ArticlePDF Available

Reforming Global Sport: Hybridity and the Challenges of Pursuing Transparency

October 2015
Law & Policy 37(4)

DOI:10.1111/lapo.12044

Authors:

Australian National University

In light of recent controversies in global sport, this article surveys the challenges of pursuing transparency in this particular domain of governance. Although corruption in sport is attracting more scholarly attention, there remains little sociolegal research that reflects critically on corporate governance in sport and its implications. This article outlines current calls for greater transparency in global sport and considers how capitalistic underpinnings and distinct hybrid arrangements complicate the task of transparency. It concludes by reflecting on how insights from studies of regulatory capitalism can inform alternative approaches to transparency and accountability in global sport.

Entrance and Information Booth at the Site of the 2004 Summer Olympic Games, Athens, Greece (July 17, 2015, Image by Author).

…

Current State of the Once Water-filled Oaka Plaza at the Site of the 2004 Summer Olympic Games, Athens, Greece (July 17, 2015, Image by Author).

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Figures - uploaded by Kathryn Henne

Content may be subject to copyright.

Content uploaded by Kathryn Henne

Content may be subject to copyright.

Reforming Global Sport: Hybridity and the

Challenges of Pursuing Transparency

KATHRYN HENNE

In light of recent controversies in global sport, this article surveys the challenges

of pursuing transparency in this particular domain of governance. Although cor-

ruption in sport is attracting more scholarly attention, there remains little

sociolegal research that reﬂects critically on corporate governance in sport and its

implications. This article outlines current calls for greater transparency in global

sport and considers how capitalistic underpinnings and distinct hybrid arrange-

ments complicate the task of transparency. It concludes by reﬂecting on how

insights from studies of regulatory capitalism can inform alternative approaches

to transparency and accountability in global sport.

INTRODUCTION

The May 2015 indictment of senior Fédération Internationale de Football

Association (FIFA) ofﬁcials on forty-seven charges related to an alleged

bribery and kickback scheme involving 150 million US dollars seemed

to conﬁrm long-standing suspicions of systemic corruption within the

organization. It also prompted global scrutiny of international football1

governance. Within two months following their arrest, the US Senate Sub-

committee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, Insurance, and Data

Security held an inquiry, which focused on the integrity of the world govern-

ing body.2Subcommittee members acknowledged concerns that the growth

of commercial interests, such as gambling, had made an ill-equipped FIFA

into big business, prompting difﬁculties in its ability to self-regulate. They

nonetheless articulated a number of areas in need of reform: the full removal

This article draws on research supported by grants from the National Science Foundation

(Award #SES-0851536), International Olympic Committee, Research School of Asia and the

Paciﬁc at the Australian National University, and World Anti-Doping Agency. John

Braithwaite, Valerie Braithwaite, Peter Grabosky, Fiona Haines, Natasha Tusikov, and Kyla

Tienhaara, two anonymous reviewers, and Nancy Reichman provided incredibly helpful com-

ments and suggestions.

Address correspondence to: Kathryn Henne, The Australian National University—

Regulatory Institutions Network, HC Coombs Extension Fellows Road, Acton, Australian

Capital Territory 2601 Australia. Telephone: +61 02 6125 1255; E-mail: kathryn.henne@anu.

edu.au.

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LAW & POLICY, Vol. 37, No 4, October 2015 ISSN 0265–8240

doi: 10.1111/lapo.12044

and sanctioning of FIFA President Sepp Blatter, greater ﬁnancial transpar-

ency, protocols for elections of executive members, leadership term limits,

revised World Cup bidding processes, and equitable compensation of pro-

fessional female athletes. The take-home message was that if international

football was a big business, it needed to take responsibility and implement

better and more transparent governance practices.

Global sport is indeed a big business. Estimates indicate that 2015

sports revenues are set to surpass 145 billion US dollars worldwide

(PricewaterhouseCoopers 2011). The FIFA scandal exempliﬁes the increased

awareness of corporate misconduct in sport. Allegations entail money laun-

dering; bribery; abusive employment practices; companies and governments

receiving preferential treatment in bidding for contracts related to sport

events; and match-ﬁxing, which is the practice of predetermining the out-

comes of games, usually for ﬁnancial gain. Some observers, including David

Howman, director general of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), go

so far as to allege that organized crime controls over 25 percent of world

sport (Rumsby 2014). Calls for greater transparency in global sport gover-

nance thus appear timely and important.

Despite recognizing the difﬁculties in regulating a powerful global sport

organization such as FIFA, the presiding members of the US Senate Sub-

committee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, Insurance, and Data

Security did not call for governments to intervene. Instead, they emphasized

the need for better regulation to come from within sport, instructing US

Soccer representatives to take a leadership role in those efforts. Prior to the

US Senate inquiry, Transparency International (2009, 2014) had made a

number of recommendations: antibribery codes, campaigns to raise aware-

ness of sport-related corruption, mandates for ethics education, the intro-

duction of anticorruption guidelines alongside clear, enforceable rules, and

“open, competitive bidding processes” for cities to host sport mega events.

There were other proposals that called for the establishment of specialized

integrity units to police unethical and illegal activities in sport.

This article surveys the challenges of pursuing transparency in global

sport, with the aim of illuminating how transnational governance arrange-

ments inform them. Although corruption in sport is attracting more schol-

arly attention (Maennig 2005), there remains little empirical work that

reﬂects critically on corporate governance in sport and its implications

(Levermore 2013). Following Roger Levermore (2013, 53), corporate gover-

nance is understood here as the “Western governance framework” applied to

organizations and industries in order to “set a balance between economic and

social goals” with “a level of accountability” that operates “within acceptable

legal obligations.” Although this article is a conceptual piece, it relies on

insight gleaned through eight years of ethnographic and archival research,

which I have discussed in more depth elsewhere (Henne 2010, 2015).3Like

other qualitative studies of sport governance, my research scrutinizes the

“often naturalized, idealized, and taken-for-granted allegiances between

Henne REFORMING GLOBAL SPORT 325

sport, business, and politics and their consequences” (Numerato and Bagloni

2012, 608). This article contributes to that line of inquiry by asking whether

or not and how transparency agendas address these taken-for-granted alli-

ances in ways that can yield meaningful reform. In doing so, it offers a case

study that can aid in thinking through concerns of transparency in other

arenas of global governance where public–private partnerships ﬂourish.

In this article, I examine how global sport maintains distinct, hybrid char-

acteristics that complicate the pursuit of transparency. By hybrid, I refer to

“synergies between binding and non-binding mechanisms,” which, enabled

by private–public partnerships, facilitate the terms and scope of global sport

governance (Trubek and Trubek 2005, 344). To do so, my analysis focuses

speciﬁcally on major international sport organizations, such as FIFA and the

International Olympic Committee (IOC), the Swiss nonproﬁt, nongovern-

mental organization that oversees the Olympic and Youth Olympic Games.

These organizations are not businesses per se; they are corporate actors that

can inﬂuence many arenas of social activity by leveraging private–public

partnerships.

The article proceeds by ﬁrst describing the global features of contemporary

sport governance. Although previous analyses acknowledge the shared roles

of public and private actors, the implications of hybridity for reform agendas

receive less attention. I therefore directly address them here. The second

section of this article outlines ﬁve areas of sport that are core targets of

transparency agendas: concerns around match-ﬁxing and money laundering,

the bidding process for sport mega events, the infrastructure contracts for

those events, human rights violations, and performance-enhancing drug use

among athletes. Reﬂecting on them collectively reveals how reform efforts,

although well intended, underestimate how their contextually speciﬁc and

hybrid dynamics pose distinct challenges for transparency agendas. That is,

calls for transparency often advocate for new rules and accountability mea-

sures without attending to the broader power relationships that facilitate and

enable corruption. Accordingly, this article offers a skeptical take on recom-

mendations that more rules, even those that require the disclosure of impor-

tant information, can ﬁx the problems of contemporary sport. Instead, this

article suggests the need for further analysis of how such arrangements

facilitate the pursuit of private interests while foreclosing democratic partici-

pation by those directly affected by the pursuit of those interests. It concludes

with a reﬂection on how transparency might be better adapted to address the

contextual challenges of hybridity in order to effect at least some change in

global sport.

GLOBAL SPORT AS A HYBRID FIELD OF GOVERNANCE

Global sport, as a transnational domain, is comprised of corporate, regula-

tory, state, and nonstate actors. According to Catherine Palmer (2013), global

326 LAW & POLICY October 2015

sport governance can be thought of on three levels—the supranational,

national, and subnational—all of which experience tension with each other at

different points of policymaking and practice. These levels capture webs of

relationships between actors that cut across nations, regions, and borders,

legal and otherwise in nature (Palmer 2013). We are therefore remiss to refer

to global sport as simply a space of globalized business. Rather, the rise of

the international sport industry is indicative of broader patterns of

corporatization observed across the globe (Braithwaite and Drahos 2000).

Historians, including Allen Guttmann (2002) and Barbara Keys (2006),

provide detailed explanations of how global sport changed throughout the

twentieth and twenty-ﬁrst centuries. For example, the success of the Olympics

historically hinged upon the tacit acceptance that Olympic sport, on the basis

of its presumed purity, was distinct from professional sports leagues (Keys

2006). This foundation myth helped to galvanize support for the Olympic

Movement, eventually contributing to its embrace of professionalism during

the mid- to late-twentieth century (Ritchie 2014). Olympic sport, which once

championed amateurism as its cornerstone value, eventually came to reﬂect

what Peter Donnelly (1996, 246) refers to as “Prolympism,” that is, the

“merger of professional sport and corporate Olympic sport.” Their conjoined

characteristics, in turn, inﬂuence sport’s institutions and their governance;

however, they are not the only features for which to account.

According to sociologists David Andrews and George Ritzer (2007, 140),

three interconnected processes drive global sport institutions today:

“corporatization (the management and marketing of sporting entities

according to proﬁt motives); spectacularization (the primacy of producing

entertainment-driven [mediated] experiences); and, commodiﬁcation (the

generation of multiple sport-related revenue streams).” These developments

yield observable trends that have implications for governance: a shift from

local fans to growing media followership across national and global sites, the

increased investment in forms of entertainment that support sporting events,

and the rise of other sport-related industries. Although not all global sport

organizations leverage signiﬁcant power, many of them rely on partnerships

with businesses and sponsors to support their sport-related efforts. Capital-

istic interests therefore still factor into the decision-making processes of

smaller sport organizations. For Jules Boykoff (2013), global sport is an

archetype of the dangers of unchecked neoliberalism. It embodies what he

calls celebration capitalism. Celebration capitalism, he argues, encompasses

the ability of global sport organizations, particularly FIFA and the IOC, to

coercively inﬂuence a variety of stakeholders so as to obtain public invest-

ment for mega events and private proﬁt. In short, the beneﬁts of mega events

go back to corporate investors, not citizens living in host cities. Celebration

capitalism thus offers one way to think through how global sport embodies

neoliberal values.

Accompanying historical and institutional changes across many sports are

a host of legal and regulatory arrangements that support the growth of global

Henne REFORMING GLOBAL SPORT 327

sports revenues, a development that is symptomatic of regulatory capitalism.

Analyses of regulatory capitalism remind us that it is a misnomer to assume

that neoliberalism always promotes both deregulation and privatization: the

pursuit of capitalistic growth also gives rise to more—not less—rules, regu-

lation, and bureaucracy (Braithwaite 2008; Levi-Faur 2005; Jordana and

Levi-Faur 2004). The corporatization and legalization of global sport go

hand in hand. And, while global sport organizations may sometimes pursue

agendas reﬂective of celebration capitalism, further analysis of their behav-

iors as international actors reveals different kinds of regulatory activity.

Consider the IOC: it maintains partnerships with multinational businesses

as well as with various national and sport-speciﬁc organizations. This enables

it to inﬂuence sport-speciﬁc issues, such as performance-enhancing drug

regulation and mega events, as well as more conventionally cosmopolitan

endeavors, such as education and development. For instance, the IOC has

become an important actor in the Sport for Development and Peace Move-

ment, which advocates sport as a meaningful way to pursue all eight of the

United Nations’ (UN) Millennium Development Goals. This is, in part,

because of its resources and ability to leverage private partnerships in order

to galvanize support for UN projects. In fact, the IOC maintains a strong,

cooperative relationship with the United Nations more generally, having

contributed to UN-backed public health campaigns and received UN Special

Observer status in 2009 (IOC 2014a). In essence, the IOC is more than an

afﬂuent private organization concerned with corporate proﬁts; it contributes

directly to global governance and transnational legal ordering.

Transnational legal orders, write Terence Halliday and Gregory Shaffer

(2015, 5, emphasis in original), are a “collection of formalized legal norms and

associated organizations and actors that authoritatively order the understand-

ing and practice of law across national jurisdictions.” Such orders, like global

sport, have taken shape against the backdrop of globalization, and nonlegal

actors (such as global sport organizations) can have signiﬁcant inﬂuence in

their development. As amalgamations of private and public actors and inter-

ests, transnational legal orders in global sport governance bring together

(and often blur) hard and soft law—that is, binding and nonbinding

mechanisms—to coerce social change (Trubek and Trubek 2005). Such

arrangements challenge the scope assumed of both law and sport by eroding

conventional understandings that jurisdiction is based primarily on hard, or

public, law—an observation that should carry over into how we think about

pursuing transparency in this context.

While it is important to note that global sports policy and governance is a

broad and pluralistic ﬁeld (Palmer 2013), it is equally important to acknowl-

edge that global sport’s hybrid characteristics retain a number of features

that render it susceptible to abuses of power. The IOC and FIFA enjoy

nongovernmental, nonproﬁt statuses, even though they have sizeable revenue

streams from their business operations. They also exercise considerable levels

of political inﬂuence across countries and sport organizations in addition to

328 LAW & POLICY October 2015

their ability to appeal to global publics through mediated spectacles of sport.

Despite the high visibility of global sport spectacles, the actors and relation-

ships supporting them are rarely discernible in popular discourse. The preva-

lence of public-private partnerships often facilitates interactions between

elites in ways that protect them from public scrutiny. Thus, unearthing the

extent of an international sport organization’s inﬂuence can itself be

understood as an act of transparency: that is, highlighting its impact can

illuminate overlooked dimensions of broader transnational governance

relationships. As the next section illustrates, calls for transparency, by

drawing attention to a wide range of practices in need of reform, enable

public scrutiny of global sport’s inﬂuence in spaces of governance tradition-

ally assumed to be the responsibility of the state operating in the interests of

its citizens.

TARGETS OF TRANSPARENCY IN SPORT

Scholars and journalists who have documented instances of corruption in

sport often attribute their causes to unbridled capitalistic pursuits and abuses

of political power (e.g., Lenskyj 2008; Jennings 2006; Barney, Wenn, and

Martyn 2002; Simson and Jennings 1992). Calls for transparency in global

sport similarly focus on the appropriation of resources by governing sport

organizations, concentrating on how corporate arrangements prioritize

private proﬁts to the detriment of the public good (Transparency Interna-

tional 2015). The IOC and FIFA are the primary targets of such criticism, as

they reap the beneﬁts of multibillion dollar sports revenues. FIFA alone

made an estimated 4.5 billion US dollars from the 2014 World Cup in Brazil,

a notable sum especially given that it already maintains a 1.4 billion dollar

reserve and distributed only 400 million US dollars of its proﬁt to the thirty-

two national federations who participated in the tournament (Boykoff and

Tomlinson 2014; Dunbar 2014). In addition, as a condition of hosting the

World Cup, the Brazilian government granted FIFA and its corporate part-

ners tax-exempt statuses during the event, which cost the country an esti-

mated 248.7 million US dollars (Erb 2014). As part of a broader international

push for greater integrity in sport, transparency promises to unveil the ineq-

uitable distribution of resources. Nevertheless, do the capitalistic underpin-

nings of global sport prevent the prospect of more radical change?

Transparency International (2014) qualiﬁes the goals of transparency,

arguing that it is necessary for counteracting the multiple forms of corruption

that threaten to tarnish sporting brands and the “positive inﬂuence sport has

in spreading the values of good sportsmanship and integrity, especially for

young people.” This line of argument presumes there is an inherent virtue of

sport, something other campaigns aimed at preserving the integrity of

sport—perhaps mostly notably the movement against doping in sport—have

championed in the name of justifying greater regulation (Henne 2010).

Henne REFORMING GLOBAL SPORT 329

Many sport reformers suggest that match-ﬁxing has overtaken doping in

sport as the primary threat to integrity of sport and call for enhanced anti-

corruption agendas.4A report published by the IOC and UN Ofﬁce of Drugs

and Crime (2013, 1) states, “The phenomenon of match-ﬁxing brings to the

surface its links to other criminal activities such as corruption, organized

crime and money-laundering.” Investigative journalist Declan Hill (2008)

concurs that organized crime and sport make for a natural marriage, which

others say is evidenced by the diversity of criminal actors—from the Italian

maﬁa to Asian organized crime groups—inﬂuencing professional sport

(Cayli 2013).

While research on organized criminal involvement in sport tends to focus

on betting scandals, Transparency International (2009) warns not to lose

sight of practices used to launder money, such as the buying and selling of

sports clubs, player contracts, and sponsorship deals. As a result, both

match-ﬁxing and money laundering are popular foci in transparency

measures. To counteract them, Transparency International (2009) encour-

ages the adoption of instruments like its Business Principles for Countering

Bribery, which provide best practices recommendations and guidelines that

advocate a more holistic antibribery framework for businesses. The organi-

zation has since outlined additional recommendations for clear and binding

codes of ethics for executive ofﬁcers, open and competitive elections for

board membership, term limits, and the introduction of external directors

who have the ability to provide oversight (Transparency International

2014, 2015). Its recommendations reﬂect a tacit acceptance of transparency

as accountability-by-audit: that is, the production of rules and documenta-

tion in the pursuit of transparency are necessary administrative processes to

“make things auditable” (Power 1999, 68). Accordingly, its pursuit of better

governance practices relies upon the creation of transparency-making docu-

ments (Mathur 2012).

Subsequently, SportAccord (2012), the umbrella organization for Olympic

and non-Olympic sport federations across the globe, has developed a similar

approach, providing a detailed integrity report as a guide for identifying and

counteracting match-ﬁxing and other fraudulent activities in sport. It sug-

gests a ﬁve-prong approach: the introduction of additional sport-speciﬁc

rules, betting regulations, organizational safeguards, prevention and educa-

tion measures, and mechanisms for monitoring suspicious activities such as

intelligence gathering and independent investigations (SportAccord 2012).

European ministers have endorsed similar tactics, as the Council of Europe

recently adopted the Convention on the Manipulation of Sports Competi-

tions, which commits signatories to efforts that aim to “prevent, detect,

punish and discipline the manipulation of sports competitions, as well as

enhance the exchange of information and national and international coop-

eration between the public authorities concerned, and with sports

organisations and sports betting operators” (Play the Game 2014). While it is

too early to evaluate the effectiveness of these measures, they evidence a

330 LAW & POLICY October 2015

growing emphasis on preserving the integrity of sport through formal mecha-

nisms of corporate policing and surveillance.

Beyond doping and match-ﬁxing, other transparency initiatives target

private and public actors that participate in global sport, often with an eye

toward pursuing corporate accountability on the one hand and promoting

government responsibility on the other. Although a popular tactic, transpar-

ency alone cannot remedy the growing concerns beyond match-ﬁxing and

money laundering. I outline three pressing areas in sport, illustrating how

transparency-as-audit offers little in terms of positive change: reforming the

bidding processes for mega events, addressing human rights concerns within

host cities, and deterring doping in sport. In the pages that follow, I address

the contextual features that reforms both consider and fail to address,

acknowledging the limitations of transparency measures purposed in relation

to each. Taken together, they point to the challenges of attending to the

hybrid and capitalist relationships underpinning contemporary global sport.

BIDDING PROCESSES FOR MEGA EVENTS

The bidding process for sport mega events and contracts associated with their

awarding are key targets for transparency reforms. As large-scale projects,

mega events offer a number of opportunities for stakeholders to take a cut or

negotiate contractual terms in their favor. This makes them particularly

prone to corruption. The fact the negotiation processes are secretive

execrates the problem.

The 2014 Sochi Olympics provides a recent illustration. Even prior to the

event, critics, among them Transparency International, described Russia’s

construction industry as the most corrupt in the world due to endemic

bribery, rigged bidding practices, and overcharging for services and materials

(Surowiecki 2014). When the cost of the Sochi Olympic Games ballooned

from the pledged 12 billion US dollars to over 50 billion US dollars, many

observers attributed the reasons to existing forms of corruption and Vladimir

Putin’s desire to express a strong Russian nationalism on a global stage.

Allegations of cronyism surfaced, as some of Putin’s close associates had

secured signiﬁcant contracts. Among them were Vladimir Yakunin who

heads Russian Railways (RZhD), the company tasked with building new

roads and railways connecting the sites for events (Yaffa 2014), and Arkady

Rotenberg, whose companies received twenty-one contracts totaling at least

227 billion rubles (7.4 billion US dollars), a sum that exceeded the entire

budget for the 2010 Winter Olympics held in Vancouver (Arkhipov and

Meyer 2013).

Even though there are seemingly evident instances of corruption, efforts to

disclose the inner workings of sport-related agreements have yielded signiﬁ-

cant pushback. Members of FIFA, for instance, debated whether or not to

disclose a 430-page investigative report into corruption and collusion allega-

tions linked to the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bidding processes, ultimately

Henne REFORMING GLOBAL SPORT 331

deciding to only publish a shorter legally appropriate version. FIFA’s actions

fall well short of interest groups’ calls for the introduction of “bidding

integrity pacts” and “citizen-monitoring mechanisms” that target the host

cities’ bids and construction contracts (Transparency International 2009). In

addition, Transparency International has proposed whistleblower protec-

tions following the assassination of Jimmy Mohlala, who told ofﬁcials about

alleged corruption linked to the building of the Mbombela stadium for the

2010 World Cup in South Africa (Alvad 2009). Mohlala was one of nine local

ofﬁcials in the area to die under suspicious circumstances within a two-year

period (Smith 2010). While the particular example suggests that sport-related

corruption maps onto existing political conditions, transparency recommen-

dations provide little recourse for them. Instead, they promote increased

surveillance and procedural regularity aimed at corporate actors, practices

that powerful actors can elude and even leverage to their advantage.

Mega events, many researchers acknowledge, are often brokered under the

guise of delivering economic development (e.g., Fussey et al. 2012; Horne

and Manzenreiter 2006; Matheson and Baade 2004). Such outcomes are

dubious at best and carry long-term effects (Lenskyj 2008; Burbank,

Andranovich, and Heying 2001). Urban planning scholars argue that the

awarding of sport mega events enables a broader “reconﬁguration of power

structures at the local and national levels” by imposing “a new neo-liberal

order marked by authoritarianism and exceptionalism” (Sánchez and

Broudehoux 2013, 135). In other words, private–public partnerships facili-

tate and enable new forms of urban governance in host cities. Their critique

points to how global sport organizations and other private interests partner

with local and national governments to develop and change regulations in

ways that beneﬁt a small elite, not the general public.

During the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, amid increased government spend-

ing on sport-related infrastructure and security, local residents endured hikes

in public transportation fees. The increased costs and changes to urban

landscapes were the outgrowth of strategic planning, a practice enabled by

public–private partnerships (Sánchez and Broudehoux 2013). Strategic plan-

ning creates consensus through the selective participation of stakeholders

and the promotion of private-sector management, pushing many affected

parties and members of the public out of the negotiation process. This

approach employed varying tactics in each host city. In Rio de Janeiro,

strategic planning worked on “improving the city’s image, repackaging its

assets, and marketing its competitive advantages in order to attract foreign

investors, tax-paying residents, wealthy tourists, and professionals” (ibid.,

134). In doing so, the World Cup—like other mega events—contributed to

reﬁguring urban development and governance practices through the adop-

tion of market-oriented, managerial approaches negotiated by political and

economic elites (Sánchez and Broudehoux 2013). It is perhaps not surprising

then that protests erupted in the lead up to and during the 2014 World Cup,

even though FIFA had already paid the Brazilian government 100 million

332 LAW & POLICY October 2015

US dollars for earlier protests, an amount similar to what it had given the

South African government after the 2010 World Cup. Transparency reforms

may have made some of these processes more visible, but they do not

offer tools to counteract broader inequalities sutured through pacts among

elites.

Transparency reforms targeting global sport organizations also offer little

in terms of responding to many state-sanctioned tools of governance. Legal

changes made during a mega event can last for years, if not indeﬁnitely. For

example, in preparation for the Olympic Games in Beijing, the Chinese

government expanded its surveillance camera systems in more than 600 cities,

recruited over 600,000 volunteers to serve as surveillance assistants, estab-

lished security collaborations with multiple global technology companies,

and empowered special military units and an International Police Liaison

Department to coordinate with outside authorities (Boykoff 2013). Costing

an estimated 2 billion US dollars,5the resulting security apparatus took aim

at a range of security threats, including suspected terrorists and political

dissidents. Even though ofﬁcials formally ended the Olympic surveillance

programs, many of the systems established for the Beijing Games remain in

place. As Human Rights Watch reports, the infrastructure justiﬁed by the

Olympics has become centralized, enabling the Chinese security apparatus to

expand in institutionalized form.6In a different vein, stadiums built for the

2010 and 2014 World Cups in South Africa and Brazil remain underused and

in some cases abandoned, despite promises that they would be sustainable

investments through multipurpose use. The Olympic facilities built for the

2004 Summer Olympic Games are also in disrepair, even though local resi-

dents still use some of the facilities (see Figures 1 and 2). The effects of mega

events become embedded in the landscapes of the host countries, lingering

well beyond the sporting events.

HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS

Concerns around mega events are not limited to the distribution of ﬁnancial

beneﬁts. While the infrastructure costs associated with the 2022 FIFA World

Cup in Qatar are expected to surpass 200 billion US dollars (Fattah and

Tuttle 2014), the human costs are perhaps more disconcerting. Reports indi-

cate that male migrant workers, who make up an astounding 94 percent of

Qatar’s work force, die at alarmingly high rates. Observers attribute many of

these deaths to exhaustion from working in conditions akin to slavery,

including extensive working hours, poor housing, and restricted mobility due

to the kafala system (Australian Broadcasting Corporation 2014; Human

Rights Watch 2012). The kafala system requires migrant workers to have

in-country sponsors responsible for their visas. This has led to widespread

exploitation, including employers holding workers’ passports so that they

cannot move freely or leave the country. Estimates go so far as to predict that

nearly 4,000 workers could die before 2022, all to support infrastructure

Henne REFORMING GLOBAL SPORT 333

projects for the FIFA World Cup (International Trade Union Confederation

2014). Although Qatar has since announced reforms to labor laws recom-

mended by the international law ﬁrm DLA Piper, a number of organizations,

including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, remain critical.

The ongoing worry, according to Rima Kalush of Migrant-Rights, is “that

Qatar will follow Bahrain’s footsteps in renaming the sponsorship system

without actually abolishing the majority of the exploitative laws and prac-

tices that encompass the system” (Black, Gibson, and Booth 2014). Fears

abound that legal reforms are merely symbolic gestures employed to evade

additional scrutiny in the lead up to the World Cup.

During the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, many Western

onlookers and domestic activists condemned the Russian government’s gay

propaganda laws, which criminalized images normalizing homosexual rela-

tionships. Despite signiﬁcant attention paid to the repressive actions of the

Russian state, few critics acknowledged the IOC’s complicit role in silenc-

ing protest (e.g., Hayes 2014). They failed to recognize that the IOC main-

tains conduct rules for Olympic athletes, which limit their political and

religious expression. Speciﬁcally, Rule 50 of the Olympic Charter forbids

any “kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda”

and limits athlete protest in accordance with the IOC’s longstanding stance

Figure 1. Entrance and Information Booth at the Site of the 2004 Summer

Olympic Games, Athens, Greece (July 17, 2015, Image by Author).

334 LAW & POLICY October 2015

that Olympic sport should be distinct from politics (IOC 2013, 93).

However, histories of the Olympics document the IOC’s active suppression

of dissent and support of discriminatory agendas under the guise that sport

is to be apolitical (Hartmann 2003). For example, when Avery Brundage

was IOC president, he took measures to have US track athletes John

Carlos and Tommie Smith expelled from the 1968 Olympic Games after

they stood shoeless with raised black-gloved ﬁsts during the medal cer-

emony as a form of protest against racial oppression. During that same

time, Brundage had extended invitations to white-only Olympic teams from

South Africa and Rhodesia throughout the 1960s despite protests about

racial discrimination. Today, the Olympic Charter bans discrimination, but

it still maintains strict rules around athlete conduct, including in relation to

protest. Although IOC representatives have qualiﬁed the application of

Rule 50, stating that athletes can speak openly in nonaccredited areas and

press conferences, the rule, though not a clear instance of misconduct,

reveals another case of strategic management—in this case, one aimed at

preventing athletes from disrupting the business of global sport by curtail-

ing their right to expression.

In addition to regulating athletes’ behavior, the IOC supported the use of

protest zones at the Sochi and Beijing Olympics, most of which were far from

Figure 2. Current State of the Once Water-ﬁlled Oaka Plaza at the Site of the 2004

Summer Olympic Games, Athens, Greece (July 17, 2015, Image by Author).

Henne REFORMING GLOBAL SPORT 335

the sites of the actual sporting events. Protest zones served as designated

areas where, according to IOC President Thomas Bach, “everybody can

express his or her free opinion” (cited in Hayes 2014). In essence, the IOC

conﬁned dissent to these zones, leaving protesters outside of those areas

vulnerable to police repression and punishment for noncompliance. IOC

representatives framed protest zones as a way to protect free speech in a safe

and controlled manner. Critics, such as Graeme Hayes (2014), provide a

cautious reminder that the IOC has long prioritized “a sanitized spectacle of

organizational efﬁciency” over human rights. Hayes (ibid.) warns of embrac-

ing the IOC’s solutions to control protest, stating that they undermine indi-

vidual freedoms in favor of protecting consumption: “we should not just be

thinking about free speech, but about the conditions in which these freedoms

are offered and about who is excluded from these freedoms.” His observa-

tions bring into stark relief how capitalistic interests undergirding global

sport can encourage the censorship of individuals who threaten to tarnish the

Olympic brand—and who are not the primary ﬁnancial beneﬁciaries of sport-

related events.

The extensive spending required to host mega events has prompted con-

cerns that few democracies—unwilling to invest the necessary resources

without public support—will bid for sport mega events, leaving authoritarian

regimes to host them. After Oslo, Stockholm, Lviv, and Krakow all withdrew

their bids to host the 2022 Winter Olympics, fears surfaced that not only

would the IOC have to choose between two candidates with poor human

rights records, Almaty (Kazakhstan) and Beijing (People’s Republic of

China), but also that this problem would become an ongoing trend. Thus,

beginning with the 2024 Summer Olympics, human rights protections are a

condition of host city contracts under the IOC’s recently endorsed strategic

plan, Olympic Agenda 2020 (Human Rights Watch 2014; IOC 2014b). This

condition, however, does not guarantee the nomination of desirable host

cities for the games. The exorbitant costs associated with mega events are a

key reason for cities backing out, as are the IOC’s perceived overindulgence

and lack of transparency—especially now that the IOC keeps 68 percent of

sponsorship and television revenues from events (Abend 2014).7

These concerns, taken together, point to the limitations of focusing on

human rights as a way of holding states accountable to their citizens; private

entities, including the IOC and FIFA, play important, although often over-

looked, roles in securing (or failing to secure) human rights protections.

Advocates for reform acknowledge these and other deeper issues of inequal-

ity impact sport-related problems, which crystallize around securitization of

public spaces and the misappropriation of public funds in relation to mega

events, not simply discriminatory acts against groups of individual citizens.

These seemingly distinct issues emerge as interrelated when considered across

a number of host cities in recent years. The growth in private investment into

mega event preparations has coincided with the forced relocation of local

residents and considerable spending on security in cities as diverse as Beijing,

336 LAW & POLICY October 2015

Vancouver, London, Rio de Janeiro, and Sochi (Boykoff 2013). For example,

in addition to the costs associated with infrastructure and relocating resi-

dents, the securitization spurred by the 2014 World Cup in Brazil alone

reportedly cost over 850 million US dollars. The price of security for the 2016

Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro is expected to exceed 1 billion dollars

(Arnold 2014; Fussey et al. 2012). While this trend is often attributed to the

post-9/11 awareness of potential terrorist threats, security tactics often target

disgruntled residents who bear the brunt of the changes driven by mega

events (Sánchez and Broudehoux 2013). Moreover, security expenditure

reﬂects a greater interest in cities appearing safe for the investments of

international visitors, global sponsors, and distant audiences spectating

through mediated forms than in actually providing safety for local residents

(Eisenhauer, Adair, and Taylor 2013). Human rights are therefore inextrica-

bly linked to other concerns related to mega events, the connections between

which surpass the scope of proposed accountability mechanisms to date.

A select few UN representatives have expressed concerns regarding the

inﬂuence of mega events on local communities. Two different UN special

rapporteurs on the right to adequate housing, Miloon Kothari and Raquel

Rolnik, have spoken out about the devastating effects the Olympic Games

had on low-income housing in Vancouver (Boykoff 2013). Beyond those

actions, the United Nations has done little to address, or even acknowledge,

the IOC’s contributing role in undermining human rights claims. Instead, it

has opted to place blame on national actors. In contrast to its treatment of

transgressing states, the United Naitons has made a number of legal gestures

that reinforce the ideal that Olympic sport is a social good to the interna-

tional community without drawing attention to the IOC’s problematic

history or the inﬂuence of its corporate interests. The United Nations for-

mally endorsed the Olympic Truce, a time intended to be an observance of

international peace, during the 2012 Olympic Games in London, even as

commentators cited those games as the most militarized to date (Fussey et al.

2012), and failed to implicate the IOC in the human rights violations identi-

ﬁed during the Sochi Games (Hayes 2014). While the United Nations

emerges as an advocate of human rights in other domains, it remains rela-

tively silent in relation to the IOC or other sport organizations’ complicit

roles in practices that have contributed to human rights violations.

DOPING IN SPORT

While transparency agendas are not yet well established in relation to match-

ﬁxing, money laundering, host city and infrastructure contracts bidding, or

human rights in sport, they are in the case of antidoping regulation. Leaders

suggest that the global antidoping arrangements offer a useful model for

anticorruption efforts in sport, with some proponents, including WADA

Director General Howman, calling for a global anticorruption agency for

sport, a World Sports Integrity Agency (Harris 2011).8Antidoping regulation

Henne REFORMING GLOBAL SPORT 337

offers a foreboding example of reforming sport, however. Despite making

thousands of athletes’ bodies more transparent by subjecting them to inva-

sive forms of surveillance, critics have convincingly argued that antidoping

regulation is not as effective as it portends (e.g., Rohan 2013). In other words,

more transparency does not necessarily deliver on its stated outcomes of

better governance or effective reforms.

While this analysis does not advance Howman’s recommendation, it does

acknowledge WADA’s distinct hybridity as reﬂective of the broader gover-

nance arrangements in global sport. The IOC was instrumental in establish-

ing WADA, the agency that spearheads a global regime comprised of sport

(e.g., international sport federations, national Olympic committees) and

nonsport (e.g., government, law enforcement, scientiﬁc laboratories) actors,

in 1999.9WADA’s aim is to prevent, deter, and adjudicate drug-related

offenses in sport (WADA 2015). Proponents justiﬁed WADA’s mission to

counter performance-enhancing drugs as necessary to protect athletes’ health

and fair play in sport, and embraced tactics of mass surveillance and bodily

intrusion to test athletes for thousands of banned substances, including many

recreational drugs without evident performance-enhancing effects.10 Today,

formal surveillance, such as random drug testing in and out of competition,

monitoring athletes’ daily whereabouts, and blood proﬁling, is common

practice in elite sports, and is increasingly used in lower-level competitions

and even in some recreational contexts (Henne 2015; Henning 2013).

By rendering athletes’ actions and ethics visible through surveillance,

testing, and sanctions, the regime has fostered a culture of suspicion in the

name of safeguarding ethics (Seﬁha and Reichman 2014; Henne and

Troshynski 2013). Others highlight that reforms developed to enhance

antidoping regulation have actually made doping more dangerous, because

they incentivize the development of more potent substances that the body can

absorb and discharge more quickly so as to avoid detection (Beamish and

Ritchie 2006). Researchers have also questioned the regime’s effectiveness:

approximately 2 percent of samples yield positive tests, but recent survey

ﬁndings (which WADA initially withheld from publication) indicate much

higher rates of doping (29–45 percent), at least among track-and-ﬁeld ath-

letes (Rohan 2013). The embrace of technocratic rules and testing is thus

perhaps better understood as a ritual of comfort: it creates the appearance of

checks being in place to prevent the undesired behavior but does not neces-

sarily deliver on that promise (Power 1999). In sum, WADA’s rules have

done little to shift the markets for drugs, thereby undermining its regulatory

aims to protect the health of athletes. In fact, if anything, they have increased

risks for athletes (Henne 2015).

More importantly, as Nancy Reichman and Ophir Seﬁha (2014, 116)

contend, antidoping regulation, by “framing individuals as cheats and

holding individuals accountable obscures the organizational dimensions of

performance enhancement.” It also fails to shed light on the public–private

partnerships at work—and their interests—in maintaining the current system

338 LAW & POLICY October 2015

of regulation (Henne 2015). The IOC continues to fund 50 percent of the

agency’s budget and provides incentives (as well as sanctions) for sport-

speciﬁc and government actors to support its regulation. Governed by the

World Anti-Doping Code and legally backed by the United Nations Educa-

tional, Scientiﬁc, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) International Con-

vention against Doping in Sport, the regime develops requirements and

procedures to ensure that government signatories pass legislation that sup-

ports WADA’s mission. The speedy ratiﬁcation of the UNESCO Convention

against Doping in Sport offers a clear instance in which the IOC inﬂuenced

the legalization of a largely private regulatory regime (Henne 2010). Only

forty-one countries had ratiﬁed the convention when it came into force in

2007. In response, WADA added IOC-backed clauses to the World Anti-

Doping Code that prevented nonsignatory countries from enjoying certain

beneﬁts such as hosting mega events and receiving sport-speciﬁc forms of

funding. The number of state parties to the convention has since surpassed

175.

Hybrid arrangements have codiﬁed the intrusive tactics to which athletes

across national jurisdictions and sports are subject. Many of them supersede

indoctrinated legal commitments to privacy, bodily integrity, and procedural

justice (Henne 2010). In addition, corporate partners, such as technology

ﬁrms and pharmaceutical companies, including F. Hoffman LaRoche, Ltd.

and GlaxoSmithKline, facilitate the expansion of testing and surveillance

though research and development. As a result, the companies that proﬁt

from making drugs also beneﬁt from developing tests to detect them.

Antidoping regulation offers pharmaceutical companies an emergent market

to develop testing technologies (which can be sold for use in ﬁelds beyond

sport), enabling them to ﬁnd new outlets as their proﬁts have shown signs of

slowing (Dukes, Braithwaite, and Moloney 2014). Instead of focusing on the

business pursuits informing antidoping surveillance, the nature of regulatory

capitalism in this context maintains an explicit focus on athletes’ bodies. As

failure by athletes to comply with complex regulatory requirements can result

in multiyear bans from sport, public scrutiny tends to reﬂect the regulatory

gaze targeted at athletes, not the broader structures overseeing athletes

(Henne 2015; Park 2005). Many discussions of integrity in sport, in turn,

also focus narrowly on individuals—and comparatively disempowered

individuals—instead of structural conditions or overseeing authorities.

Antidoping regulation can thus be understood as a cautionary tale of pur-

suing transparency through technocratic rules and individualized policing.

PURSUING REFORM IN LIGHT OF HYBRID CHALLENGES

The aforementioned examples attest that evocation of transparency does not

necessarily guarantee the reform of governance practices. In this case, global

sport institutions and the partnerships that fortify them are difﬁcult to

Henne REFORMING GLOBAL SPORT 339

inﬁltrate, often preventing full disclosure. Accountability mechanisms

employed under the umbrella of pursuing transparency can instrumentalize

solutions, amounting to symbolic gestures rather than meaningful reforms.

More insidiously, transparency instruments, when framed as solutions, can

actually hinder the pursuit of reforms that attend to the deeper institutional

relationships that foster corruption and perpetuate inequality. For instance,

efforts aimed at drawing attention to the problem of gambling in sport have

failed to counteract the practice, instead making it more visible to those who

cannot afford a gambling addiction. Despite public service announcement

campaigns, Australians lost a record-high 20.5 billion Australian dollars

through gambling between 2011 and 2012, a statistic that does not account

for overseas websites (Queensland Treasury and Trade 2014).

To get a better sense of how transparency instruments can have a limited

impact on global sport governance, let us consider transnational relation-

ships that pose particularly pernicious challenges for the pursuit of openness,

using the IOC as an example. The IOC’s inﬂuence surpasses the mega events

and activities of the Olympic Movement, as it partners with other interna-

tional governing bodies, including the United Nations. Returning to the

example of the UN-sponsored Sport for Development and Peace Movement,

the IOC is a key stakeholder among the many different actors that contribute

to sport-for-development efforts, including sport and nongovernmental

organizations, national governments, private companies, and even the armed

forces. The IOC has established Olympic Youth Development Centers in

Zambia and Haiti, with the endorsement of the UN Ofﬁce on Sport for

Development and Peace and in collaboration with governmental and private

stakeholders. The centers have well-equipped sports, medical, and educa-

tional facilities. Although the infusion of private donor funds into develop-

ment programming may support projects, skeptical observers working in

development note that their contributions often end when sport mega events

move on to other parts of the world.11 The failure of some well-established

sport-for-development projects in South Africa after the 2010 FIFA World

Cup serves as a case in point.

The relationships between sport and development at the global level reveal

other capitalist inﬂuences. The UN special adviser on sport for development

and peace, currently Wilfried Lemke, has a background in professional foot-

ball, not development, which has prompted questions about what interests

would shape the international sport-for-development agenda, especially as

development is already a space where public–private partnerships are inﬂu-

ential and reinforce asymmetrical power relations (Turshen 2014). Empirical

research supports this concern, indicating that multinational corporations

provide notable levels of funding for sport-for-development programs as part

of their corporate social responsibility portfolios, which has impacted the

nature and messages of programming targeting aid recipients (Mayhurst

2011). Thus, even in altruistic endeavors, such as development, sport’s capi-

talist underpinnings prevail. Moreover, by contributing, organizations like

340 LAW & POLICY October 2015

the IOC can solidify public–private partnerships, enabling it to better lever-

age them to its advantage in other spaces, including in relation to hosting the

Olympic Games.

It would be a mistake to say that the IOC has made no attempt at improv-

ing the outcomes of mega events. To date, any such efforts are, however,

limited in scope and lack a well-conceived governance framework, in part

because they prioritize business bottom lines (Girginov 2011). One recently

introduced requirement for hosting the Olympic Games is the delivery of

legacy projects. Most prominently championed as a cornerstone of the 2012

London Olympics, legacy projects are to deliver long-term economic, sport-

ing, social, and regeneration beneﬁts. Leaders promote such contributions

as foundational Olympic values of reciprocity and community building

(Tomlinson 2014). They also characterize legacy projects as tools to ensure

that host cities deliver outcomes that reﬂect Olympic values, rendering

them a distinct regulatory technology that reinforces the perception of

accountability.

While the jury is still out regarding the positive inﬂuence of legacy projects

and Olympic Agenda 2020, John MacAloon (2008, 2060), a noted historian

and ethnographer of the Olympics, advises that the Olympic Movement’s

long-standing legacy discourse evokes a “common and laudable purpose”

while “reinforcing the IOC administration’s preferred model of franchiser/

franchisee relations with other Olympic bodies” and “furthering the trans-

national managerial revolution in Olympic affairs.” Thus, it is perhaps not

surprising that the IOC endorsed the yearlong consultation process that

yielded Olympic Agenda 2020 in light of mounting criticisms of the Olympic

Movement. While the agenda commits the IOC’s support to a number of

reforms in relation to sustainability, match-ﬁxing, and antidiscrimination, it

also includes recommendations to strengthen the UN-recognized autonomy

of Olympic sport globally and to create an Olympic Channel that promotes

its brand and values. Furthermore, Olympic Agenda 2020 only offers a

limited intervention in the IOC’s governance structures by suggesting more

independence for its existing internal Ethics Commission (IOC 2014b). Such

projects do not break from the “Prolympism” framework.

Legacy projects are imbued with “the rationalization and lure of celebra-

tion capitalism,” perpetuating an aspirational sense of hope that has yet to

materially beneﬁt those who occupy host cities (Boykoff 2013, 5). They, like

other regulatory tools discussed in this article, may express good intentions in

their aim to hold host governments to account, but they also reveal strategic

transparency on the part of the IOC. These selectively targeted attempts at

transparency may offer the IOC some brand protection, but they do not

change the fact that even though sport mega events require signiﬁcant invest-

ments by countries, a relatively small group of elites decides the key terms of

their governance. These elites are well positioned to enjoy most of the beneﬁts

associated with global sport, and they are key to expanding its reach.

The recent FIFA scandal illustrates the consequences of allowing these

Henne REFORMING GLOBAL SPORT 341

relationships to go unchecked. Given their inﬂuence, the challenges for trans-

parency are not simply to hold these actors to account but to ﬁnd ways to

gain their support and leverage their positions of inﬂuence in order to appeal

for disclosure and openness.

IMPLICATIONS FOR TRANSPARENCY AGENDAS

The calls for reform addressed in this article bring to light the role of public–

private partnerships in global sport governance as well as the need to con-

sider their far-reaching effects. Speciﬁc issues addressed here include, but are

not limited to, corruption and human rights abuses, rigged bidding practices,

unfair laws imposed on local communities, elements of criminal networks,

doping, and closed decision-making processes that beneﬁt economic and

political elites. In short, these examples highlight that global sport affects a

number of citizens—well beyond sport participants and fans. A challenge

for transparency, then, is how it might better account for those who are

unwittingly affected by global sport. This points to a bigger problem:

transparency-by-audit cannot overcome the power dynamics of sport,

because they are situated within and buttressed by hybrid arrangements. This

is particularly problematic when powerful actors, such as the IOC and FIFA,

are charged with the task of self-disclosure. Accounting for power means that

transparency is only partial in nature, a form of admission that is often

strategically limited.

Making public–private relationships visible and open to scrutiny is an

important, albeit challenging, task for transparency advocates. Of particular

concern is how political and economic elites are able to leverage such part-

nerships across domains within and beyond sport, often doing so in ways that

are largely unchecked and invisible to public onlookers. Considering them

against the backdrop of transnational hybridity reveals that it is not simply

individual state, corporate, or sport actors that enable acts of corruption or

exploitation, but the entanglements between them. While speciﬁc strategies

for transparency may vary, the more pressing concern is that they be adapted

in order to pursue transparency’s deeper reform agenda, which may not

privilege the audit cultures that have come to characterize bureaucratic exer-

cises of transparency. Transparency in principle calls for openness and a

separation of powers that enables different institutions to check and balance

abuses of power. In practice, at least within the context of global sport, it

means that the public–private partnerships pose challenges for reform. As

governmental and corporate actors stand to beneﬁt from the global sport

industry, neither emerges as the clear arbitrator of transparency in this

domain. Even as the IOC advocates holding various threats to sport’s integ-

rity accountable, it also attempts to evade such scrutiny. Given the strong

capitalist inﬂuences in global sport, we might look to earlier scholarship on

regulatory capitalism by asking: How could market institutions be steered to

342 LAW & POLICY October 2015

aid in the work of transparency in global sport instead of contributing to its

opaqueness?

Some examples within sport already exist. Global media and gambling

interests have had corruptive inﬂuences on sport, but they have also contrib-

uted to making refereeing and umpiring errors more transparent. Together,

they have made visible the patterns of refereeing corruption, because gam-

bling multinationals have a vested interest in the integrity of ofﬁciating. In

the racing industry, where gambling interests are also evident, controls on

race-ﬁxing and doping emerged in part because there were demands to

protect racing as a brand that attracted spectators and gamblers alike.

Further, Mark Davis, the director of Betfair, an Internet betting exchange,

was a vocal advocate for stronger responses to corruption. Corporate power

can be corruptive, but it can also be wielded to serve certain productive

interests of transparency, even if only in a limited capacity.

Likewise, the spectacularization of global sport through media outlets has

fueled its growth and contributed to making it ﬁnancially enticing for those

with corruptive interests. However, it also offers mediated accountability to

the general public. Take the fall of big tobacco as an example. To make

transparent the misleading nature of corporate advertising that associated

tobacco with healthy bodies, nongovernmental organizations and public

health groups were able to mobilize effective media campaigns. Eventually,

major sporting venues across much of the globe would ban smoking, with

high levels of compliance and largely without the aid of policing. At a critical

juncture, weaker actors enrolled big media (and sport) in the much larger and

longer project of defeating big tobacco. When the dangers associated with

abuses of power can be made visible by those less powerful, there are oppor-

tunities for corrective forms of transparency to counteract such abuses. In an

odd twist, powerful actors can become allies. This observation already

applies to the recent FIFA scandal. In addition to calling for Blatter’s resig-

nation, demands for an independent reform commission have not fallen on

deaf ears. Corporate sponsors, including the Coca-Cola Company and

VISA, have joined the activist #NewFIFANow campaign, Transparency

International, and the International Trade Union Confederation in denounc-

ing the proposal of a taskforce headed by a FIFA appointee and insider,

Domenico Scala (Transparency International Secretariat 2015).

How might these lessons apply to the other ongoing challenges facing

global sport governance? In relation to international sport organizations,

particularly FIFA, Transparency International (2009, 2011) has called for

multistakeholder involvement so as to democratize their decision-making

processes. Similarly, it recommends that they become more open to working

with civil society groups as a starting point for the development of a system

of checks and balances. Nevertheless, Transparency International’s recom-

mendations alone have not prompted reform. Instead, public campaigns

bringing to light the many abuses associated with FIFA’s mega events have

prompted critics outside and within the organization to call for reforms to its

Henne REFORMING GLOBAL SPORT 343

bidding processes. Among the recommendations are that FIFA adopt the

IOC’s guidelines for host city bids (Radnedge 2014). While asking FIFA to

follow IOC rules (which have their own limitations) may not be enough, the

call does point to the inﬂuence of the IOC as a potential ally for at least

qualiﬁed change, especially as the IOC is pushing for reform while not

drawing attention to its own practices. As the cases of antidoping regulation

and the sport-for-development movement suggest, the IOC’s track record

demonstrates that it can lobby for and secure governmental and international

legal support of sport-speciﬁc measures.

In sum, regulatory enforcement that attends to the conditions of regula-

tory capitalism requires reformulating the traditionally narrow focus of

transparency as accountability-by-audit in order to devise incentives for

disclosure and openness. Analyses of hybridity do more than enable the

understanding of prospective barriers; they assist in identifying which stake-

holders in these relationships are more likely to use their clout for positive

change. Moreover, they enable the introduction of practices that promote

greater transparency. As punishing individual perpetrators is less effective

than concentrating on ways to prevent future violations, encouraging acts of

whistleblowing and punishing cover-ups of corruption and abuse show more

promise than surveillance alone. Transparency is a key value instilled

through these processes, but it requires the multistakeholder engagement for

which Transparency International has lobbied. Just as—if not more—

importantly, it requires rethinking the terms and nuances of power within a

transnational domain etched and shaped by capitalism and the hybrid

arrangements it has fostered.

NOTES

1. Soccer for North American readers.

2. The hearing is available via C-SPAN at http://www.c-span.org/video/?327125-1/

hearing-future-international-soccer-ﬁfa (accessed July 23, 2015).

3. From 2007 to 2013, I conducted ﬁeldwork in Australia, Canada, Spain, Switzer-

land, New Zealand, and the United States on the emergence of the international

antidoping regime and gender veriﬁcation rules. In 2011–2012, I studied the

politics of planning for the London Olympics, focusing speciﬁcally on the relo-

cation and securitization efforts as well as resistance movements to them. Since

2013, I have studied the Sport for Development and Peace Movement and the

International Olympic Committee’s governance structures, thus far having con-

ducted ﬁeldwork in Australasia and the Paciﬁc, as well as the UN Headquarters.

Taken together, these projects have required me to interview athletes subject to

sport governance arrangements, national and international administrators and

policymakers, politicians, sport support staff, residents affected by mega event

organizing, and protestors. In addition, I have observed meetings of governing

bodies, sport-speciﬁc conferences, sport outreach activities, developmental and

elite sporting events, participated in high-level sport in order to experience regu-

lation ﬁrsthand, and conducted archival research at the International Olympic

Studies Centre in Lausanne while an IOC postgraduate fellow.

344 LAW & POLICY October 2015

4. Fieldnotes, June 6, 2013, New York. A number of media outlets and publicly

accessible interviews reiterate this sentiment.

5. Estimates for security expenditures do not include the 6 billion US dollars for

CCTV camera installations (Boykoff 2013).

6. Presentation by Nicholas Bequelin, Amnesty International Regional Director for

East Asia, entitled “The Human Rights Cost of the Beijing Olympics: An Assess-

ment,” Melbourne, November 29, 2014.

7. In the 1980s, for example, local hosts kept the vast majority of revenues, because

they auctioned the television rights (Abend 2014).

8. In a statement at the 2011 European Union Sports Forum, Howman advocated

for a dedicated international organization (Harris 2011). Others have made

similar cases, including Mark Davis, director of Betfair (an Internet gambling

exchange), in 2008, and Dick Pound, former WADA president, in 2007.

9. The ﬁrst antidoping regulations actually targeted horse racing, and concerns

around fair play emerged in relation to protecting gambling interests, not the

“spirit of sport” (Gleaves 2012). The globalization of antidoping regulation in

horse racing emerges earlier than the antidoping regime targeting (human) sport

in part because of this linkage to corporatized gambling.

10. In Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia, for instance, the majority of antidoping

rule violations stem from testing positive for cannabis metabolites, with bans

from sport ranging from four months to ten years.

11. Fieldnotes from four interviews conducted in Canberra and New York on Sep-

tember 6, 2012 and June 5, 2013, respectively.

kathryn henne is a Senior Research Fellow at the Regulatory Institutions Network,

Australian National University, and author of Testing for Athlete Citizenship: Regu-

lating Doping and Sex in Sport (Rutgers University Press 2015).

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Good sport governance and design archetype

Chapter

Full-text available

Sep 2021

A relationship perspective on organisational culture and good governance in sport

Chapter

Full-text available

Sep 2021

Vas Girginov

Anti-bribery and Corruption Policies in International Sports Governing Bodies

Article

Full-text available

May 2021

International Sports Governing Bodies (“ISGBs”) are diverse in their aims but share a need to maintain a reputation of accountability in the eyes of their stakeholders. While some literature analyses the general governance concerns faced by these organizations, there is limited focus on anti-bribery and corruption (“ABC”) within this sphere. This paper's research aim is an exploratory evaluation of the ABC best practice policies that exist within ISGBs, asking how they can be assessed and what best practice policies currently exist within this framework. This paper undertakes a critical review of the diverse ABC governance policies in the largest ISGBs through content analysis on governance documents publically available on the sample ISGB websites. This review was undertaken twice on the same ISGBs, in 2017 and 2020, and the changes reviewed. The research highlights best practice policies for recommendation to all ISGBs, and illuminates the absence of adequate policies with regards to the risk of bribery in ISGBs. The findings show there was no area within the framework that ISGBs performed well at as a collective, and there was no single ISGB whose anti-bribery policies were strong in all areas. However, the comparison between 2017 and 2020 shows an improvement in ABC policies in some ISGBs over the timeframe analyzed. The implications are a need for sharing best practice in this area of governance, and providing global guidance on ABC policies for ISGBs to ensure integrity in the sector.

Práticas de governança e futebol: um estudo em clubes do Rio Grande do Sul

Article

Feb 2021

Este artigo apresenta e analisa os resultados do estudo multicasos sobre a relação da aplicação de práticas de governança corporativa e desempenho esportivo nas seguintes agremiações de futebol profissional: GE Brasil, SER Caxias, EC Juventude e EC Pelotas entre 2012 e 2016. Por meio de análise bibliográfica, documental e entrevistas, busca-se identificar a adoção de princípios governança a partir de cinco dimensões presentes na literatura: estrutura de governança, transparência, accountability, retorno social e práticas gerenciais. Observou-se que as dimensões estrutura de governança e práticas gerenciais foram determinantes para o bom desempenho de GE Brasil e EC Juventude no período. A SER Caxias, apresentou melhora somente em 2016, enquanto que o EC Pelotas possui problemas nas dimensões preponderantes para o sucesso dos demais clubes pesquisados. Em consonância com estudos anteriores na área, percebeu-se que os clubes que adotaram práticas de governança com maior intensidade, obtiveram melhores resultados esportivos.

Millward, P., Ludvigsen, J.A. and Sly, J.M. (2022) Sport and Crime: Towards a Critical Criminology of Sport. Routledge: Abingdon

Book

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Oct 2022

This is a draft copy only. I did not upload the finalised form but have found a copy of it here: https://bibis.ir/chosen-books/sport/2022/Sport%20and%20Crime%20Towards%20a%20Critical%20Criminology%20of%20Sport_bibis.ir.pdf Sport, Criminology

Political Expression in Sport: Transnational Challenges, Moral Defences

Book

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Cem Abanazir

A Scoping Review of the Causes and Consequences of Fraud in Sport

Article

Aug 2022
J SPORT SOC ISSUES

This study provides a structured overview of the literature published between 2010 and 2020 on the causes and consequences of fraud in sport using a systematic search strategy. Our results show that the current literature on this phenomenon is mostly focused on football as a specific type of sport, and on competition manipulation as a specific type of fraud. Guided by the routine activity theory, we observed that motivated offenders, suitable targets, and the lack of capable guardians render sport vulnerable for fraud in general, and for competition manipulation, corruption, financial fraud, and human trafficking in particular. The consequences of fraud in sport are mostly financial, through a diminution in the public's trust combined with a decrease in attendance and spectatorship to sport events. The phenomenon of fraud in sport remains strongly under-researched through empirical designs, and an interdisciplinary approach is required to tackle its complex nature and scope.

Tolerância zero ou eficácia nula? Políticas públicas e regulamentos desportivos para combater o match-fixing

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Com recurso a entrevistas semiestruturadas e análise de conteúdo, este artigo avalia e expõe a ineficácia da política de “tolerância zero” da UEFA, órgão máximo do futebol europeu, em induzir compliance nos jogadores de futebol, em Portugal, ao nível das práticas de match-fixing. A ênfase excessiva na ética individual, a externalização do fenómeno como um problema do crime organizado e a relutância em admitir falhas de governança interna são as principais razões explicativas. O artigo afirma que a regulamentação do futebol deve passar de uma lógica de compliance para políticas de enforcement.

The value of a public value perspective on good governance in sport

Chapter

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Frank van Eekeren

Action Sports and the Olympic Games: Past, Present, Future

Book

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The Politics of Regulation: Institutions and Regulatory Reforms for the Age of Governance

Book

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This book suggests that the scope and breadth of regulatory reforms since the mid-1980s and particularly during the 1990s, are so striking that they necessitate a reappraisal of current approaches to the study of the politics of regulation. The authors call for the adoption of different and fresh perspectives to examine this area.

Olympic Dreams, The Impact of Mega-Events on Local Politics

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Fastest, Highest, Strongest

Book

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Globalizing Sport

Book

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Barbara J. Keys

Global Business Regulation

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Cambridge Core - International Trade Law - Global Business Regulation - by John Braithwaite

Celebration Capitalism and the Olympic Games

Book

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Jules Boykoff

The Olympic Games have become the world’s greatest media and marketing event-a global celebration of exceptional athletics gilded with corporate cash. Huge corporations vie for association with the “Olympic Image” in the hope of gaining a worldwide marketing audience of billions. In this provocative critical study of the contemporary Olympics, Jules Boykoff argues that the Games have become a massive planned economy designed to shield the rich from risk while providing them with a spectacle to treasure. Placing political economy at the center of the analysis, and drawing on interdisciplinary research in sociology, politics, geography, history, and economics, Boykoff develops an innovative theory of “celebration capitalism”, the manipulation of state actors as partners that drives us towards public-private partnerships in which the public pays and the private profits. He argues that the Athens Games in 2004 marked the full emergence of celebration capitalism, with London 2012 representing its quintessential expression, characterized by a state of exception, unfettered commercialism, repression of dissent, questionable sustainability claims, and the complicity of the mainstream media. Controversial, challenging, and forthright, this book opens up a fascinating new avenue for understanding the contemporary Olympics in the context of global capitalist society. It is essential reading for anybody with an interest in the Olympic Games, the relationship between sport and society, or global politics and culture.

Fifa-isation: Security, brand protection and media management at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa

Article

Dec 2013

This paper presents a case-study of spatial brand protection and media management and security strategies at the 2010 Football World Cup (FWC) in South Africa (RSA). This focus stems from the realisation that commercially designated event spaces are very important environments for the interests of FWC sponsors, and that the media has a pivotal role in conveying messages about desirable conduct in such environments. In these respects, stakeholder organisations are concerned about safeguarding core event spaces, and with promoting positive messages about the FWC via the media. The paper therefore investigates the interests of key stakeholders at the 2010 FWC: the event owner Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the FWC sponsors and the host city (Cape Town). It is concerned with identifying various surveillance strategies to manage public spaces at the FWC, albeit with a particular emphasis on protecting the interests of sponsors and their brand integrity. It is also concerned with strategies to manage the media at the FWC, with a particular emphasis on how FIFA stymies dissent and forces compliance among reporters and news outlets that undermine critical surveillance into these practices of spatial management. Taken together, these hyper-protectionist approaches demonstrate what we have described as the FIFA-isation of the FWC, where commercial risk is outsourced to the event host, while the commercial benefits flow back to the event owner. Concomitantly, FIFA makes enormous surveillance demands on the event hosts and those residing in the country and city where it is to be held, and upon the media that broadcast and report on the world’s biggest sport mega events.

The Fix: Soccer and Organized Crime

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May 2010

Declan Hill

Regulatory Capitalism: How It Works, Ideas for Making It Work Better

Book

Jan 2008

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http://johnbraithwaite.com/monographs/

Pharmaceuticals, Corporate Crime and Public Health

Book

Jan 2014

The pharmaceutical industry exists to serve the community, but over the years it has engaged massively in corporate crime, with the public footing the bill. This readable study by experts in medicine, law, criminology and public health documents the problems, ranging from false advertising and counterfeiting to corruption waste and overpricing, with unacceptable pressures on doctors, politicians, patients and the media. Uniquely, the book goes on to present a realistic and worldwide solution for the future, with positive policies encouraging honest dealing as well as partial privatization of enforcement and greater emphasis on creative research to develop the medicines that society needs most. © The Editors and Contributors Severally 2014. All rights reserved.

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