Abstract des Autors

Global soccer and global sports governance have for the past nine years and certainly since a fateful meeting in late 2010 of the executive committee of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the world soccer body, witnessed crisis after crisis. Invariably the scandals involved various forms of corruption: financial corruption, political corruption or corruption of sporting performance. Gulf autocracies were often at the centre of the financial and political corruption scandals and have in unacknowledged ways served as examples of non-transparent, top-down governance designed to mask first and foremost the inextricable intertwining of politics and sports.