Quarter of a million a year. That’s what FIFA pays

The International Football Federation (FIFA) is perhaps the most generous non-profit organization in the world. The salaries of its employees far exceed the usual pay in such organizations. A study by the London-based company Emolument shows that the average annual income of a FIFA employee is $242,000. Meanwhile, salaries in the most famous non-profits are around $66,000. FIFA salaries have even outstripped those of Wall Street stockbrokers and traders at the largest U.S. banks, whose annual pay is about $190,000 according to Emolument. “It’s beyond comprehension that FIFA employees earn more than stock market traders, who are often considered the embodiment of greed,” said Alice Leguay, co-founder of Emolument.

FIFA’s annual report for last year shows that just the salaries of 25 members of the executive committee and twelve directors of individual divisions totaled $42 million. And nine of these generously paid officials are currently facing charges of corruption and money laundering from U.S. investigators.

“These scandals of recent weeks are putting FIFA’s top officials under the microscope. They should be the subject of scrutiny, and apart from other issues, perhaps the new FIFA leadership will also address these salaries,” said sports analyst and football agent Jozef Tokos for the Economic Daily.

According to him, however, average annual earnings in this organization should not be condemned outright. FIFA is based in Switzerland, which has one of the highest average wages in the world. “And if you want to have the best people in the federation and offer them salaries comparable to the private sector, you can end up with an apparently high average,” Tokos explained.

But experts from the British Isles point out that FIFA holds a monopoly on football and, unlike the private sector, produces virtually nothing. “The vast majority of FIFA’s huge revenues are not the result of enormous effort or talent of its employees. Revenues grow thanks to the ever-increasing global interest in football,” said Simon Shibli, professor of sports management at the University of Sheffield, for Reuters.

Emolument collected average salary data from almost 3,000 companies in banking, insurance, and the non-profit sector. The comparison of FIFA’s annual salaries with those of other top sports federations is also striking. For example, in the European Football Union (UEFA) the average annual salary last year was $177,000, in the International Cycling Union (UCI) $107,000, and in the tennis federation $100,000 per employee. “This is a shocking statistic – the gap between FIFA and other organizations or private companies is outrageous. For a non-profit organization, salaries should not be comparable to those achieved by people in the private sector,” said Leigh Robinson, professor at the University of Stirling’s School of Sport. In addition to the sheer size of the salaries, FIFA’s lack of transparency in the distribution of wages and bonuses is also problematic. It is impossible to determine the criteria by which pay is allocated to employees in the football federation. And to this day, the official annual salary of still-FIFA president Sepp Blatter is unknown. In the past, he admitted to earning $1.4 million a year, but several foreign media outlets have reported it could be up to four times higher.