Globalization and the Changing Face of International Law

During the 2010 World (football or soccer)Cup competition is South Africa, the Nigerian President, responding to the country's dismal performances at the tournament, dissolved the national team also known as the Super Eagles. The government also withdrew the country from further participation in international football competitions for a two-year period. A representative of the Nigerian presidency at the time informed the public that "Mr President has directed that Nigeria will withdraw from all international football competition for the next two years to enable Nigeria to reorganize its football. This directive became necessary following the country's poor performance in the ongoing Fifa World Cup." But there was yet more to this reason than met the eye. It later came to light that after a meeting with the country's World Cup organizing Committee, the President ordered an audit of the accounts of the Nigeria World Cup organizing committee as well as the hiring of the coach, the Swedish Lars Lagerback. "If any financial misappropriation is discovered, all officials responsible will be held accountable." Nigeria's participation at that World Cup tournament had told a tall tale of mediocrity. Their team won not a single match. That was the country's worst record since participating in its first tournament in the United States in 1994. In their second game of the tournament against Greece one of the team's midfielders delivered a high kick on a Greek player that a champion mixed martial artist would have been very proud of. He earned himself a straight red card and was expelled from the game and, as it turned out, for the rest of the tournament. The team ultimately snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. In their last match where they needed only a win by any margin to move on to the next round of the tournament, the team's main striker contrived to deliver the miss of the entire tournament; slicing the ball beyond an empty net from about three yards out. What they couldn't achieve on the football pitch, the team more than made up for by a stream of scandals that trailed them every where they went in South Africa. Much of it bordered on corruption. Managers of the game in the country had long been known to be self-serving, crooked thieves of public resources. But in South Africa they seemed to take their financial impunity to new heights. For example, there were allegations that the coach who eventually took the team to the tournament had offered bribes to members of the football association who interviewed him for the job before it was offered to him. A huge uproar greeted the choice of a hotel and camp for the team. At the tournament itself, hundreds of Nigerians showed up on government bill who had no defined roles to play in enhancing the team's participation one way or another. The government reaction therefore appeared to have been informed more by a need to get to the root of those scandals than anything else. And by the way, the government provided almost all the funds that supported the team both before and during the tournament in South Africa. They would therefore have been justified to investigate where all that money went after the team put up such a regrettable show. But just two days after the Nigerian government made that unprecedented announcement, it was threatened with sanctions from Zurich unless it recanted its stand. FIFA, the body that regulates football globally gave the Nigerian government a rather short time span to "cancel its direction to withdraw Nigeria's participation from all FIFA and CAF [the African organ] competitions for the next two years." It invoked its rules which mandates the suspension of national football associations where governments are seen to be interfering in their operations as the Nigerian government so clearly was. Therefore, just before the FIFA deadline arrived on 5 July 2010, the Nigerian President ate humble pie by lifting the two-year ban. In my next post, I will review the implications of the Nigeria/FIFA exchange and situate it within the emerging shift in international law from state authority to private regulatory institutions like FIFA.