AB-InBev and Coke welcome changes at FIFA
Following the resignation of Sepp Blatter as FIFA’s President on 2 June 2015, the association’s top sponsors, The Coca-Cola Company, Visa and Adidas, issued monotonously similar and surprisingly non-committal statements.
Coke said on its website that they “respect Mr Blatter’s decision. The announcement is a positive step for the good of sport, football and its fans. Our expectation remains that FIFA will continue to act with urgency to take concrete actions to fully address all of the issues that have been raised and win back the trust of all who love the sport of football. We believe this decision will help FIFA transform itself rapidly into a much-needed 21st century structure and institution.”
With annual payments of about USD 30 million (EUR 26.9 million) according to estimates, Coke is one of FIFA’s biggest sponsors – together with Visa, Gazprom, Adidas and Hyundai.
Brewer AB-InBev, whose Budweiser brand has been a sponsor of FIFA since the 1986 World Cup, would not come out with a public statement itself. But a spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal that AB-InBev expects FIFA President Sepp Blatter’s resignation to “accelerate” the organization’s efforts to “install positive change.” The spokesperson added that Mr Blatter’s departure should help the organisation “resolve internal issues ... and adhere to the highest ethical standards and transparency.”
They would all say that Mr Blatter’s departure will lead to positive change, wouldn’t they? Still, observers will not fail to detect some hypocrisy here: Most, if not all, of the current allegations which led to the recent arrests in Switzerland and Mr Blatter’s departure have been commonly known.
Already in June 2014, the UK’s newspaper The Sunday Times published an in-depth report “The plot to buy the World Cup” which revealed how secret payments helped Qatar win the World Cup bid.
With all their highfaluting codices of ethics, transparency anti-corruption and whatnot you would have thought that FIFA’s big sponsors would have immediately thrown their financial weight about and tell FIFA in no uncertain terms to clean up its act, or. But did they? Well, not that observers would have been able to notice.
In fact, events in the past two weeks proved their much criticised “wait-and-see” approach right. They only had to leave it to the Swiss authorities, the U.S. Justice Department and the FBI to take matters into their hands can drain FIFA’s sump.
The German expert in business ethics, Prof Dr Joachim Fetzer argued in a radio interview (29 May 2015) that everybody who does business with FIFA knows that they are dealing with an institution which actually enjoys a monopoly in an international, emotionally relevant sector, and is subject to low levels of regulation. It would be nothing short of astonishing if transactions with FIFA would exclude bribery, he said. “In this respect, anyone who is familiar with this sort of situation knows who they are dealing with. Therefore, sponsors have taken a decision on this issue in some way and will do so in the future”, Mr Fetzer contended.
Nevertheless, sponsors find themselves in a classic dilemma, according to Mr Fetzer. “You cannot preach integrity internally and move about in an environment which is not following those rules. […] I am relatively sure each sponsor will have an emergency meeting on how to proceed”, he concluded.
Hopefully, the outcomes of the FIFA scandal will be to the good of sport, football and its fans, as Coke said.
