Transparency and the Football Pitch
Nov 23rd, 2009 • Posted in: Commentaryby Rushworth M. Kidder
Last week in British Columbia, someone asked me how, with the world collapsing into moral fragmentation, anything could give us hope. Ever the optimist, I pointed to greater transparency as a force for moral improvement.
The words were hardly out of my mouth when the European football (soccer) circuit delivered up a pair of appalling stories. So let me explain why I’m still sticking to my view.
Story 1 concerns French football player Thierry Henry. Last week, in a match with Ireland to determine which country would go to South Africa for the World Cup finals, Henry was caught on video using his hand to manipulate the ball in a play that set up the French team’s winning goal. The referee didn’t see it, and Henry didn’t call a foul on himself.
The Irish team’s demand for a rematch was overruled by FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association, the sport’s global governing body), which explained that “during matches, decisions are taken by the referee and these decisions are final.” Henry’s own statements did little to burnish his case. “I will be honest, it was a hand ball,” he said, according to the Toronto Globe & Mail. “But I’m not the ref. I played it. The ref allowed it.”
Henry now faces blistering criticism from, among others, the leading union for physical education teachers in France itself. Concerned about the brazen lesson Henry sent to French youngsters, the coaches’ statement noted that “the France team will go to South Africa courtesy of indisputable cheating, which highlights the downward spiral affecting football today.”
In light of Story Two, the coaches proved prescient. This second item concerns the bust-up of a European soccer gambling ring. According to German police, its several hundred members bribed referees, coaches, and players to fix some 200 matches (including three in the Champions League) this year in nine countries. “Without question, this is the biggest betting scandal in the history of European soccer,” said Peter Limacher, the head of discipline for European soccer’s governing body, according to the New York Times.
You don’t have to be an arch-pessimist to let these stories get you down. Their message upends the trust of millions of fans who expect sportsmanlike teams to play fair. It points to a culture of calculated deception that infects not only sports but financial institutions and legislative bodies. It gives rise to a cynical vision of a world where getting a goal is indistinguishable from getting away with a goal — a world whose credo is “don’t get caught” rather than “don’t do wrong.”
Go deeper, however, and you’ll spot an encouraging trend. In both these cases, what broke open the story was transparency. In the end, there was simply too much light — no place for the scammers to hide. Henry was done in by the technology of instant replay: Twenty years ago, few would have seen the wrong, and proving it would have been nearly impossible. The gambling ring was done in not only by wire taps and cell phone intercepts, but by computer analyses of betting patterns that highlight unusual gaming activity in real time.
Are these technologies an unmitigated blessing? No. There’s a moral case against each one. If instant replay becomes the standard for refereeing sports, high-stakes games could last days instead of hours — either that, or a video record everyone knows is available would be ignored in deference to the merely human abilities of a referee. And if cell phone intercepts and wiretaps are so successful at solving economic crimes — and if economic crimes really do lie at the heart of the current recession — then why not throw privacy to the winds, authorize these technologies at every juncture, and always put the good of the community above the rights of the individual?
Transparency, then, sets up profound right-versus-right issues. Yet its presence is far better than its absence. The history of recent anticorruption efforts suggests a simple rule, which is that in proportion as you shine in the light and wipe out the dark corners, corruption withers and honesty takes root.
So is transparency the saving radiance that will return us to moral probity? Not without two powerful caveats:
- Don’t confuse transparency with technology. The latter powerfully increases the former. But transparency is a condition, not a technique. It involves minds, not machines, and it depends more on values than on rules. Used properly, technology not only will allow better enforcement of rules but will create cultures where it’s easier to obey the core values of honesty and fairness.
- Remember that transparency depends on consensus. Without a public willingness to label corruption as wrong, exposed evil merely will be shrugged off, miscreants will feel no shame, and wrongdoing will become the new normal. What makes transparency work is outrage. Maintain that, and transparency will continue to make strides against corruption.
Which brings me back to my reason for hope. So far, the world is genuinely upset with Henry. Very few thoughtful observers applaud him for befooling the refs. And fewer still are willing to agree that football is happily corrupt and that every game is satisfactorily predetermined. Transparency, it seems, is alive and well and living (for the moment) in Europe.
©2009 Institute for Global Ethics
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Very interesting perspective on transparency, technology and public standards. And what about another — the commercial angle? I imagine Henry’s business agent will scold the star about ruining his value as a spokesperson for big brands. He’s taken money out of his own pocket, his agent’s, and those of Tiger Woods and Roger Federer with whom Thierry Henry formed a trio of brand champions for Gillette. I doubt we’ll be seeing those ads again! Wouldn’t that be a nice irony, if considerations from the profits-obsessed marketing sector were to make sports figures more conscious of behaving properly!
I enjoyed both this week’s and last week’s Commentaries. I have thought about them in fleeting moments as I have been doing my last minute fall yard clean-up and have had an “aha” moment of sorts. Last week’s (11/16) articulated five standards and this week’s (11/23) addressed transparency, and it strikes me that one of the most fundamental lessons I took away from the Ethical Fitness Seminar in Camden is the simple concept of ethics being a commitment to the unenforceable. As I look again at the five standards all of them encompass this concept, but especially responsibility, fairness, and honesty. The concept of transparency as a condition of the mind that can be supported by, but should not be dependent on, technology also encompasses it. In the age of sound bites, it strikes me that the simple phrase “commitment to the unenforceable” captures the essence of ethics in a way that people can walk around with it in their heads and use it at a moment’s notice in everyday life. It is such a pure concept that there is almost no way to rationalize one’s way around it. It captures “doing the right thing” in a way that makes it operationally useful. I have an interest in working on instilling ethics in the educational process starting at a very early age (i.e. grade school) and plan to try to do something with it locally (once the fall yard work is done), and I think that concept is a great platform that even young people can understand and it lends itself easily to lots of examples and exercises. I also think it is a good “sound bite” that would be useful in broader public education and promotion of ethics.
Bruce Balfe
Valparaiso, IN
It seems to me that transparency is another shade of getting caught. While I agree transparency is needed, it still relies on an external influence on behavior as opposed to a self-regulating, internal control over one’s own behavior. Nevertheless, transparency is useful in establishing what society considers acceptable and unacceptable, which in turn influences one’s own ethics.