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Business Daily: Corruption and football cash

02/06/2011

Corruption and football cash

BBC World Service - Business Daily, Corruption and football cash

Will corruption scandals in world football put off the sponsors?

Billions of dollars of corporate sponsorship have made football the world's richest sport but will corruption scandals put off the sponsors?

Today Business Daily explores whether world football's financial backers, Coca-cola, McDonalds and the other corporate sponsors, will be put off by the recent allegations of corrruption.

It came as no surprise when Sepp Blatter was reappointed the undisputed king of world football yesterday - after all there were no other candidates. Mr Blatter's fourth term as the president of Fifa - the world football federation - was guaranteed when his only rival was suspended following allegations of corruption. But in the process the reputation of the organisation has taken a battering and some - most notably the Football Associations of England and Scotland - are demanding wholesale changes.  

So, will the sponsors who bankroll world football get behind this campaign? Are they worried that the claim of endemic corruption within the game will damage the brand they spend billions backing?  

Justin Rowlatt interviews Patrick Nally the man behind the first big sponsorship deals for world football back in the seventies. He brought Coca-Cola into football and also secured a young Sepp Blatter his first job with Fifa. 

Then we ask why aid donors think they are so much more generous than they actually are.

It has taken a sex scandal to get the International Monetary Fund onto the front pages of the newspapers across the developed world - the alleged attempted rape by the now former IMF head of a hotel maid in New York. Elsewhere in the world it has traditionally taken a lot less to get the IMF in the news. As our regular commentator Wycliff Muga reports, in Kenya even a visit from a senior IMF official has been considered newsworthy. But, he wonders, is the IMF really that important? Indeed, do both donors and recipients believe that development aid is more significant than it actually is?

And finally we go out into the beer halls of St Petersberg.  Russia is a famously thirsty nation - right near the top of the world's alcohol consumption league. As a result alcohol is wreaking terrible damage on the nation's health. Half of all premature deaths in Russia are caused by alcohol. No surprise then that the Russian government has been trying to wean its citizens off booze. One measure, introduced last year, was to double the tax on beer. That was a real headache for foreign brewers who'd enjoyed healthy profits from the Russian market. So how are they coping with the sudden hike? We have a report from Malcolm Borthwick in Russia's beer capital, St Petersburg.

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