Derek Shearer, Professor of Diplomacy and World Affairs at Occidental College, on the FIFA International Soccer Scandal

Derek Shearer, a professor of diplomacy and world affairs at Occidental College and an expert on the diplomacy of sports will talk to a Global Café breakfast meeting of LAWAC on June 16th about the corruption scandal that has engulfed FIFA, the international governing body of soccer. The world was shocked on May 27th by the early morning arrests in their Swiss hotel rooms of seven officials of FIFA and the indictment of a total of 14 FIFA members on charges of corruption and bribes totaling at least $151 million.

FIFA President Sepp Blatter, profiled here who resigned on June 2 after holding the job for 17 years, was not included in the indictment, but questions have been raised about how much he knows about the issues cited in the indictments. FIFA is very wealthy, generating billions of dollars a year, and is enormously powerful, notably for its control over which country hosts the World Cup every four years. Doubts have been raised for some time about the process under which Russia and Qatar were awarded the 2018 and 2022 World Cups respectively, with suspicions of bribery involved. And the indictments issued by the current US Attorney General Loretta Lynch allege that FIFA officials were paid $10 million in exchange for helping South Africa win the right to stage the 2010 World Cup.

Shearer, who served as US Ambassador to Finland and was a senior official in the Commerce Department, teaches a course on sports and diplomacy at Occidental, where he also is the Director of the McKinnon Center for Global Affairs. He is a graduate of Yale, and has written about the FIFA scandal here and about sports diplomacy in general here.