Sportswashing

“The evil was not in bread and circuses, per se, but in the willingness of the people to sell their rights as free men for full bellies and the excitement of the games which would serve to distract them from the other human hungers which bread and circuses can never appease.” —Cicero In the year 98, Tacitus wrote a biography of his late father-in-law, Agricola, who governed Britain for five years. Agricola’s main task and accomplishment was thwarting an uprising against Roman rule. Tacitus recounts how the British were subdued not by force, as one might expect, but were instead slowly conquered by bread and circuses: “And so the population was gradually led into the demoralizing temptations of arcades, baths and sumptuous banquets,” Tacitus wrote. “The unsuspecting Britons spoke of such novelties as ‘civilization,’ when in fact they were only a feature of their enslavement.” As the Roman satirist Juvenal famously said, “Give them bread and circuses and they will never revolt.” Perhaps that helps explain why so many governments, especially those with an authoritarian bent, tend to love hosting extravagant sporting events. Arguably the first modern dictator to channel his propaganda through sports on an international scale was Benito Mussolini. In 1934 the second FIFA World Cup was held in Fascist Italy. Mussolini used the event to showcase the strength and vitality—the machismo—of the fascist man. He called the Italian soccer players “soldiers of sport.” Stadiums were erected in the style of fascist monuments, and even the tickets were imbued with fascist imagery. Besides the World Cup Trophy, the winners also received the six-times-larger Coppa del Duce, Mussolini’s personal award. Then, two years later, the Nazis similarly used the 1936 Olympics in Berlin to gain legitimacy on the world stage, at least in the eyes of Germans. Presenting the image of a strong Germany that could no longer be ignored by the international community. For Hitler’s supporters, overcoming the national humiliation of losing the First World War—and being made to pay for it as part of the Versailles Treaty—was of significant importance. As in Italy, the Nazis could also showcase and boast of their “Aryan” machismo, especially since “non-Aryans” were banned from the German teams. At the same time, the games also allowed Germany to repair its image abroad. Shortly before the games began, anti-Semitic signs banning Jews from certain establishments were removed and German officials ordered the police to exempt international tourists from the harsh new laws that criminalized gay sex. The charm offensive worked. On August 16, 1936, the New York Times wrote that the games put Germany “back in the fold of nations.” Adding that, this contact with many nationalities and races has made the Germans more human again after four long years of a régime which, while it strengthened, tended also to harden its votaries. … For the first time in years, for instance, substantial, well-clad German women have again seen around them numbers of fashionably attired and elegantly mannered foreign women. The Chinese and Japanese women here are especially notable as walking fashion plates. Berlin newspapers have commented thereon, and German male eyes following well-tailored foreigners have supplied a silent tribute even more potent. …Foreigners who know Germany only from what they have seen during this pleasant fortnight can carry home only one impression. It is that this is a nation happy and prosperous almost beyond belief; that Hitler is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, political leaders in the world today, and that Germans themselves are a much maligned, hospitable, wholly peaceful people who deserve the best the world can give them. On the showing of these two weeks during which all black spots have been covered, all political controversy side-tracked, all prejudice and all militarism put aside and forgotten, it is all true. After the flags have been hauled down, the Olympic village vacated, the streets and hotels brought back to their normal state, and Berlin becomes itself again, one can only hope that it will remain so. Of course, not reported by the press was the arrest and internment of 600 Roma people by the Berlin police shortly before the games began. After the Second World War, Francisco Franco, the last standing fascist dictator, would also use the exploding popularity of soccer to rally political support at home and to break Spain out of its post-war isolation. Franco’s foreign affairs minister Fernando Maria Castiella said that the Real Madrid football club “is the best embassy we have ever had.” In 1964, a US-backed coup in Brazil overthrew the democratically elected left-wing government of João Goulart. While Goulart was not a communist, he refused to sever diplomatic ties with his communist neighbor Cuba and nationalized the Brazilian subsidiary of the International Telephone and Telegram (ITT) company, a US mega-corporation that had gained monopoly power in Brazil. ITT President Harold Geneen was friends with CIA Director John McCone, and convinced him to help engineer the coup against Goulart. The military dictatorship that followed unleashed two decades of brutal oppression. Government death squads, armed and trained by the US, terrorized and tortured tens of thousands of people. One of the worst criminals to lead the junta was General Emílio Médici. One of Médici’s first moves, less than a month since taking office, was to summon legendary Brazilian footballer Pelé to his office for a televised handshake and to convince him to play in the 1970 World Cup. After Brazil won that cup, Médici credited the victory due to “the rise of faith in our fight for national development.” The junta’s slogan, “no one will hold back Brazil now,” was put on posters with Pelé. Just a few years earlier, Pelé had met the dictator of the Congo, Mobutu Sese Seko. It was after Mobutu’s second coup d’état when he badly needed a boost to his popularity. He first came to power in a coup against Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first and last democratically elected leader. Lumumba, a popular pan-African leftist, wanted to lead the Congo into independence after 75 years of being a bloody Belgian colony, which was particularly heinous even by comparative standards. As soon as Lumumba was elected, the CIA and MI6 instantly targeted him for assassination. But the Belgians got to him first. They kidnapped him, drove him to an isolated spot, put him up against a tree, shot him, dismembered his body with a hacksaw, and dissolved his body-parts in sulfuric acid. Mobutu, a murderous kleptomaniac, subsequently rose to power with US, French, Belgian, and Israeli backing. Thus, Congo’s brief experiment with democracy ended before it began. Today, most of the world’s cobalt comes from the Congo, mined with slave labor. Cobalt is used to make rechargeable batteries. Your iPhone probably has Congolese cobalt in it. In 1974, Mobutu was competing with Ugandan dictator Idi Amin for the imaginary contest as perceived leader of Africa. This time he wanted greater publicity than a single photograph with Pelé. He sent one of his advisers to court boxing promoter Don King to organize a boxing match in Zaire (Mobutu briefly renamed the country) between Muhammed Ali and George Foreman. At a time when the Zairean economy was struggling due to a price drop in copper, Mobutu took $10 million out of the treasury to fund the match. The now-legendary event, called “The Rumble in the Jungle,” made history as the most-watched event in television history. It was so successful that several months later another US-backed dictator, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, produced a sequel of sorts, called “Thrilla in Manila.” The following year a US-backed coup installed a military dictatorship in Argentina, led by General Jorge Rafael Videla. It was, without exaggeration, a Nazi regime. Over 30,000 Argentinians were murdered or forcibly “disappeared.” Jews were targeted in particular and put in camps with pictures of Adolf Hitler on the wall. And the regime had special torture techniques they only used on Jewish women. Of course that didn’t stop Israel from supporting the regime to the hilt. Videla and his soldiers were trained at the School of the Americas, an infamous US training camp, known in Latin America as the “School of Assassins,” where they were instructed in techniques of torture, repression, kidnapping, and execution. The regime spared no one. One classified US State Department memorandum surveyed that the people targeted were “not only suspected terrorists but also encompass a broader range of people, for example, labor leaders, workers, clergymen, human rights advocates, scientists, doctors, and political party leaders.” In the Junta’s first year, ten high school students were kidnapped over the span of five days. Only four survived the brutal torture they were put through. “They gave me electric shocks in my mouth, my gums, and my genitals,” Pablo Diaz said. “They tore out one of my toenails. It was very usual to spend several days without food.” Emilce Moler, another survivor, said, “They tortured us with profound sadism. I remember being naked. I was just a fragile small girl of about 1.5 meters and weighed about 47 kilograms, and I was beaten senseless by what I judged was a huge man.” She was tortured and raped for two years. Besides the four survivors, the bodies of the other six have never been found. Because these were ten high school students, their disappearances became known as the Night of the Pencils. The churches were also especially targeted as they became centers of meaningful peaceful resistance. The church also became a conduit for international solidarity, since other avenues were blocked. For example, Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo  (The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo), a women’s protest group advocating for their “disappeared” loved ones, found an audience abroad primarily through the church. My grandmother marched with her church group in what were called “silent marches,” partly organized by the Madres as international solidarity campaigns. Like the Argentinian Madres they would wear headscarfs with the name of someone missing. The march would end in front of the Argentinian or sometimes the US embassy where they would hand a letter to the ambassador demanding the return of the people they vanished. In 1978, this regime hosted the FIFA World Cup. Like Nazi Germany with the Olympics, the junta slightly dialed back its overt repression to put on a friendly face to the world’s journalists. This also gave the Madres de Plaza de Mayo some international news coverage, but overall the blandishments of the regime put Argentina “back into the fold of nations.” Thirty years later, reflecting on the event, Los Angeles Times staff writer Patrick McDonnell wrote: The River Plate stadium [where the final was played] is less than a mile away from what was once one of the junta’s most notorious torture centers, the Naval Mechanics School, where about 5,000 people were held and are believed to have been “disappeared.” Prisoners could hear the cheers from the nearby field. Surviving detainees have recalled Kafkaesque scenes of interrogators taking time out to root for the home team. Guards even encouraged shackled, hooded and half-conscious prisoners to join in the merry-making. “We won! We won!” the lockup’s notorious chief of intelligence, Jorge “El Tigre” (The Tiger) Acosta, shouted over and over, recalled Graciela Daleo, a survivor. “When he said, ‘We won,’ I was certain that we had lost … and we did lose.” On that evening, Daleo says, she was among a number of inmates taken for a surreal jaunt: Jailers whisked her and others off in a Peugeot 504 sedan and drove among the celebrating masses on the streets of a delirious capital. Daleo stuck her head through the sedan’s sun roof into the chilly evening to view the unbridled, madcap revelry. “I stood up on the seat and looked at that multitude,” Daleo recalled. “That was another moment of terrible solitude. I was crying. I was certain that if I began to shout that I was a ‘disappeared,’ then no one would even notice.” The use of enormous sporting events by these regimes to launder their reputations and increase their soft-power eventually became known as sportswashing. As football aficionados are doubtlessly aware, today is the first 2026 FIFA World Cup match in the United States. This year’s competition is held across three North American countries, Mexico, Canada, and the US. Today’s event is held in Los Angeles. Trump has frequently bragged about bringing the World Cup to the US. “In my First Term as President, I fought hard to bring the 2026 FIFA World Cup and 2028 LA Summer Olympics to the U.S.A,” he wrote. Interpreting it as a “big milestone in our new Golden Age of America.” He also mentioned it as an accomplishment in his last State of the Union speech. Given all that, I figured that today we’d briefly explore the topic of sportswashing. The practice has certainly continued in the 21st century. The most well-known cases are probably the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia; the 2018 FIFA World Cup held across various cities in Russia; and the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. There are lesser-known cases, such as the 2025 cycling World Championships in Rwanda that functioned as propaganda for President Paul Kagame, who sorely needed it since modern scholarship on the Rwandan genocide has increasingly focused on his malfeasance; not to mention the wars against the Congo and other neighbors or the international assassination plots against Rwandan dissidents, often with Kagame’s barely hidden approval. However, between the better-known and lesser-known cases, almost no one considers it sportswashing when a Western nation hosts one of these events. No one accused the United States of sportswashing when they hosted the Winter Olympics in 2002, despite their illegal invasion of Afghanistan and ominous threats against Iraq. Nor were there such accusations in 2006 when Italy hosted the Winter Olympics and Germany the World Cup, both complicit in the Afghanistan War. Or when London hosted the Olympics in 2012, one year after destroying Libya along with the rest of NATO. Neither did Italy’s hosting of the Winter Olympics earlier this year attract any criticism, despite still supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza at the time (Rome suspended military support on April 14). Suspiciously, the accusations of sportswashing flow only in one direction: towards the Global South. More specifically, towards the West’s adversaries. According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, US wars since 2001 have directly killed over 928,000 people; an estimate that does not include indirect deaths, deaths by US proxy forces, hybrid or clandestine wars, et cetera. Attempting to include indirect deaths in US war zones, they estimate a death toll of 4.7 million people and counting. This is a country with a lot of blood to launder out of their sports jerseys. Furthermore, in most of the aforementioned cases of sportswashing—Franco’s Spain, Mobutu’s Zaire, the Argentinian and Brazilian juntas, and Kagame’s Rwanda—the governments were supported by the West (with the exception of Francisco Franco, who received US government support only after the Second World War; tough he was funded by Texas Oil Company and Henry Ford during the Spanish Civil War). Even Mussolini’s Italy was rescued from their economic depression by British and American bankers, and Vladimir Putin’s rise to power was partly facilitated by MI6 and Tony Blair. An honest accounting would show that the West is responsible for the lion’s share of the world’s atrocities, yet they are treated as model citizens of the world. The only argument against Western sportswashing is that they don’t need to launder their reputation because they’re powerful enough to enjoy a kind of self-justifying religious authority. It is still, as St. Augustine remarked in the 5th century, a world wherein sea-ruling emperors condemn the pirate. Thanks to Donald Trump’s global unpopularity owing to his obnoxious brand of clownish authoritarianism, the unleashing of ICE as a white supremacist paramilitary, and the spectre of the Epstein scandal, this FIFA World Cup might finally be described as sportswashing. Yet I wonder whether the Iran War, last January’s attack on Venezuela, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, his bombings of Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Nigeria, Syria, and boats in the Caribbean, or his regime- change threats and fuel blockade of Cuba are things that people feel need to be laundered with football. So, we have now thoroughly established that governments, especially authoritarian ones, love to host lavish sporting events like the FIFA World Cup. But does FIFA love them back? Yes! It turns out that they do. In 2013, as FIFA was organizing the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, they were having some difficulties with the laws. To give just one small example, Brazil had banned the sale of alcohol in stadiums in 2003 to combat the high death rate amongst football fans. But FIFA is sponsored by massive alcohol companies—chief among them Anheuser-Busch, the world’s biggest multinational brewing company that owns Budweiser. FIFA secretary general Jerome Valcke explained in no uncertain terms that beer would be sold in the stadiums. “Maybe I look a bit arrogant but that’s something we will not negotiate,” he said. “I mean there will be and there must be as part of the law the fact that we have the right to sell beer.” At a symposium, Valcke said that “The main fight we have when we enter a country where the political structure is divided, as it is in Brazil, into three levels—the federal level, the state level, and the city level,” means there are “different people, different movements, different interests and it’s quite difficult to organize a World Cup in such conditions.” Looking ahead to the 2018 World Cup, which had already been given to Russia, Valcke anticipated fewer hurdles. “Less democracy is sometimes better for organizing a World Cup,” he said. “When you have a very strong head of state who can decide, as maybe Putin can do in 2018, … that is easier for us organizers than a country … where you have to negotiate at different levels.” FIFA’s current president, Gianni Infantino, is likewise a bourgeois creature that enjoys rubbing elbows with wealthy and powerful politicians. In 2018 he played football in the Kremlin with Vladimir Putin and later received the Orden Druzhby  (Order of Friendship) medal from the president. In 2022 when he was running defense for the Qatari government which was using virtual slave labor to construct the stadiums, Infantino relocated his family to Doha and denounced the government’s critics as Western chauvinists with a racist double standard (which, sadly, is mostly true—the best propaganda often is). Last year Infantino attended Trump’s inauguration. “Together we will make not only America great again but also the entire world,” he said on Instagram. He and Trump also share a friendship with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Infantino carefully manipulated FIFA’s internal politics to hand Saudi Arabia the 2034 World Cup. In return the Kingdom made their state-owned oil company, Aramco, FIFA’s most lucrative sponsor; paying them approximately $100 million a year. That actually takes us to another form of sportswashing that’s often ignored: Sponsors and advertising. Like governments, corporations also have incentives to sportswash. This is true for all corporations but, as with governments, it’s especially worthwhile for those who would otherwise receive little positive press coverage. Basically, billionaire CEO Jim Ratcliffe is hoping that when you hear the name “INEOS” you think of the soccer clubs that they own, or the professional cycling team they sponsor, or their investments in Formula 1 racing and competitive sailing. That’s a much rosier image than INEOS the massive oil, gas, and chemicals conglomerate that owns 36 businesses across 29 countries that massively pollute the planet through fracking, oil drilling, and plastic production, among others. Other energy companies that share responsibility for destroying the climate and deliberately hamper efforts to deal with climate change—like BP, Phillips 66, Valvoline, Shell, TotalEnergies, and so on—all heavily invest in sportswashing. Uno- X, a Norwegian energy company owned by the Scandinavian conglomerate Reitan, is quite open on their website as to why they sponsor a professional cycling team: “Cycling being an immensely popular sport—both in our two home countries, and abroad—has delivered great added value to our brand as part of our marketing strategy.” Sports betting companies have also become increasingly unavoidable as sponsors, trying to exploit the vulnerable and normalize high-risk financial betting. Their rise dovetails nicely with the various “crypto-currency” companies that convince people to buy fake Monopoly money to use for online sports betting. Then there are those advertisers which blur the lines between state and private sponsorships. Most obvious are the professional cycling teams owned by Middle Eastern sheiks. Such as team UAE, financed by Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who serves as Abu Dhabi’s national security advisor and manages a $1.3 trillion investment portfolio on the side; mostly he’s up to his eyeballs in the AI boom. There is also team Bahrain Victorious, created by Sheikh Nasser bin Hamad Al Khalifa, eighth in line to the throne and leader of the Royal Guard and Supreme Defence Council. The team is funded by Bahrain’s state-owned Economic Development Board, Bapco (Bahrain Petroleum Company), Batelco (Bahrain Telecommunication Company), and the National Bank of Bahrain. Then there are Western defense companies that are part of Washington’s Military- Industrial Complex. The mass-surveillance company Palantir sponsors Ferrari’s Formula 1 team. The Austrian firearms manufacturer Glock sponsors horse races. And the German arms company Rheinmetall sponsors a football club in Dortmund. And the Polish state-owned company Nitro-Chem, which produces 90 percent of the TNT used by American arms manufacturers to make the bombs that are dropped on Gaza, sponsors the Polish Volleyball League. The Nitro-Chem plant is located where the Nazis build one of their biggest weapons factories during the war. The TNT is transported on train tracks passing several Holocaust memorials, including the mass grave site known as the Valley of Death and the Potulice concentration camp, before being shipped to a General Dynamics factory in Dallas, Texas, where it’s used as the key explosive in Mk. 84 bombs; those bombs are then shipped to Israel by the US military, and dropped on Palestinian children in Gaza by the IDF. Finally, the US military itself also invests heavily in sports. And not just through advertising alone, but also by providing ringside entertainment. In William Hartung and Ben Freeman’s excellent book, The Trillion Dollar War Machine, published last year, they devote one section to pro-military propaganda. They discuss, for instance, how the Air Force Thunderbirds are not just a combat force but also “a fine-tuned public-relations machine”: If you’ve been to just about any sporting event, you’ve likely had a front seat to one of the oldest forms of military entertainment: the flyover. Above the 2024 Super Bowl, six F-16s screamed out of the sky in a crisp formation, rattling windows and causing gasps and shouts from the audience. Their flyovers are exciting … Although the public’s eyes are focused on the six planes in the sky, the Thunderbirds are actually a massive 130-person squadron, and the job of many members of the squadron is explicitly public relations. And they work a schedule that would exhaust a traveling salesman. Everyone connected to the program—from the Thunderbirds pilots to the aircraft maintainers, public- relations specialists, photographers, and many more—spend the vast majority of their time traveling from one public performance to the next. …The Thunderbirds’ self-professed mission is to “excite and inspire.” The “inspire” portion of this ultimately translates to recruiting people to join the Air Force. In fact, the Thunderbirds squadron includes airmen whose title is literally “Recruiter.” … According to the official guidelines of the DoD, “The Military Departments should carefully consider sporting events that will have a national or significant regional broadcast of the flyover or additional opportunities to connect the military to a vast public. Additional opportunities may include social media, interviews with pilots and crew, onsite public engagement, recruiting booth spaces, etc.” So what should we conclude from the fact that big sporting events, far from providing a reliable escape from the grinding, ugly realities of the world, are conductor cables of power, run for the benefit of politicians, militaries, authoritarian governments, and private corporations? I think the conclusion is the same as with everything else: Sports are merely another reflection of what happens when institutions are privately owned and controlled. In truth, FIFA is a “non-profit” in name only. It simply means that most of their revenue has to be reinvested in the promotion of soccer. But it nevertheless remains privately controlled by a handful of elites, who make sure to profit handsomely from the endeavor. FIFA is ultimately controlled by the same class that own the corporations and that designs national policy. They come from the same schools, have the same friends, go to the same restaurants, and have similar world views. Furthermore, aside from dominating the nexus of state and economic power, this bourgeoisie embodies other forms of power as well, such as patriarchy and white supremacy. As the Epstein emails have demonstrated, the upper class delights not only in exploiting workers economically but also in exploiting women sexually and subjugating “the darker nations” to their neo-colonial designs through military domination. (I promise this is still about FIFA. You’ll see.) Epstein’s emails show how casually the bourgeoisie talk about such topics. From Epstein discussing with Bobby Kotick, CEO of video game publisher Activision Blizzard, how adding gambling mechanics to games could not only generate profit but would also function as a social experiment to see how effectively kids could become addicted to gambling; to corresponding with model scout Daniel Siad about young aspiring models he found in impoverished countries that he could introduce to Epstein. These emails show how our modern-day aristocrats discuss their investments in the arms industry and surveillance companies, whilst also yucking it up with the chair of the Nobel Committee. The personal tastes of these wealthy men ends up effecting the industries that they run. Epstein, for instance, liked thin girls (we know this because his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell used to “joke” that she kept herself on “the Auschwitz diet” for him), hence the clothing company that he managed, Limited Too, which markets to preteens, engaged in inverted vanity sizing—the practice of labeling clothes as larger sizes to make girls think they’re overweight when they can’t fit into a size “medium,” though they’re actually wearing a size small. John Dewey once called capitalism “industrial feudalism.” That is, a pyramid- shaped power structure with the king on top, followed by the lords, then the knights, and a mass of peasants at the bottom. Similarly, the hierarchy of corporations has the shareholders on top, followed by the executives, then the managers, and a mass of wage laborers at the bottom. It follows, therefore, that all the problems inherent in feudalism also plague capitalism. From extreme wealth inequality to wars between rivaling lords. The rapacious behavior of our modern bourgeoisie is the modus operandi of any aristocracy. I recently read that Africa’s last remaining monarch, King Mswati III of Eswatini (Swaziland), summoned young and unmarried women to his palace where they will dance topless and he will pick one to become his 17th wife. The Communist Party of Swaziland (CPS) condemned the ceremony, pointing out that most of the country is dirt poor and there is both a cash incentive to participate in the proceedings and a heavy fine imposed for avoiding it. A classic carrot and stick approach to force the hands of families reluctant to commodify their daughters. The CPS pointed out that the ceremony “must be critically examined as part of a broader system of feudal and capitalist oppression … that concentrate[s] power and wealth in the hands of a few, … [and wherein] women’s bodies become state property, controlled, displayed, and allocated according to patriarchal hierarchy. This reflects the commodification of women under both feudalism and capitalism.” They added that “cultural reform or superficial changes to existing practices” will not achieve true liberation. Such forms of oppression and exploitation are baked into a system of private ownership. And so it is with FIFA. (See, I told you it was still about FIFA!) As detailed by Josimar, a Norwegian-based publication of investigative football journalism, FIFA officials in Haiti set up a training center for young aspiring players which became a hotbed of sexual abuse: For almost two decades, leading officials at the Haitian football association (FHF) built a vast network of sexual exploitation. This included the rape of teenage girls and boys, abortions, blackmail and death threats. … The Fifa Goal Centre of La-Croix-des-Bouquets was like “hell on earth” according to victims. Concacaf or Fifa delegations visiting Haiti to attend refereeing courses or to inspect the progress of the Fifa Goal Centre were offered a player, a referee or and employee to have sex with. Some of football’s most senior officials, including Sepp Blatter, took advantage of this system. Lest we forget, of course, that Infantino’s predecessor Sepp Blatter once suggested boosting the popularity of women’s soccer by saying, “Let the women play in more feminine clothes like they do in Volleyball. They could, for example, have tighter shorts.” Adding, “Female players are pretty, if you excuse me for saying so, and they already have some different rules to men, such as playing with a lighter ball. That decision was taken to create a more female aesthetic, so why not fashion?” One of the principle architects of the abuse network in Haiti was Yves Jean-Bart, nicknamed “Dadou,” then the president of the Haitian Football Federation. “He didn’t like to share the girls,” one of his victims said. “He was very jealous. He wanted us only for himself and his sexual impulses.” However, according to Josimar, “Jean-Bart did make one exception for a dear old friend, Sepp Blatter”: “‘Dadou’ ordered an employee to pay a visit to Blatter at his hotel,” recalls an upper-echelon member of the federation. “He basically told her to sleep with him. It was an order. She hesitated because she was afraid of her husband’s reaction. ‘Dadou’ didn’t understand that she could defy his authority, but he asked another woman. She agreed. She didn’t really have a choice.” Yves Jean-Bart asked a member of the federation’s medical team to buy blue pills for Fifa’s president. That night an employee at FHF spent the night with Sepp Blatter at the Oasis Hotel. ‘Dadou’ was so proud of it,” remembers the member of the medical staff who bought the blue pills. “He told the story to everyone using the name of the employee even when she was next to him. He said, ‘President Blatter loves Haitian women! He loves Haitian women! I got one for him.’” The children at the camp fared even worse: At the Fifa Goal Centre—known as “The Ranch”—some of the best young Haitian players, girls and boys, lived, trained and went to school from the age of 14.  Dreaming of becoming professional footballers, these teenagers left their families to pursue their goal. The majority of the players came from some of the financially worst off families in Haiti, one of the poorest countries in the world. … they had to surrender their passports to FA president Jean-Bart. … “Football is maybe the only option for these kids to make it out of extreme poverty,” remarks the former captain Ernso Laurence. “That was the leverage ‘Dadou’ held. With it, he could get what he wanted.” If you wanted to travel with the national team and obtain a US visa, a dream for millions of Haitians, Jean-Bart and his administrators asked you for something in return. Most of the time, sex. …It was in this centre, financed by Fifa at the cost of almost 1.5 million euro, that Yves Jean-Bart raped some of Haiti’s most promising teenagers. According to court documents in Josimar’s possession, the former sports minister, Evans Lescouflair, along with coaches under FHF contract, raped underage boys at the centre. No formal investigation was opened after complaints of abuse swirled around FIFA headquarters, but one Frenchman, Yvon Avry, was sent to Haiti in 2011 to verify if everything was alright: “He slept with several of my teammates!” a disgusted former youth international says. “He slept with us! Fifa sent someone to check on us and he ended up having sex with the players that ‘Dadou’ gave him.” Like Blatter, Yvon Avry received the girls on Jean-Bart’s orders. “It was a way to close the eyes on everything that was going on there,” a coach points out. “Like everyone else, I can’t speak publicly because the country is too dangerous and these people are too dangerous.” A gangster only known as Bozom visited Jean-Bart and the center regularly. With a gun visible in his pocket he came to collect money, and shared laughs with the boss. “We were terrified,” a victim of other FHF officials says. “It was a place… it was a place where it was normal to be raped. Some of my friends are now prostitutes or junkies because they have been broken.” At least one victims has committed suicide. The common thread in what enables this abuse—whether it’s Harvey Weinstein praying on actresses or Epstein praying on young fashion models or Jean-Bart praying on aspiring footballers—is that they held their victims’ careers and livelihoods in their hands. In a system where people are forced to sell themselves on the labor market in order to survive, the buyers of labor—i.e. employers, who makeup only 3 percent of the US population, according to the Census—have extraordinary power over others. It should come as no surprise that the culture of exploitation at the peak of power should also have a sexual dimension. In fact, we should already know that. FIFA simply embodies all the ills that are inherent to private institutions. From the corruption, the incessant advertising, the moneyed connections to corporations, the reciprocal relationships with authoritarian state power, the financial exploitation of workers especially in the Global South, and the sexual exploitation of the most vulnerable and invisible members of the organization’s hierarchy. There may not be a panacea for these maladies but we can eliminate the structures through which they metastasize. In FIFA, as in the economy and the political system, it will require the transfer of power from the few into the collective hands of the public. To solve the problem of sportswashing we must go beyond the solutions that many sports columnists who’ve written about this issue have suggested and let soccer be run collectively by the people: democratize the sport. And if it were up to me, I’d take an additional step of somehow denationalizing the sport. I’ve argued before that athletes should compete at the Olympics as individuals instead of representatives of nation states. I understand that it would be more difficult with soccer, given that the clubs are often tied to a certain city or country. But then again, many regional clubs already purchase athletes from all over the world, so it wouldn’t be such a stretch to decouple a football club from a city’s identity. However, I understand that this is probably going too far for most soccer fans. I’ve gathered over the years that pride in one’s city or country is somehow linked to the enjoyment of sports. I confess that I was born without this gene; there is not a patriotic cell or nationalistic bone anywhere in my body. There never has been. Still, if soccer is going to remain a conduit for nationalism or regional pride, it leaves us with the question of what to do about the uncomfortable connection between soccer and ultra-nationalism. Soccer hooligans are often prime recruiting pools for far- right terror groups. That’s how Ukraine’s Azov Battalion recruited many of its members. In any event, that’s a conversation for another day—one that is probably better led by a soccer fan, which I am not. If I want to watch a bunch of grown men pretend to get injured for over 90 minutes, I’d prefer to watch a John Wick movie.