As Australia and New Zealand host the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup for the first time, a lesser-known, but no less worthy football writers’ event has also kicked off in our region.
The Football Writers Festival was held in Sydney on the eve of the Women’s World Cup, and hosted dozens of well-known writers who love watching soccer’s on-field glories as much as they love investigating its back room dealings.
These writers – like UK-based sport journalist Nick Harris and Australian investigative writer Jack Kerr – work hard, often over several years, to publish some of thornier truths behind the world’s beautiful game.
Investigative writers with their eyes on the ball
Nick Harris is UK newspaper The Mail on Sunday’s Chief Sports News Correspondent – a position he has held for the past 13 years.
Over that time, he has led major investigations into sports world corruption, which he admits have made him more than a few enemies at the highest level of power.
‘When we broke the Russian athletics doping story in 2013, I don’t think Putin was too pleased,’ Harris recalls, adding that the government-appointed director of Russia’s drug program is now in witness protection in the US, having fled the country after Harris’ story broke.
In addition to these perilous outcomes for those directly involved, the story proved a bombshell for the international sports world, with repercussions that echo to this day. (Notably, it led to Russia’s eight-year suspension from World Athletics in 2015 and saw 43 Russian Olympic athletes stripped of their medals, among other things.)
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But even when sporting power-players want writers like Harris to disappear, the investigative journalist says he remains focused on telling the difficult stories that he sees as vital to the scene.
‘If you look at a sport like football – which I’ve also written about in relation to corruption at the highest levels – it’s very much the people’s game,’ Harris says.
‘And I think people absolutely deserve to know when their game is being corrupted and abused, and readers are very interested in these stories because it’s part of protecting the thing that may be most important to them in their lives at that moment.’
Further to that, Harris says there will be a continued need for sharp eyes on the business-end of sporting codes like World Football as their financial power continues to climb.
‘FIFA is only getting richer and richer,’ he says. ‘I think its income projections for this four-year cycle in the lead-up to the next men’s World Cup [in 2026] is US$11 billion. The TV rights alone are worth billions of dollars and all the commercial partners are paying tens of millions of dollars each – it’s just an enormous cash machine,’ he says.
Local football teams’ links to global money markets
The stories behind these rivers of cash also preoccupy Australian investigative writer Jack Kerr, who, like Harris, has devoted much of his career to uncovering some the financial dirt beneath soccer’s evergreen pitch.
Most recently, Kerr’s work has had a local bent, focusing on some dubious machinations behind Australia’s round ball sporting code.
Kerr says his writing about the underbelly of Australian soccer has largely been driven by his love of the game and his wish to see it freed from the shackles of corrupt international money markets.
‘Football is so important to so many people,’ he tells ArtsHub. ‘So, I guess I can’t stand by while there are some bad actors out there who are taking advantage of that.’
The corruption at the heart of Kerr’s writing centres on the encroachment of the sports gambling industry into competitions that are often little more than community events.
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He explains that, each week, there are around 250 Australian soccer matches played across the code’s professional, semi-professional and amateur leagues that are being offered on offshore betting markets. Amazingly, these Australian games can make up more than 8% of that betting market’s activity on some weekends, ‘which is just a staggering amount,’ Kerr says.
Once he realised how many international bets were being placed on Australian soccer games – mostly within the semi-professional and amateur leagues – the writer was concerned about how this could corrupt the local game, and the types of criminal figures who could be profiting from their data.
‘It pushes the door wide open for match fixers and, because most of their suspicious bets will be placed overseas, in jurisdictions that lack transparency, it is often almost impossible for authorities to take any action,’ he says.
‘Our recent investigations have even found … some gambling operators offering amateur Australian sports are cyber scam compounds in Southeast Asia where human trafficking is rife.’
Can you make a living as an investigative sports writer?
Kerr’s writing on football has been picked up by outlets like The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel, and he and a group of colleagues recently won Europe’s biggest prize for cross-border investigative collaborations. But he says this work has not been funded through traditional means, and that the industry needs to consider new ways of keeping investigative journalism strong.
‘This investigative work I’ve done is really only happening because of EU grants I’ve received for collaborative projects with international colleagues,’ Kerr says.
‘I don’t see any similar support for this kind of investigative journalism happening in Australia right now,’ he adds.
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By contrast, Harris says he feels very well-supported by his employer – The Mail on Sunday – which has backed his investigative work since he started with the masthead in 2010.
‘[The Mail on Sunday] is one of the best resourced publications in the UK to do this kind of work,’ Harris says.
‘I think there’s an appetite among readers and certain other proprietors in the UK to support investigative journalism,’ he adds. ‘That said, I could probably only get to a dozen names before I’d run out of names of journalists who, like me, are funded to do this kind of work.’
Harris says that, although his CV is loaded with scoops that have helped clean up certain sporting codes, those wins have not come easily, and it can take years before his stories prompt the relevant authorities to take action.
‘I was reporting on all sorts of corruption issues within FIFA for 19 years before the FBI and the [US] Department of Justice brought the whole edifice down in 2015.
‘So it can be frustrating when you report on this stuff and nothing happens. But eventually things do happen and our work does contribute to the bad seeds getting weeded out, and that’s one of the reasons this kind of work must be supported,’ he concludes.
