FIFA

Wir sollten uns fragen, ob unser Spiel eines Tages auf einem anderen Planeten gespielt wird. Warum nicht? Wir hätten dann nicht nur eine Weltmeisterschaft, sondern interplanetare Wettbewerbe. Warum nicht?

— Joseph Blatter

For quite a while it seemed as if the "The Swarm" would be the only highly democratic and 100% global-inclusive organisational body who could seriously challenge the dictatorship of the Military Three (M3) - With China leading, USA closely following and Russia looked as the "junior" partner whose strengh lies less in its own power and contribution, but upon the permanent threat of going togehter with the EU and jointly creating a challenging superpower to be taken seriously.

However, "The Swarm" never got accepted by the uneducated, is still manipulated by tech oligarchs and especially did never reach all those, whose governments have recently denied access to The Swarm, to the Internet or have shut down the Internet entierely.

But the African and South American continents had something, nobody was able to shut down without risking a revolt and chaos: soccer. Not just the play under the hot equatorial sun on a dusty village-field but the addiction to world-class players and international games, teams, and nations fighting for titles and dominance.

Other than any professional business ambition, becoming a professional soccer player was still open to everybody. With scouts visiting the smallest and most remote villages for 6- to 7-year old "talent" and with the globally launched "MiniFoot" platform, where kids could compare their videos of specific ball-exercises with the performance of their same age peers everybody that at least the impression to have a chance to be valued about performance rather than origin, having access to infrastructure and parents having the time and money to pay the bill for training, camps, coaches, marketing, doping and performance-enhancing surgery.

And all this is supervised by FIFA, and only FIFA had the money and organizational reach and capacity, the nation's trust and support to bring soccer to the most remote areas. FIFA became the only single global organization that was able to claim to assemble all nations under one good-faith umbrella. Not even the Vatican nor the UN, nor the WHO or Worldbank, nor Coca Cola, Microsoft or any other MegaCorp had this reach, and definitively not the overwhelming support by the common population.

Only the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the International Red Cross - not surprisingly, Swiss-domiciled organizations again - could claim at least the same reach on a national level, but definitely not the buy-in of the simple people.

And so, it has always been obvious that nations, MegaCorps, oligarchs etc. have always tried to get a foot in FIFA's doors -which, of course, let it just open that much to take the sponsor's money but not wide enough to get the whole body through. So, with the global reach came the money, and with the money the power to have considerable impact, FIFA has become a substantial financial and political force for many nations that extended its rules far beyond the game onto financial politics, infrastructural priorities, education, security, and the constitution of governments.

Trusted that in soccer, everybody had the same, fair and fully transparent chances to succeed and failure has immediate consequences, all the FIFA organization has become a trusted role model for how folks wanted to have their administrations organized and controlled and therefore were supporting everything FIFA in a non-escapable loop of financial and legal dependency towards a meritocratic system which - finally - was orchstrated - in big contrast to the "Swarm" - just by just a few.