Global Corruption Report: Sport

Transparency International

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317443742
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

Sport is a global phenomenon engaging billions of people and generating annual revenues of more than US$ 145 billion. Problems in the governance of sports organisations, fixing of matches and staging of major sporting events have spurred action on many fronts. Yet attempts to stop corruption in sport are still at an early stage.

The Global Corruption Report (GCR) on sport is the most comprehensive analysis of sports corruption to date. It consists of more than 60 contributions from leading experts in the fields of corruption and sport, from sports organisations, governments, multilateral institutions, sponsors, athletes, supporters, academia and the wider anti-corruption movement.

This GCR provides essential analysis for understanding the corruption risks in sport, focusing on sports governance, the business of sport, planning of major events, and match-fixing. It highlights the significant work that has already been done and presents new approaches to strengthening integrity in sport. In addition to measuring transparency and accountability, the GCR gives priority to participation, from sponsors to athletes to supporters an essential to restoring trust in sport.

PART 1

Governance of sport: the global view

1.1

Sport as a force for good

Bob Munro¹

Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does. It speaks to youth in a language they understand. Sport can create hope where once there was only despair.

Nelson Mandela, Laureus World Sports Awards, Monaco, 2000

Since the eighth century BC, when the first Olympic Truce allowed athletes to travel safely to the Olympic Games, sport has been largely regarded as an inspirational force for good.² Sport has helped transcend often divisive geographic, political and cultural differences by bringing people and nations together to celebrate athletic achievements. Surprisingly, concerted efforts to expand sport as a force for good accelerated only in the last two decades. More surprisingly, the youth in Nairobi’s Mathare Valley, one of Africa’s largest and poorest slums, were pioneers in using sport for community development and peace. Although the initial examples in this chapter are from that project, today many different sports are now used as a force for good in tackling a remarkably wide range of serious health, social and environmental challenges – and even conflicts – around the world.

Learning life lessons and skills through sport

For me and many other boys growing up in the Canadian town of St. Catharines in the 1950s, school was what we did in between Saturdays. With our fathers as voluntary organisers and coaches, on Saturdays we put on our team uniforms and proudly bicycled through town to play with or against our friends in summer baseball and winter ice hockey leagues. On those eagerly awaited Saturdays, we won or lost the bragging rights for the next week.

Through sport, we learnt vital lessons and social skills, which helped us then and later in life. We learnt that achievement is our reward for self-discipline and constant training, for getting fit and staying healthy and, most importantly, for extra effort and teamwork. We learnt to cope with losing as well as winning, gaining new insights into our weaknesses from our losses and earning new self-confidence from our victories. We also learnt to respect the rules, the referees, our coaches, our team-mates and even our opponents. Our leagues were also a miniature United Nations (UN) in which multiculturalism thrived as many players were young refugees from faraway places such as Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Slovakia and Ukraine. Once we put on our team uniforms, though, they ceased being foreigners and soon became our team-mates and friends.³

Without those many kind-hearted volunteers and the early life lessons and social skills I learnt while playing in their youth leagues, my character would have had much sharper edges and my life been far less user-friendly. As they made sport such a force for good in my life, I owed them a debt of gratitude that I wanted to repay some day.

Combining sport with community service

Three decades later the Mathare Youth Sports Association (MYSA) became my payback. In August 1987 in the huge Mathare slums near the UN headquarters in Nairobi, I stopped at a little dirt field to watch some barefooted kids excitedly playing with their homemade juala football.⁴ Their joy triggered a flashback to my own youth and this thought: why shouldn’t these kids also get a chance to play and learn useful life lessons in leagues with real footballs, coaches and referees?

A few days later I met with some young leaders in the slums to start organising a few youth leagues. I set only one non-negotiable condition: ‘If you do something, I’ll do something, but if you do nothing, I’ll do nothing.’ They agreed and the first MYSA leagues kicked off two weeks later with over 500 youth in 27 boys’ football teams and six girls’ netball teams.

The Mathare youth leaders and members adopted the same approach, which soon transformed MYSA from just a few youth leagues into a self-help community development project using sport as a starting point. For example, the huge piles of uncollected garbage were major causes of disease and deaths in the slums, so environmental clean-ups became an integral part of all MYSA leagues. While teams get three points for a victory, MYSA teams also earn six points for each completed clean-up project. Then, and still today, MYSA likely has the only sports leagues in the world where the standings include the points for games won or tied plus points for garbage clean-ups.

MYSA’s community service activities expanded in response to many different needs and risks in the slums. In 1994, when Adrian, a shy and popular teenager on the Undugu⁵ street kids team, suddenly grew thin and died of an unusual and unfamiliar disease, MYSA started an HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention programme which is still in existence today. Training in AIDS prevention as well as child rights and protection against sexual abuse are embedded in all staff, coaching and other courses in the MYSA Sports and Leadership Training Academy.

By the mid-1990s MYSA’s pioneering sport-for-development activities attracted a few brave partners,⁶ enabling MYSA to add innovative new programmes such as training youth in music, photography, dance and drama which focused on serious health and other risks in the slums; providing leadership awards to help the best young volunteers stay in school; feeding and freeing jailed kids; expanding activities for kids with disabilities; stopping child labour; and creating slum libraries and study halls for members and local school classes.⁷ Today in the Mathare slums, over 30,000 boys and girls⁸ participate annually in the MYSA self-help youth sports and community service programmes. In addition to helping themselves, the Mathare youth also help over 10,000 youth in similar projects in and outside Kenya, which receive technical and training support from MYSA.⁹

Linking sport for development with peace

The MYSA youth also became peacemakers outside and later in the Mathare slums. In 1999 inter-ethnic violence escalated among the over 70,000 refugees in the Kakuma Refugee Camp in north-west Kenya. As two-thirds of the refugees were youth, the UNHCR asked MYSA to start a similar self-help youth sport-for-development project in the camp. Within six months the inter-ethnic tensions and violence had dropped dramatically. Many youth were from South Sudan and, after the 2005 peace agreement, they returned to Rumbek, the then administrative capital, where former child soldiers also demobilised. MYSA therefore helped start another project there, which continues today.

Sadly, in late 2006 inter-ethnic violence also flared up in the Mathare slums, with hundreds of innocent women and kids fleeing and camping on a field near a MYSA office. As the government and nearby UN agencies initially ignored their desperate situation, the Mathare youth took the funds intended for MYSA’s 20th anniversary celebrations and instead used the money to rent tents and buy blankets, clothing, food and medicine for the displaced families. MYSA also organised peace-themed sports activities for the kids and, with later donations from MYSA friends in Norway and UN-Habitat, bought new uniforms and textbooks so the children could go back to school.¹⁰

During the devastating post-election violence in early 2008 the MYSA youth also organised special Football4Peace tournaments and activities throughout the slums.¹¹ Even the top clubs in the Kenyan Premier League (KPL), then chaired by Mathare United FC, got directly involved in helping mend the post-election rifts after the government and the Kenya Football Federation (KFF) had both declared that they lacked funds for the national team to join the 2010 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup qualifying rounds. To help heal their divided country, the 16 KPL clubs urgently met in early May 2008 and agreed to fund the national team themselves.¹² Over the next six months national pride and unity rose, and Kenyans packed the stadium to cheer their national team as it climbed an astonishing 52 places in the FIFA world rankings.¹³ Even FIFA acknowledged that it was likely the first time in world football history that a national team had been funded entirely by the clubs.

Expanding sport-for-development initiatives worldwide

National governments and other international organisations had largely ignored sport as a serious development activity until the early 1990s, when MYSA’s new approach to sport for development started attracting attention in the Kenyan¹⁴ and international media,¹⁵ and even an academic journal.¹⁶ The new approach and potential of sport for development gradually gained international recognition. For example, the 1991 Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting first recognised the unique role of sport in helping reduce poverty and promote development. In 1993 the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 48/11 on ‘Building a Peaceful and Better World through Sport’. Key milestones early in the new millennium included the appointment in 2001 of a new UN Special Adviser on Sport for Development and Peace and the creation in 2002 of the UN Inter-Agency Task Force on Sport for Development and Peace, which produced a trailblazing report on how sport can contribute to achieving many of the Millennium Development Goals.¹⁷

New international non-governmental organisations and networks also emerged for supporting and linking sport-for-development projects around the world. The process started in 2000 with the new Laureus World Sports Academy and Laureus Sport for Good Foundation, which adopted MYSA as its first flagship project.¹⁸ Committed to ‘using the power of sport as a tool for social change’, today Laureus has national foundations in eight countries on four continents, and, with additional support from Comic Relief, now assists over 150 sport-for-development projects in 35 countries.¹⁹

In 2004 the streetfootballworld network was inaugurated ‘to change the world through football’ by creating new partnerships for sharing knowledge and experience among the fast-growing number of football-for-development-and-peace projects around the world. Headquartered i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Executive summary
• Part 1 Governance of sport: the global view
• Part 2 Money, markets and private interests in football
• Part 3 Events in the spotlight
• Part 4 Match-fixing
• Part 5 The US model: collegiate sports and corruption
• Part 6 The role of participants: within and beyond the sports family
• Index