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Ditching Integrity: US college sports in crisis

Before the American Civil War (1861-65), every state in the Confederacy had stringent laws forbidding anyone to teach slaves reading and writing. In North Carolina, it was a crime to distribute books or pamphlets to slaves. After emancipation, and well into the mid-20th century, schools remained segregated in both the North and South either by […]

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Corruption on the fringes of FIFA

Sepp Blatter’s announcement on 2 June that he will step down as President of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) was met with reactions of disbelief, excitement and uncertainty from across the football world. Only a few days earlier, he had been re-elected by nearly two thirds of the 209 national member associations. With […]

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Fans can influence how football is run

Fans today are speaking out more about actions that take place off the field of play as well as on it. Ben Shave works at Supporters Direct Europe, an organisation that helps football fans gain influence in the running and ownership of clubs. Shave is also on the Expert Advisory Panel of the Corruption in […]

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Mega-event hosting by the world’s rising powers – more pitfalls than promises?

The geography of sport mega-event hosting is changing significantly, as several mega-event researchers had predicted, and we now see more prospective hosts from the Global South and East. Many of them are industrialising, rather than advanced economies, which raises the question why they would want to invest vast volumes of capital to stage an event […]

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Welcome to Transparency International’s new ‘Corruption in Sport Initiative’

There are few people on earth that are unaware of the magnitude of sport as a global industry, with revenues larger than China’s military budget or the nominal GDP of more than two-thirds of the world’s countries. Almost all of us play a part in it as participants, spectators or tax-payers. And yet, despite its […]

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What made corruption a hot topic in sports

Jens Sejer Andersen is on the Global Corruption Report Expert Advisory Panel. He is the international director of Play the Game, an international communications organisation that has held international conferences on sport, transparency and ethics since 1997, long before the topic became vogue. Play the Game has been at the vanguard explaining the links between […]

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Brazil emerging

Two nations now have the uncommon fortune of consecutively hosting the FIFA World Cup and the Olympic Games: Russia, and Brazil. This article will focus on Brazil, which saw the Brazilian people taking to the streets, exercising their right to protest corruption; in response, the Brazilian legislature has enacted substantial new anti-corruption laws; and enforcement […]

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Sports governance in the spotlight

The corruption crisis at FIFA, world football’s governing body, over the awarding of the World Cups to Russia and Qatar and the new reforms on the table this week at the International Olympic Committee (IOC) have put sports governance high on both the political and popular agenda as 2014 draws to a close. Sport is […]

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Corruption in the Americas: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly?

The 2014 Corruption Perceptions Index does not show significant movement in the scores of the countries in the Americas. For the more cynical among us, this is a good sign as there is always the possibility of worsening. But the reality is that stagnation is not good news. Each year that passes without things improving, […]

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FIFA: how to win back trust

Recently FIFA vice-president Jeffrey Webb admitted publicly that FIFA still had a lot of work to do to repair its battered image despite introducing a slew of organisational reforms. He’s right. FIFA is often seen as synonymous with scandal and not just for football fans. It is the butt of media satire, Twitter wit and […]

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