‘Hard to believe’: Pieth questions FIFA’s democratic decline and the silence over Saudi 2034

If, as expected, US President Donald Trump becomes the first recipient of the new FIFA peace prize, which will be awarded on 5 December this year, many FIFA critics will see it as the latest example of FIFA president Gianni Infantino’s almost ten-year-long kowtowing to heads of state, including some of the world’s worst autocrats and dictators.

After seven years as secretary general of the European football association UEFA, Infantino was elected FIFA president in February 2016, when he took advantage of the American and Swiss corruption investigations into former FIFA president Sepp Blatter, former UEFA president Michel Platini, and many other high-profile football leaders.

“Under Mr. Infantino, FIFA has become the eager ally of super-rich sportswashing states such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia, with the latter given a clear run at the 2034 World Cup,” The Guardian recently wrote in an editorial.

The editorial called on the FIFA president to abandon his geopolitical networking and instead address growing criticism of high ticket prices for next year's World Cup tournament, which many football fans in the three host countries, the United States, Canada and Mexico, cannot afford to pay.

Infantino is in a league of his own

But media editors and columnists are not alone in characterising Infantino’s  ten-year presidency as a decade of democratic decline in football. They are joined by Swiss professor of criminal law and criminology, Mark Pieth, who has followed FIFA's management closely  over the past 15 years.

“Blatter is a strange animal. But compared to what is going on inside FIFA now, the dirty tricks that were exposed when he was president of FIFA are only petty stuff and just what you do if you are an average criminal,” he said in an interview with Play the Game.

He added that the present FIFA president is in a league of his own. 

“Infantino copies the autocrats he cosies up to. He loves Trump, he is only driven by power and money, and he has no need for democracy in FIFA.” 

Pieth is the founder and former president of the Basel Institute of Governance and also the former head of the section for economic and organised crime at the Swiss Federal Office of Justice. He participated in Play the Game's international conference in Tampere, Finland, where he spoke in a session entitled: 'The troubled quest for good governance in sport: Can we get from paperwork to practice?'

“Have the reforms of sports governance been successful? I will use FIFA as an example. It is the elephant in the room. Before 2010, FIFA had a very bad reputation. Today, FIFA does not look so bad – at least on paper. From 2011 to the present day, FIFA has done a lot. FIFA's human rights policy from 2017 is basically a copy of the UN's human rights policy. What more do we want?” Pieth asked rhetorically during the session.

FIFA is a paper tiger

From 2011 to 2013, Pieth chaired the Independent Governance Committee overseeing the governance reform process of FIFA. Most recently, he co-authored a human rights report about FIFA’s failure to implement its own human rights policy for the World Cup in Saudi Arabia in 2034.

The report concludes that FIFA must ensure that Saudi Arabia implements minimum human rights requirements in relation to at least five key areas before the 2034 World Cup, including freedom of expression and association, arbitrary arrests, mistreatment and the death penalty, judicial independence, migrants’ rights, and women's rights.

“None of these are presently being undertaken, which must be remedied in accordance with a clear and transparent plan of action,” the report stated, but according to Pieth, FIFA never responded to the critique. 

“In my interpretation, it's all about money. Saudi Arabia was elected unopposed, not at a FIFA congress but in a virtual meeting with all participants applauding. There was no debate or criticism from FIFA’s member associations,” Pieth noted in his Play the Game presentation, which he concluded by saying:

"This illustrates how FIFA ignores its own human rights policy. But to me, it is also a shocking illustration of what democracy means in FIFA. So, we have a compliance system in FIFA that doesn't look bad on paper, but it's a paper tiger operated by people who cosy up to autocrats and dictators to enrich themselves as quickly as possible.”

Infantino and Platini in opposition to governance reforms

After the session, Play the Game asked Mark Pieth to elaborate on his work for FIFA as an expert on anti-corruption and good governance, and to explain his criticism of Gianni Infantino's FIFA presidency.

“I had done a lot of work on corruption when somebody told Sepp Blatter to hire me as a governance specialist. I said yes to him but also added that I couldn’t do it not alone. So, we had a group of 13 people who worked three years for FIFA up to a point where we had a good result on paper,” he said.

“But we also had opposition, especially from Infantino and Platini. They didn’t like our work. And in 2014, we decided to quit FIFA because Blatter refused to step down when he was re-elected. That was not agreed, so we said: Sorry, goodbye.”

However, Pieth's research interest in FIFA's management was rekindled when Saudi Arabia in 2023 decided to bid to host the 2034 Men's World Cup.

The murder of a Saudi journalist 

After Saudi Arabia’s announcement of the bid, Pieth was contacted by London barrister Rodney Dixon who represents Hatice Cengiz, the Turkish fiancée of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi who was murdered by Saudi government agents on 2 October 2018.

Khashoggi was known for being in opposition to the Saudi government. In 2017, he fled Saudi Arabia and moved to the United States. where he wrote for The Washington Post. 

According to the CIA, the Saudi journalist was murdered on the orders of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in an assassination that took place at the Saudi Arabian Consulate General in Istanbul, Turkey, when Khashoggi arrived to pick up his Saudi divorce papers so that he could marry his Turkish girlfriend.

“That was outrageous, so we decided to write a report with about 30 pages listing what the problems with Saudi Arabia’s bid for the FIFA World Cup were,” Pieth told Play the Game.

On a long list of human rights violations committed in Saudi Arabia, the report written by Pieth, Rodney Dixon, and the Swiss attorney Stefan Wehrenberg mentions the murder of Jamal Khashoggi as an example of a case that has become tragically emblematic:

“His murder provoked global outrage and cast a spotlight on the Kingdom’s wider pattern of crimes against journalists and dissidents who voice criticism. The report of the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions on the killing of Mr Khashoggi concluded that it constituted an extrajudicial killing for which the state of Saudi Arabia is responsible.”

The FIFA election of Saudi Arabia was against all rules

According to Pieth, the report documents that it is against FIFA’s own human rights rules to elect a country like Saudi Arabia as host of the World Cup, and he urges the international football association to at least demand a minimum of human rights requirements. 

“Saudi Arabia got the World Cup in a very strange way. It was against all rules and had nothing to do with governance. It was a joke.”

You know some of these people. Why are they doing this?

“I think that for Infantino, it’s for the money, and he is probably getting something personally as well. What is interesting is that he has all these followers. Everybody is paid off. He doubled the amount that Blatter gave the FIFA member associations, so now each country and island gets two million Swiss francs know instead of one million.”

Why is it possible for Infantino to persuade more than 200 FIFA members to award the World Cup to a country like Saudi Arabia without much opposition?

“Yes, it’s hard to believe. There was a mild protest from Norway, but I had expected that they would also go to court. The FIFA members are the only people who have the standing to go to court against Infantino because they are members of the association, and he is going against the rules of the association. They could have gone to a civil Swiss court, and that would have made a difference.”

After Saudi Arabia was awarded the 2034 World Cup, Pieth, Dixon, and Wehrenberg wrote a complaint to FIFA about its failure to implement its own human rights policy.

“FIFA has its own tribunal for these human rights issues, but we never got a receipt. It’s pathetic. They didn’t even acknowledge our complaint, although we wrote it in a very civil and careful way like you would write to the London High Court. We didn’t want to be aggressive,” Pieth says adding that it is difficult to decide what to do now.

“It would have been good if, for instance, the Norwegians had said: No way, we are not accepting this. I don’t know why they didn’t.”

A Norwegian protest against the bidding process

At an extraordinary digital congress on 11 December 2024, FIFA’s 211 member associations formally supported the FIFA Board’s decision to award the 2030 World Cup to Spain, Portugal, and Morocco, with three matches played in Uruguay, Paraguay, and Argentina, and the 2034 World Cup to Saudi Arabia.

In a letter to FIFA prior to the extraordinary congress, Lisa Klaveness, the president of the Norwegian Football Federation, criticised the bidding process but not the decision to award Saudi Arabia the 2034 World Cup. 

In February 2025 Klaveness further explained her position in an interview with The Guardian:

“If FIFA followed their own statutes – I’m not saying it’s formally a breach – and the reform Gianni (Infantino) put in place after his election in 2016, I think it would be very, very good. But they didn’t. They were not really implemented.”

To Pieth, the weak Klaveness protest over FIFA’s election of Saudi Arabia as host of the World Cup came as a surprise:

“Because she was angry, and because she is usually a strong person. Of course, other countries than Norway, like Germany or the UK, could also have stepped in and protested, but nobody in football seems to care. How can this be?” 

Nevertheless, Pieth continues his fight for good governance in the world of football:

“We are discussing what to do next, and we won’t give up easily. Because it’s not just about human rights, it’s about democracy.”