Professor Alan Tomlinson on the rise and fall of FIFA's Sepp Blatter.
19 Oct 2016
This new book by Professor Alan Tomlinson Football, Corruption and Lies: Revisiting Badfellas, the book FIFA tried to ban demonstrates the vital importance of critical investigative methods in sport studies as it explores the rise and fall of FIFA president Sepp Blatter.
The corruption scandal engulfing FIFA is arguably the biggest story in the history of modern sport and a watershed for sport governance. More than a decade ago, John Sugden and Alan Tomlinson laid the foundations for subsequent investigations with the publication of Badfellas, a groundbreaking work of critical sport sociology that exposed the systematic corruption at the heart of world football. It was a book that FIFA and Blatter tried to ban.
Now re-issued by publisher Routledge to combine the original contents of Badfellas with new chapters cover the current crisis pointing to the ways in which FIFA’s new administration can learn from the Blatter story. The prequel traces the course of Sugden and Tomlinson’s game-changing investigation into FIFA, while the sequel updates the FIFA story from 2002 onwards and provides a chronology of crises and scandals within the FIFA narrative.
