The Referee Who Was Paid to Stay Home

There is a particular kind of problem that money is used to close rather than to solve, and the BBC has reported one of them this weekend. Somali referee Omar Artan, denied entry to the United States to officiate at this World Cup, will still receive his tournament fee from FIFA in full.^{T2, BBC} The cheque is the right thing to do. It is also the smallest possible version of the right thing to do, and the gap between those two statements is the column.

Consider what the sentence actually contains. A governing body selected an official, judged him good enough to referee matches at the largest tournament it stages, and then could not get him into one of the countries hosting it. The barrier was not his competence, which FIFA had already certified by appointing him. The barrier was a border. And the institution’s response to a border it could not move was to move money instead.

I do not want to be unfair to the decision in front of us. Paying Artan is correct, and refusing to pay him would have been a second injustice stacked on the first. The BBC’s report is narrow and I will not stretch it past what it says; the figure, the matches he was meant to take, the precise mechanics of the refusal are not in the account I am working from, and I am not going to invent them to make the argument louder.^{T2, BBC} The argument does not need them. The argument is structural.

A World Cup expanded to 48 teams and spread across host nations was sold, in part, as football opening its arms. The competition that markets itself as the world’s game has now produced a case in which an official from Somalia could be appointed to it but not admitted to it. Those two facts cannot both be comfortable. Either the appointment meant something, in which case the exclusion is a failure the host arrangement should never have permitted, or the appointment was always contingent on a visa officer’s mood, in which case the global tournament is rather less global than its branding insists.

What a full fee buys, in cases like this, is silence. It allows everyone to say the matter was handled, because the wronged party did not lose money, and a story that might have run as a question about who a tournament is actually open to instead runs as a line about a payment processed. That is the function of the cheque. It is not corruption and it is not malice. It is the ordinary administrative reflex of a body that would rather settle an individual than examine a system.

The harder questions sit untouched. Will every official appointed to this tournament be able to work it, regardless of the passport they carry? If not, who decided that a competition could be awarded to hosts whose entry rules its own appointees might not clear? And what does FIFA intend to do the next time, because there will be a next time, when the barrier falls not on a referee who can be quietly paid but on a player, a coach, or a travelling supporter who cannot?

Omar Artan will be made whole, and that is as it should be. But a man paid to stay home is not the same as a tournament that let him in, and an institution that knows the difference has chosen, this weekend, to act as though it does not.

Diana “Dee” Stephanopoulos writes on football governance for MercatoWire. Sources named in body. Tier 2: BBC.