The belly of the sport: Dirty games

Exposés about sports corruption are not new, but they have become more common. There has never been a golden age of pure sport, but there is now a growing public awareness that many of the core ideals of sport - such as fairness, integrity, character and respect - are too often real in the name only.

Benjamin Best's award-winning film "Dirty Games" is a tour de force that delivers a lot of shame about high-performance sport. It's a compilation of stories about arrogance, exploitation, stinginess, manipulation and crime.

Dirty Games was recently unveiled in Australia at the German Film Festival and is now available to local consumers on request. The documentary is a critical addition to the work of another German reporter / filmmaker, Hajo Seppelt, who uncovered state-sponsored doping in Russia.

Inhumanity

Dirty Games begins with a shattering account of the exploitation of Nepalese workers in Qatar. On arrival, they discovered that the "employment contracts" they signed were not worth the paper they were written on.

The construction of World Cup venues was certainly an opportunity for FIFA's Qatarists to create safe and rewarding working conditions and a legacy of goodwill. Instead, as the film shows, many Nepalese workers returned home with serious injuries or worse, in a coffin.

This is the height of indecency. Both Qatar and the global companies that have used it to build infrastructure are immensely wealthy and therefore have the ability to be socially responsible managers. Instead, they show an obvious disregard for human life.

Dirty Games also brings us to Rio de Janeiro, where an Olympic Park was planned for a poor western part of the city. The residents did not want to move because they had no real options elsewhere. The police were asked to move them on, which they violently did.

Instead of the Olympics being a mechanism that could bring disadvantaged people into contact, for example, by involving them in this park project, they were taken out of sight and reason. The poor and the weak had no currency in Rio's account of the Olympic spirit.

It is an amazing irony that this city has just admitted that it is "broke" after spending government spending on the World Cup and the Olympics.

Audacity

Dirty Games is aimed specifically at FIFA. It relies on Richard Blumenthal, who spoke in front of a subcommittee of the US Senate on FBI charges against FIFA.

After examining the evidence, he concluded that FIFA is a "Mafia-like crime consortium" that is "more obvious, open and arrogant" in its corruption than the mafia itself.

Countries that want to dine at the FIFA table and thus host the World Cup come with gifts to those who have direct or indirect influence on the outcome of competitions. The commitment is high and the ethical standards too often low.

Afast Company Is So Bracing

Those with high principles, such as the Australian Bonita Mersiades, who participated in the bid for the Football World Cup of the Australian Federation (FFA), risked being knocked off the negotiating table. Mersiades had the audacity to ask questions about where and why large sums of money went abroad - in one case to the private account of the now disgraced Caribbean FIFA chief Jack Warner. The FFA showed Mersiades the door.

Perversion

Dirty Games reveals two particularly annoying examples of deception in American sports. In an exceptional situation, former American boxing promoter Charles Farrell admitted to organizing "hundreds" of battles.

He outlines the linguistic "code" that underpins the order of results: Farrell insists that the big winners of such deals are almost always the losers of the fight. Only elite boxers have the optimal combination of athletic ability and financial incentive to fight for victory.

On a personal level, Farrell openly admits that he has had enough of making a fight to "send his son through college." He was especially proud of that. Farrell lives in Boston, is now a seasoned pianist and seems to have no consequences from his recordings or his long association with organized crime organizations.

For many viewers, it is likely that a true eye-opener compromises the integrity of the rating of NBA games. Game officials are not allowed to play in NBA games, but according to former top referee Tim Donaghy, the practice is widespread.

At least to me, however, the big surprise was that Donaghy insisted that the NBA leadership put pressure on the referees to make other calls to the star players than to the regular players, and that the league made it clear to the referees Certain teams prefer to move forward (usually from big cities) and not from others (usually from smaller cities).

According to Donaghy, the NBA is so determined to maximize its financial position that it wanted to influence the opportunities for top athletes and the result for large clubs.

Donaghy's refereeing career ended abruptly when he was arrested by the FBI: The authorities were hearing about Donaghy's criminality by listening to an organized crime syndicate. He was in jail for 15 months, writing a memoir, Personal Foul. The NBA conducted an in-house investigation of the referee's gambling and found that this was widespread, but apparently not in NBA games. So no foul. Donaghy was therefore rather a "bad apple" than a typical one.

Dirty Games offers a provocative compilation of stories that discourage sports-traditionalists, upset sports whistleblowers, and hopefully spur them on such investigative reporting.

The most dignified and helpful response from sports organizations that take integrity and credibility seriously is the confrontation with independent critics such as Benjamin Best.