After the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) announced its decision to reform the organisation and to commit to greater transparency earlier this year, it asked Prof. Dr. Mark Pieth to advise on the reorganisation of its governance.

In this role, Prof. Pieth examined the organisational structures and procedures and their abilities to deal with existing risks and challenges.

Prof. Pieth's report emphasises that even though FIFA is organised as an association under Swiss law, it has the risk exposure of a powerful multinational corporation or an international organisation. Therefore, the compliance structures need to be improved to match the level of large organisations in all dimensions including conflict of interest and the prevention of corruption.

The membership structure of FIFA presents a further challenge in terms of governance since its members are its supervisors and beneficiaries at the same time.

These assessments lead to the following specific requirements:

• On the level of corporate governance, a very professional compliance program is necessary.
• As a quasi-international organisation, FIFA has to establish procedures to ensure democracy, transparency and adherence to the rule of law.
• In particular in FIFA's relations to member organisations, a very serious conflict of interest regulation is needed.

All these requirements have to be translated into concrete recommendations.

Prof. Pieth has recently been named Chairman of the Independence Governance Committee and will, in this role, form a multi-stakeholder group with influential people with backgrounds in law, sports, marketing and governance to join him to work on further recommendations to improve FIFA`s governance and transparency. The Independent Governance Committee will take up its tasks immediately after its constitution by the Executive Committee on the 17th of December and will report back on its progress in regular intervals.