SEC as a parrot

EVERY so often, organisations become bywords for something else. Apple means elegance, Berkshire Hathaway loyalty and BlackBerry decline. Alas, FIFA, the governing body of world football, spells corruption. Sprucing up this most tarnished of brands will take more than a bit of tinkering with the way FIFA is run.

On February 26th FIFA’s member associations will hold a secret ballot—what else?—in Zurich to choose a new president who will replace Sepp Blatter. The omens are not good. Mr Blatter bequeathed his successor an organisation in crisis. His fifth term was cut short after the indictment last year of several of the game’s biggest-wigs for alleged money-laundering. He has since been suspended from football for eight years for making an undocumented SFr2m ($2.1m) payment to Michel Platini, then head of Europe’s football body. (Mr Platini, once a favourite to succeed Mr Blatter, has also been suspended from the game; both men deny wrongdoing.)

The five candidates left to vie for the top job talk warmly of the need for term limits and better disclosure. But a radical reform would start with an idea put forward by Stefan Szymanski, a sports economist, among others—turning FIFA into a public company. For good measure, the new, cleaner FIFA would be listed in New York.

A public listing would have several benefits. The first is that the level of transparency would shoot up. Scandals afflict listed firms too, but one thing you do not hear from executives at public companies is complaints about the absence of scrutiny.

For FIFA to be under the referee’s beady eye would be precisely the point. According to its annual report, an organisation with just 474 employees spent an impressive $115m on personnel expenses in 2014. A listing would require FIFA to break out how much its executives get. They might expect to face questions from shareholders about the $35m they spent on meetings expenses that year, too.

Opening FIFA to America’s justice system would also have a salutary effect. The reach of the Department of Justice and the FBI is already long: they were behind indictments in 2015 that eventually dethroned Mr Blatter. But a listing in America would bring some of the world’s most enthusiastic law-enforcers to the organisation’s door. In particular, it would make FIFA subject to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Given the allegations that still swirl around the award of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar, seeking a home with a punitive anti-bribery regime would send a clear statement.

Becoming a public company would also formalise and sharpen FIFA’s incentives to make as much money as it can through legitimate means. Of the $5.7 billion in revenue that FIFA pulled in between 2011 and 2014, the biggest chunk was from the sale of television rights for the 2014 tournament in Brazil. More revenue—from the sale of broadcasting, marketing and licensing rights to World Cups—and tighter cost control ought to be enough both to keep shareholders happy and also to raise money to foster grassroots initiatives worldwide. The profit motive would also encourage faster development of the women’s World Cup.

Fantasy football

The beautiful game should not be handed to Wall Street without safeguards. To protect FIFA’s mission to develop football, a portion of revenues would have to be ring-fenced for distribution to its member associations, perhaps by a separate charitable arm (which would also be responsible for the rules of the game). To ensure that some private-equity baron doesn’t take FIFA over and load it up with debt, this charitable arm would need to retain majority voting rights over the listed firm. That would still leave plenty of scope for shenanigans as money sloshed between FIFA and football’s member associations. But it would also ensure that FIFA received harsher scrutiny.

Sadly, not one of the candidates vying to take over from Mr Blatter is likely to countenance a listing in New York. But when you judge their promises to restore FIFA’s integrity, that should be the yardstick.