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Who Owns Soccer? - The New York Times

Who Owns Soccer? - The New York Times: To reform the way world soccer is run, we’re going to need a much more radical solution than whatever post-Blatter changes end up happening. FIFA can claim to be a democratic organization, in the sense that the voices of poor and insignificant soccer countries count equally with those of powers like Germany and Argentina. But the problem is that national federations, and therefore FIFA, are not accountable to the people of their respective countries — that is, the fans whose ticket and jersey purchases and television viewing make global soccer a multibillion-dollar franchise. The current system treats these people as customers. To fix the system, we should think of them more like constituents.

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Making FIFA truly “responsible, accountable, transparent and focused solely on the best interests of the game,” as Gulati called for in a statement last month, would require ensuring that those federations actually represent the fans in each country, rather than simply collecting a percentage off their fandom. They should, in other words, become public trusts in which the fans have a voting interest, rather than state-sanctioned monopolies. The president of the United States Soccer Federation is currently elected by a small number of insiders. (Gulati was first voted into the post in 2006 and went unopposed in 2010 and 2014.) Why not open up the ballot to everyone else? Fans would clamor to join a U.S. Soccer membership program, and even pay dues, if it gave them a vote in how the federation is run.

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