Thanks to Mr. Trump, I ended up looking into how FIFA actually works—something I honestly had never been interested in before. But there’s an enormous amount of money involved, and some of it ultimately comes from people like me, who don’t care much about football. Sure, my share is tiny, but I’d honestly rather see my public broadcaster spend that money producing great films than paying billions for broadcasting rights.
So, with a little help from ChatGPT, here’s what I learned.
„FIFA is a private association under Swiss law, made up of national football federations and organized through continental confederations. Its enormous revenues come mainly from selling broadcasting, sponsorship, licensing, ticketing, and hospitality rights for the World Cup. Its monopoly is not granted by any state; it exists because national associations “voluntarily” accept FIFA’s rules and recognize its tournaments as official. In practice, however, this voluntariness is limited: leaving FIFA would mean exclusion from the World Cup and much of international football. An alternative system could be a transparent, non-profit global football federation that makes broadcasting rights freely available and uses advertising revenue for grassroots sport and public-interest projects.“
I mean …eeeh.. all this stuff is so heavily cross financed by the public (i hated to have Play soccer in school- so maybe I’m based :-)- and that is only the tip of the iceberg) - but the revenue goes to the FIFA and their members?
