When Gianni Infantino was elected as president of Fifa after years of bribery and corruption scandals shaming the organisation, his victory speech was full of promises. Football’s global governing body would be rebuilt with “good governance and transparency”, the Swiss administrator pledged. “Everyone in the world will applaud us.”
That was in 2016. A decade into Infantino’s reign, however, damaging allegations continue to hit the association – from allegations of secret payments to claims of ticketing extortion – even while the World Cup is under way.
Nobody feels more outraged and let down than Australian whistleblower, Bonita Mersiades.
She suffered greatly after raising concerns about malfeasance in Fifa’s World Cup bidding process. First she was sacked from her senior role at Football Australia in 2010, then she was hit by threats, cyber attacks and personal abuse in 2014 when it was revealed she’d assisted an official investigation.
Mersiades is troubled that risks she took to expose wrongdoing didn’t lead to genuine reform.
“The pattern of behaviour hasn’t changed,” she tells The i Paper from her home in Sydney, where she now runs a publisher of sport books. “If you don’t change the culture, nothing’s going to change… It’s very disappointing.”
Mersiades is backing the Reboot Fifa campaign run by a sports ethics group, Fair Square, which is lodging a formal complaint against Infantino for “repeated and serious breaches” of his organisation’s own rules.
Fifa claims to have undergone “deep-rooted governance and management reforms over the last decade with a clear focus on transparency” under Infantino’s leadership.
Yet his rule has provoked criticism over the deaths of workers building World Cup stadia in Qatar, over Saudi Arabia being awarded the 2034 tournament despite its human rights record, and over the creation of the Fifa Peace Prize awarded to Donald Trump. Infantino has also called for Russia to be allowed to compete in international football again – arguing the ban since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine “has only created more frustration and hatred“.
The controversies keep coming, too.
Last month, one of Fifa’s vice presidents was alleged to have personally received millions of dollars as a secret bonus – from funds which ironically had been recovered through an anti-corruption investigation. Sources told The New York Times that Alejandro Dominguez, who leads South America’s football body Conmebol, has been the subject of an ethics complaint to Fifa for over a year following whistleblower claims about this money. Neither Fifa nor Conmebol have responded to the allegation.
Then came more bad news: two US states are investigating whether supporters were misled into thinking few World Cup tickets were available, encouraging them to pay huge sums without even knowing where they’d sit. New Jersey’s attorney general, Jennifer Davenport, said Fifa had “turned buying a ticket to the World Cup into a gauntlet of confusion, fake scarcity, and impossibly high prices”. Her New York counterpart, Letitia James, suspects fans may have been “manipulated” in violation of consumer protection laws.
It’s this issue that angers Mersiades the most, because it’s ordinary supporters who appear to have been exploited.
“It’s typical of what Fifa has become,” she says. “They are not pitching this as a football tournament for the people but as a premium event experience. We’re all in a so-called cost of living crisis but some people are spending $25,000 (£18,900) to be there for the group games.”
Infantino says he is “very relaxed” about the investigation, arguing that if Fifa made tickets cheaper, people would sell them on for a profit, meaning money would go into “black market activities and not to football”.
Why Mersiades became a whistleblower – and how she suffered
Mersiades grew up as a genuine fan, playing the game as an amateur, taking her children to matches and supporting Liverpool thanks to their double-winning Aussie midfielder Craig Johnston.
She became the Socceroos’ operations manager and was later made Football Australia’s head of corporate and public affairs. In this role, she also worked on the country’s bid to host either the World Cup in 2018 or 2022.
During that process, she grew alarmed at millions of taxpayers’ dollars being spent on “dark and shady” consultants, whom she claims were effectively tasked with arranging bribes to back the Australian bid.
Mersiades recalls how in 2009, Australia donated a reported $5m (£3.8m)to the Asian Football Confederation. “To this day, only about $2.5m (£1.9m) of that has been accounted for.” Oceania’s confederation also “asked for $4m (£3m) worth of goodies,” she says. “That was what we had to pay to get their vote… The ‘Fifa way’ allowed that to happen.”
It even emerged that $500,000 (£378,000) supposed to fund a development centre in Trinidad and Tobago instead ended up in the personal bank account of Fifa’s then vice president Jack Warner. He was indicted by the US over $5m (£3.8m) of alleged bribes but has always denied any wrongdoing and avoided extradition last year after a 10-year legal battle.
Mersiades was sacked by Football Australia in 2010 after objecting to what was going on. “I had been raising concerns internally and it just got too uncomfortable for them,” she explains. The Sydney-based governing body did not respond to a request for comment but has previously said it “ran a clean bid”.
When Fifa voted that December, Russia and Qatar won the tournaments – while Australia received just one vote.
As disquiet grew around the world, she wrote an article criticising the process, but this angered former colleagues. “I was threatened by a senior executive of Football Australia and told that my life would be ruined,” she says.
Officials at Fifa’s Zurich headquarters eventually commissioned an inquiry by US lawyer Michael Garcia, and Mersiades agreed to help as long as she remained anonymous. A summary of Garcia’s report, published in 2014, did not name her – but left experts in little doubt that she was a key source.
Soon afterwards, cyber attacks were launched on websites she ran. “They were traced to Russia and to Zurich,” Mersiades claims, believing they were punishment for whistleblowing. She also faced “very hurtful” misogynistic abuse.
She felt vindicated when a US investigation into Fifa corruption in 2015 led to more than 20 convictions and many more indictments – prompting Sepp Blatter’s resignation as president – but has found its conduct galling since then.
Infantino’s hold on power
Infantino, who earned $6m (£4.5m) last year as president of Fifa, intends to stand for re-election next year and is widely expected to win despite the organisation’s issues. So how does he retain control?
Mersiades believes Infantino’s changes to Fifa’s structure helps him secure power. One of the organisation’s key reforms after the 2015 corruption scandal involved cutting the number of its standing committees from 26 to just nine. But in 2024, these were vastly expanded again to 35, creating more highly paid roles to fill.
She argues: “This allows him to appoint people to positions where they get superannuation, a very handsome stipend, first-class travel, five-star hotels, guaranteed tickets to tournaments like this one. What does that do? It makes people grateful to the Fifa president and shores up his re-election. They get treated as VVIPs, they lose all sense of what’s right and what’s wrong.”
Many middle managers join Fifa because they love football and it offers them “glamorous” travel opportunities, she says. “They think: ‘This is my dream job, I’m not going to do anything to stuff it up’.” This makes it “very difficult” for them to risk their livelihoods by speaking up if they encounter misconduct, she argues.
Mersiades alleges officials are dealt with harshly if they raise concerns, claiming to know of two employees who “helped authorities but Fifa found out and they are no longer working there”.
A Fifa spokesperson insists the organisation is now “more efficient, well-governed and fit for purpose”. They say this “fundamental change” has been “acknowledged by a number of international institutions”, including the Association of Summer Olympic Federations.
Delivering on its “mandate to develop football all around the world”, it has “distributed more than $5bn (£3.8bn) to grow the game globally”, they add.
“The organisation has been transformed and is now considered a trusted partner for international agencies, NGOs, and leading global brands. Fifa is a role model when it comes to governance and transparency in the sports industry.”
Mersiades thinks statements like this are just “PR gloss”. But if it’s true that Fifa has failed to truly reform, even after its huge scandal in 2015, what hope is there for the Reboot Fifa campaign now?
“I don’t expect change to happen this year, next year, or maybe even in my lifetime,” she admits. That’s a depressing thought; she is only aged in her fifties.
Nevertheless, campaigners must keep on fighting, she says. “Things will never change if people don’t chip away.”
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