One Step Leads to Another: FIFA and the Corruption Pyramid

Last updated on: May 27, 2015 at 1:56 pm by Kyle Roberts

One Step Leads to Another: FIFA and the Corruption Pyramid 2015-05-27T13:56:00-05:00 Kyle Roberts

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Everyone is talking today about corruption and soccer. We’ve got a big scandal going, that will take some time to unpack. I’m not going to summarize in detail the unfolding allegations: but it appears that all of 14 FIFA officials and employees have been indicted for various forms of corruption. The NT Times summarizes it thus:

The Department of Justice indictment names 14 people on charges including racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy. In addition to senior soccer officials, the indictment also named sports-marketing executives from the United States and South America who are accused of paying more than $150 million in bribes and kickbacks in exchange for media deals associated with major soccer tournaments.

CNN reports what FBI Director James Comey as saying, “The defendants fostered a culture of corruption and greed that created an uneven playing field for the biggest sport in the world…Undisclosed and illegal payments, kickbacks and bribes became a way of doing business at FIFA.”

Moments like these cause a momentary furor and gasps of disbelief. But it’s all-too-common, really, and quite natural, in a way. How do this sort of corruption happen? If I may refer again (you can find several references to this book in my past blog posts) to the book Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), there is a very helpful description of the pyramid of corruption: Scandalous activity occurs, very often, through a process of small steps in succession. We human beings are rascally rabbits and we’re very good at justifying each of those steps. The process of self-justification is an accruing process-that gains energy or steam. Or perhaps we could liken it to the snowball effect, a small snowball eventually becomes a large one, and then sometimes an avalanche if there’s nothing to stop its growth. Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson dub it the pyramid effect. You start at the top, take one step in one direction, then another, then another, and suddenly you find yourself very far from where you began. And that’s when–if it’s a matter of public interest–it becomes a scandal. They reflect on the Jack Abramoff scandal, when Tom DeLay accepted a bribe (a golf trip to St. Andrews) for political favors. How could DeLay do would he did?

Dissonance theory gives us the answer: one step at a time. Although there are plenty of unashamedly corrupt politicians who sell their votes to the largest campaign contributor, most politicians, thanks to their blind spots, believe they are incorruptible. When they first enter politics, they accept lunch with a lobbyist, because, after all, that’s how politics works and it’s an efficient way to get information about a pending bill, isn’t it? ‘Besides,” the politician says, ‘lobbyists, like any other citizens, are exercising their right to free speech. I only have to listen; I’ll decide how to vote on the basis of whether my party and constituents support this bill and on whether it is the right thing for the American people.”

Once you accept the first small inducement and justify it that way, however, you have started your slide down the pyramid. If you had lunch with a lobbyist to talk about that pending legislation, why not talk things over on the local golf course? What’s the difference? It’s a nice place to have a conversation. And if you talked things over on the local course, why not accept a friendly offer to go to a better course to play golf with him–or her–say, to St. Andrews in Scotland? What’s wrong with that? By the time the politician is at the bottom of the pyramid, having accepted and justified ever-larger inducements, the public is screaming, ‘What’s wrong with that? Are you kidding?”

If the first offer DeLay got was to St. Andrews, he would have had enough sense (probably) to turn it down. But the succession of small steps, accompanied by deceptive self-justification, led to a gradual but steady movement down the road to Scotland. Throw in the fact that ‘everyone else is doing it,’ and you have the makings of the pyramid of corruption. Would you and I have the sense or the courage to stop the progression? Who knows what all the steps were that led to such apparently rampant corruption within FIFA, but it’s a safe bet that it involved a whole hell of a lot of self-justification, quite a bit of peer pressure, and a lot of small steps along the way.

photo credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/56087830@N00/8940352680″>England v Brazil [June 2 2013]</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

photo credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/11414938@N00/1255721231″>Steps not for European feet</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

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