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Delivering Community Power CUPW 2022-2023

Anatomy of a soccer scandal

When the sanctity of rules is cherished above the basic value of human life, something has gone terribly awry

Human RightsSports

Photo by Thomas Couto/Flickr

The Canada Soccer drone spying scandal offers an ideal prism through which to examine the question of what is perceived to be scandalous in the context of global high-performance capitalist sport—and what is not.

Several months ago, in the middle of the Paris Olympics women’s football tournament, it was revealed that Canadian soccer officials, with the knowledge of coaches, used drones to spy on the training sessions of opposing teams in the lead-up to matches, thus apparently compromising the competitive integrity of games.

This apparent crime against human decency elicited all manner of aggrieved headlines. A representative sampling included, “Soccer drone scandal embarrassed Canada, fans say,” “Canada soccer sponsors say they are ‘deeply concerned’ about drone spying scandal,” “NDP MP wants women’s Olympic soccer coach, staff to testify on drone scandal,” “Canada needs to rebuild its reputation after drone spying scandal, says former player,” and, “Canadian Olympic women’s soccer drone scandal an utter embarrassment.”

As it happened, the most instructive commentary on the affair was offered in a piece published in The Conversation by two University of Guelph business school professors, who offered an appraisal of the scandal they described as raising “questions about Canada’s commitment to ethical standards in sports.” They wrote:

Several factors in professional sport culture numb our moral intensity. In competitive sports, the pressure to succeed and the culture surrounding it can often cloud a person’s ethical judgment, leading to decisions that prioritize winning over ethical considerations. The drive to win overshadows the ethical implications of certain behaviours… In addition athletes and coaches might believe their actions are unlikely to cause harm.


The first part of this claim is correct: high-performance sport absolutely does privilege winning over all other ethical considerations. In fact, this is precisely what leads to the ruthless exploitation of athletes in many contexts (including college football, which we study). It is also responsible for all manner of harm, including the physical sacrifice so central to sports like football and hockey, for example, as well as abuse, to which athletes are both subjected (think of hazing and overtraining) and which they, at times, perpetuate.

Reflecting on the second part of this claim—that athletes and coaches might believe their actions are unlikely to cause harm—while the authors view this as a misguided sentiment, we do not. In fact, we would suggest, the drone scandal is one of the least harmful ethical problems in global sport today, unless the “integrity of the game” is sanctified above actual human well-being.

FIFA, however, begs to differ.

The revelations about the use of drones emerged publicly on July 24. By July 27, the governing body of international soccer had docked Canada six points, among other penalties, one of the harshest punishments ever handed down in women’s Olympic soccer history. On July 29 Canada appealed. By July 31 that appeal was expeditiously rejected.

FIFA’s quick and decisive decision was very much in line with its policy towards Russia. In March 2022, less than a month after its invasion of Ukraine, the world soccer governing body indefinitely banned the Russian Federation from participation in international competitions. That suspension continues, and Russia is still mostly isolated from the global soccer community (FIFA recently allowed under-17 girls and boys teams from Russia to take part in tournaments). At the Olympics, Russian athletes were not permitted to compete under their own flag.

Yet, all of this raises the question: how is one the world’s foremost sporting bodies responding to the well-documented and ongoing war crimes and human rights violations being carried out by another state, Israel? Here, we can see that the standard is entirely different indeed.

Even as the drone spying scandal dominated news at the Olympics and apparently raised the most fundamental questions about ethics and harm, the Israeli national soccer team was still permitted by FIFA to compete in the Games. This, despite the fact that Israel was then (as it is now) conducting a genocidal assault against Palestinians in Gaza. While it might not be obvious at first, Israel’s shocking brutality over the past year relates directly to sports.

In fact, by June 2024, prior to the Olympics, at least 300 Palestinian athletes, sports officials and referees had been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza, while nearly all sports facilities, infrastructure, and stadiums in the besieged coastal enclave were significantly damaged or completely destroyed. Israeli forces even used Yarmouk Stadium in Gaza City as a makeshift prison to detain hundreds of Palestinians, including children, often subjecting them to harmful and humiliating treatment.

On May 2, Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister Israel Katz threatened to have Palestine Football Association President Jibril Rajoub imprisoned in retaliation for his efforts to have Israel censured by FIFA. In an X post made in Hebrew, Katz wrote, “Jibril Rajoub, a terrorist in a suit who openly supported Hamas’s crimes, is working around the clock to get Israel removed from the international soccer association. We will work to thwart his plans, and if he doesn’t stop—we will imprison him in the Muqata’a [presidential compound in Ramallah], where he will be left to play stanga by himself between the walls.” Rajoub was arrested by Israeli authorities two months later. He had his passport seized and was brought to a military interrogation centre upon his return to the West Bank from Paris.

Compared to the so-called drone scandal, this incident received almost no international coverage, save for a recent column in The Nation by Jules Boykoff and Dave Zirin, who pointed to the glaring double standard on display, as well as FIFA’s failure to live up to the “fundamental principles enshrined in its own rules.”

Likewise, there was little outcry in November of last year when Israeli Culture and Sports Minister Miki Zohar wrote to the interior minister asking “to revoke [Israeli citizen and soccer player Ataa] Jaber’s citizenship” for having “expressed identification with the enemy when he stood for a minute of silence in memory of ‘the victims in Gaza’” prior to a game between the Palestinian national team and Lebanon.

Indeed, while we saw an international fit of indignation over a coach’s scouting tactics, we heard barely a peep after 42-year-old Hani Al-Masdar, the former coach of Palestine’s Olympic soccer squad, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza. Nor did we hear cries of condemnation when Palestinian footballer Muhammad Barakat, known as the “Legend of Khan Younis” for his prolific goalscoring abilities, was killed following a strike on his home in March. As of mid-July, per the Palestinian Football Association, nearly 100 Palestinian soccer players had been killed by Israel in Gaza—all in advance of the Olympics. Disturbingly, the slaughter continues unabated. Just this week, former Palestinian under-21 player Imad Abu Tima and his entire family were killed by Israeli bombs.

As a direct result of these developments, the Palestinian Football Association, backed by the Asian Football Confederation, petitioned FIFA in May to censure the Israeli Football Association by demanding Israel’s suspension from all club and international competitions due to “complicity in violations of international law by the Israeli government, discrimination against Arab players, and inclusion in its league of clubs located in Palestinian territory.” PFA President Jibril Rajoub said at the time, “FIFA cannot afford to remain indifferent to these violations or to the ongoing genocide in Palestine, just as it did not remain indifferent to numerous precedents. How much more must the Palestinian football family suffer for FIFA to act with the same urgency and severity as it did in other cases? Does FIFA consider some wars to be more important than others and some victims to be more significant?”

Although FIFA claimed to call for an “urgent legal evaluation” in response, meant to be addressed at an “extraordinary meeting” of its council prior to the Olympics in July, the decision to make a determination was conveniently postponed until after the Games on August 31. The decision was postponed again at that meeting until just recently at the beginning of October. At the subsequent gathering, which many hoped would provide a verdict, we learned that the “FIFA Disciplinary Committee will be mandated to initiate an investigation” that will ultimately inform a decision by the FIFA council. In effect, the process has been delayed indefinitely, and Israeli teams continue to compete in international competitions without restrictions.

This is all to say that ethics—that is, fairness and harm—do matter in sport. The problem is that, all too often, we confuse what these concepts mean. When the sanctity of rules is cherished above the basic value of human life—or, to put it more precisely, certain human lives—something has gone terribly awry.

The real scandal of this summer’s Olympics was that too many of us and the institutions we are governed by seemed to care so much more about who wins and loses in sport than who kills and dies in genocide.

That’s a scandal we continue to relive every single day.

Nathan Kalman-Lamb is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick. Derek Silva is Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminology at King’s University College at Western University. They are co-authors of The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game (UNC Press, December 2024) and co-hosts (with Johanna Mellis) of The End of Sport podcast.

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