Abstract
Football is a game that connects people from different backgrounds, languages, and countries. Like many other popular sports, it inspires youth to achieve greatness and men and women to seek excellence. Unfortunately, in recent years, football has been tainted with corruption. Match-fixing and illegal gambling have caused fans to lose confidence in the sport, which may have far-reaching social as well as economic consequences.
As recently as 2011, FIFA president, Sepp Blatter, chose to address the problem of corruption in football and eliminate match-fixing and illegal gambling. To do so, Blatter enlisted the help of Mark Pieth, anti-corruption specialist formerly from the World Bank. Together they challenged the corrupt culture of football and worked to enhance the transparency and integrity of the game. The question is whether their efforts are sufficient to achieve their goals or merely more cover-up for sports culture that cannot be reformed.
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Notes
- 1.
For almost 20 years, Pieth taught Criminal Law and Criminology at the University of Basel and served as head of the organized crime unit at the Swiss Federal Office of Justice (Ministry of Justice and Police). Previously, Pieth was a member of Switzerland’s Financial Action Task Force (FATF) on money laundering and held a number of other posts in the OECD. In 2008, he was named a member of the World Bank’s Integrity Advisory Board, which advises the Bank’s President and the Audit Committee (Pieth.com 2012).
- 2.
Wikipedia defines “sportsmanship” as “an aspiration or ethos that a sport or activity will be enjoyed for its own sake, with proper consideration for fairness, ethics, respect, and a sense of fellowship with one’s competitors. A sore loser refers to one who does not take defeat well, whereas a good sport means being a ‘good winner’ as well as being a ‘good loser.’” Sportsmanship as the basis for a moral code emphasizes “virtues such as fairness, self-control, courage, and persistence, and has been associated with interpersonal concepts of treating others and being treated fairly, maintaining self-control if dealing with others, and respect for both authority and opponents” (Wikipedia 2014).
- 3.
This translation is James Legge’s (citation). D. C. Lau’s translation removes any lingering confusion that traditionally assumed that they referred to one game, known as po-yi: “The Master said, ’It is no easy matter for a man who always has a full stomach to put his mind to some use. Are there not such things as po and yi? Even playing these games is better than being idle” (Lau 1979: 147).
- 4.
This translation, also by James Legge, appears to assume mistakenly that “po” and “yi” both involve gambling, and indicate a dissolute lifestyle in which being “fond of wine” is typical. Mencius’ list is significant in that the five categories of moral weakness—the next of which is “being fond of goods and money, and selfishly attached to his wife and children”—are each understood as symptoms of lack of respect and care for one’s parents, clearly the core value in traditional Chinese morality. D. C. Lau’s translation makes the connection even clearer by describing each of the five failings as contributing to “the neglect of one’s parents” (Lau 1979: 135).
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Rothlin, S., McCann, D. (2016). Becoming a Top-Notch Player. In: International Business Ethics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-47434-1_1
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