only compound. With Saudi Arabia already locked in as the 2034 host, the next chapter of this crisis is being actively written. The sector faces a clear strategic choice: will it continue to observe and respond to the fallout of FIFA’s governance failures, or will it fund the accountability mechanisms required to prevent those harms in the first place?

If philanthropy wants to change the rules of the game, it needs to start by funding those with the vision to rewrite them.