THE FINANCIAL PAGE.(The Talk of the Town)(FIFA)(Viewpoint essay)

On the eve of this year's World Cup, Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA, the worldwide governing body for soccer, gave a speech in which he laid out his organization's lofty goals. "Universality is still our guiding force," he said; FIFA must preserve soccer as a "beacon of hope." FIFA was established in 1904, and Blatter's rhetoric evoked that era's dream that sport would foster global amity. Like the International Olympic Committee, founded the decade before, FIFA was a prototype of the modern non-governmental organization, free from the influence of the state (since it's not a government agency) and of the market (since it's technically non-profit). FIFA gives every country in the world one vote, so that tiny countries like the Solomon Islands have as much pull as soccer giants like Germany and Italy. It rules impartially, concerned only with "the good of the game," as the organization likes to say.

Modern soccer, however, is apparently so riddled with Machiavellian maneuvering that Henry Kissinger once said it made him "nostalgic for the Middle East." Blatter himself is a canny autocrat who has maintained and expanded his power with Boss Tweed-style tactics, as alleged in "Foul!," a new book by the British investigative journalist Andrew Jennings. Blatter denies all allegations of wrongdoing, but after he came to power, in 1998, one FIFA member signed a statement swearing that he had been offered a bribe for his vote. In 2002, Blatter's own deputy submitted a well-documented report charging him with financial mismanagement and of running fifa "to the benefit of third parties and his personal interests." When FIFA's audit committee started to look into the organization's finances, Blatter shut down the investigation. In the years since, he has consolidated his power, so that his will now seems to be law.

This is nothing new in the world of international sports. Blatter's predecessor at FIFA, Joao Havelange, was legendary for his autocratic ways. So, too, were Primo Nebiolo, who was the president of the International Association of Athletics Federations for almost two decades, and Juan Antonio Samaranch, whose tenure as head of the International Olympic Committee was marked by charges of bid-rigging, bribery, and influence-peddling. Such venal self-dealing seems to have been more the rule than the exception in international sports.

Why, when global governing bodies have such noble aims, are the results so consistently bad? One answer is suggested by a school of thought known as public-choice economics, propounded in the nineteen-fifties largely by conservative economists seeking to explain why government doesn't work as well as we expect it to. Public-choice economists emphasize the importance of self-interest in shaping behavior, showing that bureaucrats are often more interested in protecting and expanding their power than in looking ...