What’s worse, state-led doping or money stealing federation chieftains?

Inside World Football

FIFA in its present form may or may not be destroyed, as the US Justice Department is clearly aiming to do, but for all the never ending stories of corruption that continue to emerge from the world of football one point needs to be stressed. This is that, however dreadful the governance of football, the FIFA scandal as far as sport is concerned does not match what has happened in athletics. There, as has been well reported, following the World Anti-Doping's Independent Commission finding that the Russian state sponsored doping of athletes, Russia has been suspended from the IAAF, athletics' world governing body, and could miss next summer's Rio Olympics.

And, if you do not accept my argument that one form of corruption is much worse than the other, then listen to what Dick Pound, who chaired the WADA Independent Commission, told me. When I asked how he saw what has happened to athletics compared to football his answer was, "It is not like FIFA where a bunch of corrupt people are passing money around to each other for sponsorship deals in marketing and television, that sort of stuff. This [meaning the athletics scandal] actually goes right down to the field of play. In sporting terms it is a worse report in the sense of affecting those who are playing. That is the qualitative difference between the two types of corruption. FIFA is a b-to-b type of corruption".