By David Owen
March 18 – And the answer, ladies and gentlemen, was $3,634,857. With the annual deficit widely expected, much the liveliest interest in FIFA’s just published 2015 financial report was always likely to concern disclosure of former President Joseph Blatter’s famously undisclosed remuneration. And there it is in unsparing detail on page 65, revealing not just his gross salary – $2,964,379 – but also how a variety of additional components, including variable compensation, social security contributions and accident/illness insurance, took the full total to $3,634,857.
By the standards applying nowadays in the corporate world, this scale of pay packet is far from gargantuan. For a sports administrator, however, even one who presided for 17 years over the world’s richest international sports federation (IF), it is, suffice to say, a more than tidy sum.
Cheek by jowl, Blatter’s former chief lieutenant Jérôme Valcke, the former secretary general, was accorded identical treatment. In the Frenchman’s case, the overall tally came to a not inconsiderable $2,124,822.
With the 2015 deficit weighing in much as expected at $122 million on revenue of $1.15 billion, the other main point of interest in the 134 page document was the move by new broom, Gianni Infantino, elected President on February 26, to rewrite the 2015-18 budget.
The main aim of this appeared to be to enable him to start to make good the spending pledges that helped to get him elected. Whereas the original budget for the four-year cycle that will culminate with the 2018 World Cup pencilled in $900 million of development spending, this has now been lifted by well over 50% (assuming the proposal is accepted) to $1.417 billion.
And where – given FIFA’s annus horribilis – is this extra cash going to come from? Infantino has opted to up the revenue forecast from $5 billion exactly to $5.656 billion.
Even given the dreadful start to the cycle, this is not as ambitious a new target as some might presume. FIFA managed to generate more than $5.1 billion of event-related revenue alone over the four years culminating with the last World Cup in Brazil in 2014. Under normal circumstances, the original goal for 2015-18 would have been comfortably outstripped. While marketing revenue is thought to be running well behind target, there were already rumours at last month’s Extraordinary Congress that a substantial new Chinese sponsor might soon be signed up.
On the cost side, expenditure reached $1.274 billion in 2015 – up $240 million from the total incurred in 2011, the corresponding year of the previous quadrennial cycle. Spending on legal matters doubled from $31.3 million in 2014 to $61.5 million.
One area where cost savings will be made is in salaries. Infantino will earn less than Blatter, and whoever becomes his second in command will have to accept a smaller pay packet than former secretary general Valcke.
It has also been decided by FIFA’s compensation committee that Infantino should be paid less than his new number two now that the presidency has been stripped of much of its executive power.
According to FIFA accounts, $39.7 million was paid to “key management personnel” in 2014. Executive committee members, too, will have to share the pain and are facing a lowering of their remuneration under a new wage structure as part of the body’s rebranding as a 36-member council. Annual remuneration for an exco member was revealed at $300,000 including allowances and pension payment for those who have served at least eight years.
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