The Circus Has a Basement

The Dark Side of Major Sporting Events

A World Cup final puts roughly 80,000 people in a building and over a billion in front of screens. For 90 minutes, or 120, or 120 plus penalties, most of the planet cares about the same thing at the same time. There are not many institutions left that can do that.

Give these events their due. The Olympics remain the only occasion on which a wrestler from Kyrgyzstan, a sprinter from Jamaica, and a swimmer from suburban Maryland compete under the same roof with the same rules. The Super Bowl is the last piece of genuinely shared American culture, watched by over 120 million people who agree on almost nothing else. Wimbledon has run a tennis tournament with taste and restraint since 1877, still cuts its grass to 8 millimeters, and still makes room for a public queue where an ordinary person with patience can buy a ticket. The World Cup produces moments of collective joy that entire nations organize their memories around. These events showcase real excellence, the product of thousands of hours of unglamorous work by athletes who mostly did that work in obscurity. They employ hundreds of thousands of people. They give cities and countries a deadline, and deadlines occasionally get useful things built. None of that is fake.

But the spectacle has a supply chain, and the supply chain has a basement. The tickets are rationed by algorithms designed to extract the maximum a desperate fan will pay. The stadiums are frequently paid for by taxpayers who will never afford a seat in them. The venues in poorer host countries are sometimes built by men who die doing it. The games themselves are increasingly wired into a gambling economy that has already corrupted players, coaches, and referees, and that sends death threats to college athletes who miss a rebound. The children who supply the pipeline of future champions have been abused by the very officials assigned to protect them, and the institutions above those officials looked away for years. And the governing bodies that preside over all of it, FIFA and the International Olympic Committee foremost, have compiled criminal records that would embarrass a mid-sized cartel.

None of this is an accident of scale. Each failure has names attached. Executives chose dynamic pricing. Legislators chose to hand billionaires public money. Federation officials chose to take the bribes, and other officials chose not to look. The purpose of this article is to walk through the basement, room by room, with the lights on.

The Ticket Racket

Start with the simplest transaction in sports: a person buying a seat.

For the 2026 World Cup, FIFA introduced dynamic pricing to the tournament for the first time, meaning ticket prices rise and fall with demand, mostly rise. The results were predictable to anyone who has bought an airline ticket, except that no competing airline exists. When the United States, Canada, and Mexico bid for the tournament, the bid documents promised a maximum final ticket price of $1,550. FIFA’s initial top-category final tickets went on sale at $6,730, already 4 times the most expensive seat at Qatar 2022. By the April 2026 sales window, that same category cost $10,990. On FIFA’s own resale marketplace, where the organization collects transaction fees on top, tickets have been listed for more than $2 million. Prices rose for 90 of the 104 matches. Adjusted for inflation, World Cup ticket prices had been roughly stable for 30 years before this tournament.

FIFA president Gianni Infantino defended the prices as adapting to the North American market, and told fans they should chill. The defense fails on its own terms. Dynamic pricing can lower prices when sellers compete, as economists studying airlines have documented. FIFA has no competitor. Nobody else sells World Cup tickets, and no substitute product exists. A monopolist running a demand-based auction on a once-in-a-lifetime event, while withholding all information about remaining inventory, is not discovering a market price. It is running a squeeze. Fans waited hours in online queues without knowing what they would pay if they reached the front. FIFA declined to disclose how many tickets remained, when prices would adjust, or by what rule. A consumer attorney described the strategy plainly: tell people they must pay now or miss out forever, while making it impossible to verify whether that is true.

The affordability gestures were ornamental. After the backlash, FIFA introduced a $60 Supporter Entry Tier for every match, including the final. Reporting put the actual number of such seats in the hundreds per game, in stadiums that hold up to 80,000. England’s allocations for the semifinal and final did not sell out; every fan who applied got a seat, at a lowest final price of roughly €3,613 through the official supporters’ channel. At Euro 2024 in Berlin, the equivalent ticket cost €96. Meanwhile, the gamble embedded in dynamic pricing cut the other way for anyone who planned ahead: 60 days before kickoff, average cheapest prices across the 11 US host cities fell 37 percent, and 59 percent in the Bay Area, punishing precisely the traveling fans who booked flights and hotels early. The attorneys general of New York and New Jersey opened a joint investigation and issued a subpoena, stating that FIFA had turned ticket buying into a gauntlet of confusion and fake scarcity. Attorneys general in Texas and California joined the inquiry. FIFA ignored requests from House Democrats and the mayor of New York to change course.

The traditional scalper, by comparison, looks almost quaint. The modern version is a software operation. Bots autofill purchase forms, defeat CAPTCHAs, and buy tickets in bulk the moment they go on sale, then flip them at markups that have reached several thousand percent. Congress outlawed this in 2016 with the Better Online Ticket Sales Act, which empowered the Federal Trade Commission to fine violators. In the following 8 years, the FTC brought exactly 1 enforcement action. One. Ticketmaster claims to block 200 million bot attempts per day, a figure that mostly demonstrates the scale of the industry the law failed to touch. Then in September 2025, the FTC sued Ticketmaster itself, alleging the company knowingly let brokers bypass purchase limits and then collected fees on the resulting resales, $3.7 billion in resale revenue between 2019 and 2024. The platform positioned as the fans’ defense against scalpers was, per the complaint, the scalpers’ business partner. The defense that resale is simple supply and demand ignores who built the supply constraint: the same firms profit on the primary sale, the resale, and the fees on both, which means scarcity is not their problem; it is their product.

The fix here is not mysterious. Ontario caps resale markups at 50 percent above face value. Several Australian states cap them at 10 percent and ban bot software outright, with corporate fines up to $110,000. New Jersey, home of this year’s final, already caps broker markups at 50 percent. Enforcement budgets for existing law would cost a rounding error of what fans lose annually. FIFA could publish its inventory and pricing rules tomorrow at zero cost. That these things have not happened is a decision made annually by people whose names are known.

The Bill Arrives at the Wrong Address

MetLife Stadium in New Jersey is one of only 3 current NFL stadiums built without direct public construction money, and even it received over $250 million in state-funded land and infrastructure. The other 29 franchises did better. American taxpayers have spent roughly $30 billion on major-league stadiums over the past 34 years, more than $10.6 billion of it on current NFL venues alone, not counting property tax exemptions or the federal revenue lost to tax-exempt municipal bonds. The National Football League generated over $23 billion in revenue last year.

The recent deals set records. New York State and Erie County committed $850 million to the Buffalo Bills’ new Highmark Stadium, which opened at a total cost of about $2.2 billion, the largest public subsidy for an NFL facility at the time it was approved. Bills owner Terry Pegula has an estimated net worth above $9 billion. The new stadium seats 60,108, which is 11,500 fewer seats than the one it replaced, with personal seat licenses running as high as $50,000 for the right to then buy season tickets. The public paid for a smaller building, so it can afford less. Nashville promptly broke Buffalo’s record: the Tennessee Titans’ new stadium carries roughly $1.26 billion in state and local commitments, $500 million in state bonds plus $760 million from the city’s sports authority, toward a $2.1 billion building that will also be smaller than the one it replaces. Once bond interest over the 20-plus-year repayment term is counted, analysts put the total public expenditure near $2.3 billion. The franchise is valued at $6.3 billion.

The standard defense is that stadiums generate growth, jobs, and tax revenue that repay the public. This is the most thoroughly tested claim in urban economics, and it is false. A comprehensive 2022 survey in the Journal of Economic Surveys concluded that nearly all empirical studies find little to no tangible impact of teams and facilities on local economic activity, and that subsidies far exceed any observed benefits. A 2017 poll found 80 percent of economists agreeing that the costs outweigh the benefits. The mechanism is not complicated: entertainment spending at a stadium is mostly entertainment spending diverted from restaurants, theaters, and bars elsewhere in the same metro area, while the team’s revenues flow to an ownership group that does not live there. Even the friendliest case study, the Atlanta Braves’ suburban development, produced sales tax gains consistent with more activity, but not enough to cover the subsidy, per the Kennesaw State economist who measured it. The secondary defense, that tourists pay through hotel taxes, quietly concedes the point: a hotel tax spent on a stadium is a hotel tax not spent on schools, transit, or lower taxes, in a city whose actual residents buy most of the tickets.

The federal government subsidizes all of it through a drafting error. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 tried to end tax-exempt bonds for private use and instead created a loophole: if a local government finances at least 90 percent of a stadium and does not repay the bonds from stadium revenue, the bonds qualify as tax-exempt. So cities structure the deals to maximize public exposure on purpose, because that is what unlocks the cheap federal money. Representative Earl Blumenauer introduced a bill to close the loophole in 2022. It went nowhere, as its predecessors did.

The leverage that makes all this work is the threat of relocation, and the league maintains that leverage deliberately by keeping the supply of franchises below the number of cities that want one. The threat is frequently a bluff. Buffalo, with one of the most loyal fan bases in professional sports and an owner with nowhere better to go, was never realistically losing the Bills; the $850 million was, in the words of one analysis, a ransom paid to prevent a departure that was never on the table. Nashville’s case is more instructive still: the Titans were not even threatening to leave. The city was bound by a 1996 lease obligating it to maintain a first-class facility through 2039, an open-ended promise that owners then priced at up to $2 billion in hypothetical renovations, making a new stadium look like the bargain. The lesson for any city council is old and simple: do not sign open-ended obligations to businesses that can leave, and do not spend public money without a referendum. Oklahoma City at least put its billion-dollar arena tax to a vote and won it honestly, which is more than most of these deals can say. The rest were approved by councils and legislatures, by named officials, most of whom will be out of office when the bonds mature.

The Olympic version of this problem is worse because the Olympics combine stadium economics with a deadline that cannot slip. The Oxford Olympics Study, the most systematic accounting of Games costs, found an average cost overrun of 156 percent in real terms, the highest of any category of megaproject on earth, and found overruns in every single Games since 1960 without exception. No other megaproject type has a 100 percent failure rate on budgets. Montreal 1976 was overrun by 720 percent and took about 3 decades to pay off. Sochi 2014 cost $21.9 billion. The 2024 update of the study found that costs are statistically increasing, that overruns have worsened since 2008, and that Paris 2024, sold to the French public as the frugal Games, came in around $8.7 billion, 115 percent over its bid budget. The IOC’s reforms have not bent the curve. The authors’ recommendation to prospective host cities was direct: do not host. Cities have been listening; the bidding pools for recent Games shrank to the point that the IOC began awarding Games decades ahead to whoever remained. The obvious structural remedy has been on the table for years: rotate the Games among a small set of permanent venues that already exist, the way Wimbledon has used the same grounds for a century and a half, and stop asking a new city to build a $10 billion campus for 17 days of use. Los Angeles 2028, which plans to build essentially nothing new, will test whether the model survives contact with reality.

Bodies in the Foundation

Cost overruns are an accounting problem. In some host countries, construction is a mortality problem.

Qatar won the 2022 World Cup in December 2010 and spent the following decade building 7 stadiums, a metro system, an airport expansion, and roughly a new city on the labor of some 2 million migrant workers, mostly from Nepal, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, working under the kafala sponsorship system that tied their legal residence to their employer. In 2021, The Guardian reported that at least 6,500 migrant workers from 5 South Asian countries had died in Qatar since the award. That figure requires honest handling, and it rarely gets it from either side. It counts all deaths of migrants from those countries, from all causes, including retirees and dependents; not all of those deaths were work-related, and no more than about 20 percent of the migrant workforce worked in construction at all. But Qatar’s official counterclaim, that only 37 deaths were linked to World Cup projects and only 3 of those were work-related, is worse than misleading. It defines World Cup projects as a handful of showcase stadium sites while excluding the metro, the roads, the hotels, and the city built to host the event, and it rests on a death-certification system that Amnesty International found routinely attributed young men’s deaths to natural causes or cardiac arrest without investigation. The honest statement is that the true toll is in the thousands, that Qatar declined to count it properly, and that the failure to count was itself a choice. Human Rights Watch said there is clear evidence of thousands of migrant worker deaths in the lead-up to the tournament.

The system that produced those deaths was not hidden. Workers paid illegal recruitment fees to get the jobs, arrived to find contracts swapped for worse ones, surrendered passports, lived in labor camps, and worked outdoors in summer heat that Qatar itself later restricted. When roughly 60 workers protested 7 months of unpaid wages in August 2022, 3 months before kickoff, Qatar arrested and deported them. FIFA’s own human rights policy, adopted in 2017, committed the organization to remediation for workers harmed by World Cup-related work. The European Parliament formally asked FIFA to compensate the families of the dead during the tournament itself. FIFA, an organization that generated a record $7.5 billion in the Qatar cycle, never established the compensation fund that Amnesty, a global coalition of rights groups, and a majority of fans surveyed in 15 countries asked for. Qatar did enact real reforms under pressure, dismantling parts of kafala and setting a minimum wage, and those reforms are worth acknowledging; enforcement has been another matter, and the men already dead collected nothing.

The gentler version of the same phenomenon happens in rich host cities, where the event does not kill the poor; it relocates them. Rio de Janeiro’s city government evicted an estimated 77,000 people from favelas between 2009 and 2015 in preparation for the World Cup and Olympics. Within 3 months of winning the bid, the city announced that 119 favelas would be removed. The community of Vila Autódromo, sitting on the edge of the planned Olympic Park, was ground down from more than 600 families to 20 through demolition, intimidation, and selective compensation, while 60 percent of the Olympic Park land was slated for private condominium development after the Games, which tells you what the project was actually for. Paris 2024 ran the polite European edition: aid groups documented roughly 12,500 people evicted from encampments, squats, and shantytowns in the year before the Games, about 5 times the usual pace, with migrants bused to regional cities that had not agreed to receive them and food distribution suspended in cleared zones. The coalition tracking the removals calculated that €10 million would have sheltered everyone affected, in an event that cost France on the order of €12 billion. Officials denied the sweeps had anything to do with the Olympics, which required believing the 5-fold acceleration was a coincidence timed to the opening ceremony. The pattern repeats because the incentive repeats: the event rewards the appearance of order, the poor are visible, and moving them is cheaper than housing them, provided nobody in authority is ever named and billed for the decision.

Trafficking: The Crime and the Myth

Every February, officials warn that the Super Bowl is the largest human trafficking event in the United States. The claim deserves scrutiny because it is false, and because the falsehood does damage of its own.

The empirical record is unusually consistent. A review in the Anti-Trafficking Review examined 55 scholarly articles on major sporting events and trafficking and found little evidence connecting them. No host city has documented a measurable rise in trafficking before or after the game, not Houston in 2017, not Atlanta in 2019, where an FBI raid billed as a trafficking operation turned out to be a routine roundup of adult sex workers, not Tampa or Phoenix or New Orleans since. Research around the 2010 Vancouver Olympics and the 2010 World Cup in South Africa found, if anything, reduced commercial sex activity during the events, likely because of saturation policing. The famous numbers underneath the claim dissolve on inspection: the assertion that 10,000 prostitutes were brought to Miami for the 2010 Super Bowl has no traceable source, and the 300,000 trafficked children statistic is a misquote of a 2001 University of Pennsylvania estimate of children at risk. The National Human Trafficking Hotline does see slightly elevated call volume on Super Bowl weekend, which its operator, Polaris, attributes to the surge in advertising of the hotline itself. Before 2018, 76 percent of US print media coverage repeated the spike narrative anyway.

Why does the myth persist? Researchers at the University of Texas and the University of Minnesota identified the machinery: it raises money for advocacy organizations, it lets host-city politicians perform vigilance, and it gives law enforcement a marquee justification for sweeps that mostly arrest sex workers and produce press releases. Florida’s attorney general cited 47 trafficking-related arrests around the Miami Super Bowl as proof of the problem, when elevated arrests during an enforcement surge prove only that a surge occurred. This is what institutional failure looks like when it wears a concerned expression: agencies spending scarce anti-trafficking resources on a weekend where the evidence says the problem is not concentrated, while trafficking, which is real, ongoing, and tied to poverty, housing instability, and the year-round hospitality economy, continues on the other 364 days with less attention. The McCain Institute, no one’s idea of soft on trafficking, has publicly asked officials to stop repeating the claim for exactly this reason.

There is a real mega-event labor trafficking story, but it is the one told in the previous section, and it happens during construction, not on game day. Workers deceived about wages, bound to employers, and charged illegal recruitment fees meet the legal definition of forced labor, and the International Labour Organization documented all three in Qatar at scale. The distinction matters because the resources follow the story. A federation that wanted to reduce trafficking connected to its events would audit its construction supply chain years before kickoff. Announcing a hotline the week of the final is cheaper.

The Gambling Machine

In May 2018, the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting, and the leagues that had spent decades warning that gambling would corrupt their games pivoted, within months, to selling their data to sportsbooks, taking equity stakes in betting companies, and painting odds on the broadcast. Whatever else can be said about the old hypocrisy, it kept the product at arm’s length. The new arrangement wired the sportsbook directly into the sport. The results arrived on schedule.

The prop bet is the specific point of failure. A wager on a team outcome requires corrupting a team. A wager on whether one player exceeds 7.5 rebounds requires corrupting, or merely informing on, one man. Jontay Porter, a reserve center for the Toronto Raptors, demonstrated the mechanics in the 2023-24 season: carrying gambling debts to people who threatened his life, he agreed to exit 2 games early with claimed injuries so that associates could cash bets on his statistical unders. He received a lifetime ban in April 2024 and pleaded guilty to federal wire fraud charges. Federal prosecutors later stated openly that Porter had been coerced into the scheme over his debts, which is worth sitting with: the league’s betting partners helped create the debtor, and organized crime collected him.

Porter turned out to be the loose thread. In October 2025, the FBI arrested more than 30 people across 11 states in 2 linked cases that prosecutors tied to 4 organized crime families. In the first, Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier was charged with tipping a childhood friend, in advance, that he would leave a March 2023 game early with a purported injury; the network placed over $200,000 on his unders, Rozier exited after 9 minutes, and the friend drove through the night to Rozier’s house, where, per the indictment, they counted the cash together. The NBA had investigated Rozier earlier and cleared him, a verdict the federal wiretaps did not share. The indictment also described insider tips from connections on 5 teams, including an unnamed co-conspirator whose playing and coaching history matches Portland head coach Chauncey Billups telling bettors which Trail Blazers starters would sit. In the second case, Billups and former player Damon Jones were charged as celebrity bait, face cards in Mafia-run poker games rigged with X-ray tables, card-reading shufflers, and doctored contact lenses, which took victims for at least $7.15 million. Both men are presumed innocent and are contesting the charges. The NBA placed them on leave and announced a review of its gambling rules, which is what institutions announce when the FBI has done its compliance work for them.

Basketball is the loud case. Tennis is the chronic one, and it shows what happens when a global betting market, now roughly $50 billion a year on tennis alone, is bolted onto a sport whose lower tiers pay poverty wages. A winner of an entire lower-level ITF tournament can clear about $2,000, less than the travel costs of attending it. A fixer pays $2,000 to $3,000 to lose a set. Grigor Sargsyan, a Belgian law student turned match-fixing broker, built a network of more than 180 players from over 30 countries on exactly that arithmetic before Belgian police dismantled it; he got 5 years. The sport’s own Independent Review found that in 2018, 72.1 percent of suspicious betting alerts came from the very lowest tier of events. In October 2025, Europol and French police arrested 14 more people in a separate Armenian-organized network spanning 40 tournaments, identified by combing 180,000 betting slips. Even Wimbledon is not sealed off; tournament organizers were handed a watch list of fixing suspects as far back as 2011, and a 2016 BBC investigation reported suspected fixing involving players who had appeared there. The sport’s integrity unit issues lifetime bans at a steady clip, which treats the symptom. The disease is a prize money structure in which the 400th-best tennis player on earth, a world-class professional by any sane standard, loses money playing the sport, while bookmakers post live odds on his qualifying matches in Turkey. Either pay the lower tours a living from the sport’s ample television revenue, or stop selling betting markets on matches played by the broke. The governing bodies have chosen neither for 20 years.

Then there is what gambling does to athletes who never fix anything. The NCAA, using AI monitoring across its championships, found that roughly 1 in 3 high-profile college athletes receives abusive messages from people with betting interests, including death threats, and that is counting only public posts, not direct messages. Women’s basketball players received about 3 times as many threats from men. In a single championship cycle, monitors flagged more than 540 abusive betting-related messages at basketball players and officials, 73 percent of them during March Madness. Big Ten athletes wrote an open letter describing prop bets as a direct avenue to the overwhelming number of death threats that student-athletes receive if they ruin a parlay. These are unpaid or barely paid students, some of them teenagers. A handful of states, Ohio, Louisiana, Maryland, and Vermont among them, have banned player prop bets on college athletes, which is the rare reform in this article that is cheap, targeted, and already proven administrable. The industry’s counterargument, that legal markets at least provide the transparency that catches the fixers, is true as far as it goes; the Rozier and Porter cases were flagged by sportsbook monitoring. But a system that manufactures the temptation, profits from the volume, and then takes credit for catching a fraction of the resulting fraud is not an integrity program. It is a casino with a tip line.

Cheating, Retail and Wholesale

Individual cheaters are the oldest story in sports, and the least interesting. Lance Armstrong doped and lied for a decade; sprinters have been stripped of medals since Ben Johnson in 1988. The retail cheater at least faces an adversary, the testing regime, that is nominally trying to catch him. The wholesale version, cheating conducted or protected by institutions, is the one worth studying, because it reveals what the institutions actually are.

The largest documented case is Russia. The McLaren investigation, commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency, found that from 2011 to 2015, the Russian state ran a doping and cover-up program that benefited more than 1,000 athletes across more than 30 sports. At the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics, which Russia hosted at a record $21.9 billion cost, officers of the FSB passed steroid-tainted urine samples through a hole in the anti-doping laboratory wall at night and swapped them for clean samples collected months earlier, with the laboratory director, Grigory Rodchenkov, orchestrating the exchange. The host country of the Games ran a state security operation inside the drug-testing lab of the Games. The IOC’s response was to decline a blanket ban for Rio 2016, delegate entry decisions to individual sports federations, and then permit Russians to compete at subsequent Games under rebranded neutral designations. The consequences kept arriving anyway: at Beijing 2022, 15-year-old Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva tested positive for a banned heart medication, the case dragged on for 2 years, and she received a 4-year ban in 2024, a mess whose primary casualty was a child surrounded by adults who have never been sanctioned to this day. When cheating carries state sponsorship, the pattern shows that the governing bodies negotiate rather than punish, because the cheater is also a host, a broadcaster’s market, and a source of votes.

The refereeing can be corrupted too. An independent investigation led by the same Richard McLaren found that bout results at the Rio 2016 Olympic boxing tournament were manipulated by judges and referees under a system enabled by officials of the sport’s federation, then called AIBA; all 36 referees and judges from Rio were stood down afterward, and the IOC eventually stripped the federation of its right to run Olympic boxing. Fighters trained their whole lives for bouts whose outcomes had been arranged by the people holding the scorecards. And the corporate version is on file in Major League Baseball: the 2017 Houston Astros used a center-field camera and a trash can signal to steal opposing catchers’ signs through a championship season. MLB fined the club $5 million, the statutory maximum and roughly the cost of a middle reliever, took draft picks, suspended 2 executives whom the club then fired, and disciplined no players in exchange for their testimony. The championship stands. Every incentive that produced the scheme remains in place, minus one trash can.

What links Sochi, Rio boxing, and the Astros is not the method. It is that in each case the institution charged with policing the competition had stronger incentives to protect the spectacle than the sport. A stripped title embarrasses the league that awarded it. An expelled host embarrasses the committee that chose it. So the show goes on, and the message travels down to every athlete deciding what the rules are worth.

The Ones Who Take the Hits

The athletes are the product, and the product has been handled with less care than the sponsor signage.

The controlling case is Larry Nassar. As national team physician for USA Gymnastics and a sports doctor at Michigan State University, Nassar sexually abused hundreds of girls and young women over roughly 2 decades under the pretext of medical treatment. The abuse itself was the crime of one man. What made it an institutional story is the count of adults who were told and did nothing. USA Gymnastics received complaints about Nassar from 3 gymnasts and reported them to the FBI’s Indianapolis field office in July 2015. The agents interviewed 1 of the 3, McKayla Maroney, then let the matter sit; the Justice Department’s inspector general later found they made false statements and failed to take basic investigative steps. USA Gymnastics, meanwhile, allowed Nassar to retire quietly, and he kept treating patients at Michigan State for another 14 months, during which, by the estimate of the victims’ counsel, he abused as many as 100 more people. He was finally arrested in 2016 by Michigan State University police, who did not know the FBI had ever been notified. The financial reckoning eventually totaled roughly $1 billion: $500 million from Michigan State, $380 million from USA Gymnastics and the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, and $138.7 million from the Justice Department itself in 2024 for the FBI’s failures, paid to 139 claimants including Simone Biles, Aly Raisman, and Maroney. No FBI agent was criminally charged. The victims got an apology from a director who was not there when it happened, delivered after Senate testimony forced it.

Nassar was the extreme, not the exception. His enabler at the club level, coach John Geddert, was charged with 24 felonies, including human trafficking of his gymnasts, and killed himself the day charges were filed. The US Center for SafeSport, created by Congress in 2017 as an independent clearinghouse for abuse complaints across Olympic sports, receives thousands of reports a year on a budget of roughly $20 million, most of it supplied by the very Olympic committee whose sports it polices, an arrangement that would not survive 5 minutes of scrutiny if proposed for any other regulator. Meanwhile, the documented harms run beyond sexual abuse. Distance runner Mary Cain described in 2019 how coaches at Nike’s Oregon Project pushed her to keep losing weight until she broke bones and cut herself; the project was shuttered after its head coach was banned for doping violations, not for what happened to the athletes. The NCAA’s own surveys, cited above, show a third of its basketball players absorbing betting-related harassment as a routine condition of playing. And the global calendar keeps expanding, more matches, more tournaments, more inventory to sell, over the documented objections of players’ unions in soccer and tennis whose members supply the inventory.

The pattern in every case runs through the same joint: the people responsible for athlete welfare answer to the people responsible for revenue, usually within the same organization. The remedy is structural and known. Safeguarding bodies need independent funding and subpoena-grade authority, not a budget line controlled by the federations they investigate. Reports to law enforcement need statutory timelines with personal liability for officials who sit on them; the Nassar timeline, 14 months of silence purchased by bureaucratic drift, is the precise cost of leaving this to institutional goodwill. None of this is exotic. Financial firms have operated under mandatory suspicious-activity reporting for decades because Congress decided money laundering was serious. Children in national sports programs have so far merited less.

The Head Office

Everything above happens under governing bodies whose own conduct sets the tone, so consider the tone.

In May 2015, Swiss police walked into the Baur au Lac hotel in Zurich at dawn and arrested 7 FIFA officials at the request of the US Department of Justice, part of a 47-count indictment eventually reaching some 40 defendants and charging racketeering, wire fraud, and money laundering. Prosecutors documented over $150 million in bribes and kickbacks spanning 24 years 2 generations of soccer officials, in the attorney general’s phrase, selling media rights, marketing contracts, and votes. Among the documented schemes: $10 million routed from South Africa through FIFA accounts to CONCACAF president Jack Warner in exchange for votes awarding the 2010 World Cup. The organization’s response measured its culture precisely: 2 days after the arrests, FIFA’s congress reelected Sepp Blatter president. He resigned days later only when the investigation reached his own office, and was subsequently banned from the sport by FIFA’s ethics committee alongside his heir apparent, Michel Platini, over a 2 million Swiss franc payment between them that both men described as an oral contract. The 2018 and 2022 World Cups, awarded to Russia and Qatar in the single most scrutinized vote in the sport’s history, stayed exactly where they were, and FIFA’s own investigator, Michael Garcia, resigned in protest when the organization published a summary of his bid-corruption report that he said misrepresented it. FIFA has since rebranded itself as a victim of the corruption for legal purposes, successfully collecting restitution from the proceedings, which takes a certain composure.

The IOC’s sheet is older and no shorter. The Salt Lake City scandal of 1998-99 established the baseline: bid committee members dispensed roughly $1 million in cash, scholarships, medical care, and gifts to IOC members and their families to win the 2002 Winter Games, and 10 IOC members resigned or were expelled. The committee promised reform. In 2017, Brazilian prosecutors arrested Carlos Nuzman, head of the Rio 2016 organizing committee and an IOC member, for directing roughly $2 million in bribes to African IOC members, channeled through the family of Lamine Diack, to buy votes for Rio’s winning 2009 bid; investigators found undeclared Swiss assets including 16 one-kilogram gold bars, and a Brazilian court convicted him in 2021, a verdict he has appealed. Diack himself, for 16 years the president of world track and field and an IOC member, was convicted in France in 2020 of corruption for taking money to slow-walk the exposure of doping by Russian athletes, extorting the athletes he was supposed to police. Tokyo 2020 followed the pattern: Japanese prosecutors arrested former Dentsu executive and Tokyo organizing committee board member Haruyuki Takahashi in 2022 over tens of millions of yen in sponsor payments, part of a widening bribery and bid-rigging investigation that produced convictions of executives at several major companies and so poisoned public opinion that Sapporo abandoned its bid for the 2030 Winter Games. Three consecutive Olympiads, three procurement-and-votes scandals, three rounds of announced reform.

The common structure deserves naming. FIFA and the IOC are private associations, headquartered in Switzerland, taxed lightly, governed by members they themselves select, holding monopolies over events that national governments will bankrupt themselves to host. They answer to no electorate, no shareholder, and no regulator with teeth; nearly every consequence they have ever absorbed was imposed from outside, by the US Department of Justice, French magistrates, Japanese prosecutors, or Swiss police acting on someone else’s warrant. An organization that cannot be fired does not reform; it redecorates. The practical leverage sits with the parties who can walk: host governments that could condition public money on published bid books, open venue-contract bidding, and human rights escrow accounts with automatic penalties; sponsors who fund the cycle; and the national federations and athletes whose participation is the product. All have so far preferred the seat at the table to the use of it, which is itself a choice made by named executives and ministers, renewed every cycle.

The Security State Comes to the Party

Mega-events also change what the host country does to people who never buy a ticket, because a deadline that cannot slip is the best justification a security bureaucracy ever gets.

The 2026 World Cup ran the experiment at full scale. A US travel ban covering citizens of 39 countries, including qualified nations Haiti, Iran, Ivory Coast, and Senegal, has prevented most ordinary fans from those countries from attending matches in their own teams’ World Cup, with exemptions carved out for the athletes, coaches, and officials whose absence would have embarrassed the broadcast. A separate visa bond program initially required fans from 5 African nations to post deposits of up to $15,000 for the privilege of watching soccer, a policy suspended for ticketed fans only in May 2026, weeks before kickoff, after the obvious was pointed out. Iran’s team had its training base relocated, staff denied visas, and ticket allocation revoked days before the tournament, following the outbreak of open war in February. Infantino’s 2017 assurance that any team, including the supporters and officials of that team, needs access to the country, otherwise there is no World Cup, turned out to contain a large unstated exception for supporters. FIFA had 8 years of notice about exactly this risk, wrote access guarantees into the hosting requirements, and enforced none of them, because enforcing them would have required a confrontation the organization did not want. Meanwhile, Spanish, one of FIFA’s 7 official languages and the first language of co-host Mexico, was restricted at official press conferences, and mandatory hydration breaks added for player safety in extreme heat were promptly sold to advertisers, a detail that functions as the whole tournament in miniature.

The pattern predates this cycle. Brazil passed a temporary World Cup General Law in 2012 at FIFA’s insistence, suspending its own statutes on ticket resale, alcohol sales in stadiums, and commercial zones around venues; police killings in Rio state rose about 40 percent in the 2014 World Cup year as favelas were occupied by pacification units; Russia 2018 and Qatar 2022 each ran their own versions of exception-making, from protest restrictions to press minders. Host cities buy surveillance systems, drones, and crowd-control inventories for a month-long event, and the equipment does not go back in the box afterward. The bill for extraordinary security is public; the capabilities are permanent; the legal exceptions have a way of outliving the closing ceremony. A country that wants a mega-event should, at minimum, be required to state, in the hosting agreement, which of its own laws it intends to suspend and for how long, so its citizens can read the price tag before the party.

Even the Garden Party Has Weeds

It would be convenient to file all of this under FIFA and the IOC and keep the smaller, better-mannered events clean. The record does not cooperate.

Wimbledon runs the most civilized ticket operation in major sports, and its perimeter still hosts a resale economy. Debenture seats, 5-year Centre Court investments sold for tens of thousands of pounds, are the only Wimbledon tickets legally resalable at market price, and they change hands at multiples of cost through brokers; around the honest public queue, touts work the grounds every summer, and the club prosecutes a handful annually. The tournament was handed a watch list of suspected match-fixers as early as 2011, and the 2016 BBC and BuzzFeed reporting on suspicious betting patterns named matches at Wimbledon itself among those flagged. The All England Club’s expansion plan into neighboring parkland spent years in litigation against local residents, a small-scale rehearsal of the mega-event habit of treating the neighbors as an obstacle. None of this makes Wimbledon Qatar. It makes the point that the pathologies scale with money and scarcity, not with the accent of the organizers.

The Super Bowl adds its own local costs beyond the trafficking theater already described. The NFL’s host-city requirements arrive as a several-hundred-page specification, hotel blocks, police escorts, tax exemptions for the league, free use of the publicly funded stadium, and cities sign because the projected economic windfall is presented as self-evidently enormous. Independent economists who have measured actual Super Bowl impacts, Victor Matheson and Robert Baade most persistently, find gains a fraction of the boosters’ figures once displaced tourism and leaked spending are counted; the visitors occupy hotel rooms that would have held other visitors, at a premium captured by national chains. The 1986 bond loophole, the relocation bluff, and the inflated impact study are one machine with 3 moving parts, and the Super Bowl is its trade show.

And the newest entrants are learning fast. Saudi Arabia was awarded the 2034 World Cup unopposed, in a bid process FIFA compressed to a single candidate, over documented objections from rights groups about a construction program that will dwarf Qatar’s and a labor system with familiar features. The kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund has meanwhile bought professional golf’s peace, salaried much of soccer’s aging elite, and taken title sponsorships across tennis and boxing. Sportswashing is the accepted term, but the term flatters the buyers less than it should flatter the sellers: a state cannot launder its reputation through sport without a federation agreeing, for a price, to run the wash cycle. Every institution described in this article has now been offered that price. Most have taken it.

Why the Basement Stays Full

Run back through the rooms, and the same 4 load-bearing beams appear in each.

First, monopoly. There is 1 World Cup, 1 Olympics, 1 Super Bowl, 1 Wimbledon. Monopolists do not need satisfied customers, hosts, or workers; they need only the absence of alternatives, which they control by definition. Dynamic pricing without competition, hosting demands without competition, broadcast terms without competition. Everything else follows.

Second, other people’s money. The owner builds with the county’s bonds. The federation builds with the emirate’s treasury and the migrant’s body. The organizing committee overruns a budget backstopped by a national government that signed an unlimited guarantee, because the IOC requires one. When the party spending the money is not the party bearing the cost, the Oxford study’s finding, a 100 percent budget failure rate across 6 decades, stops being surprising and starts being arithmetic.

Third, misaligned policing. Nearly every scandal in this article was surfaced by outsiders: the FBI and IRS on FIFA, French magistrates on Diack, Belgian police on tennis, Michigan State campus police on Nassar, federal wiretaps on the NBA cases the league itself had investigated and closed. The internal integrity units, ethics committees, and safeguarding offices answer to executives whose bonuses depend on the spectacle continuing. They are weather vanes asked to stop the wind.

Fourth, the fan’s forgiveness, which is the subsidy underneath all the others. The love is real, and the institutions have learned that it is unconditional. Ratings survived Qatar. The 2026 group stage sold out its marquee matches at 4 times the historic prices. Buffalo taxpayers funded the stadium and then paid $50,000 seat licenses to enter it. The customers keep arriving because the product, the game itself, remains genuinely great, and the organizations holding it hostage know exactly what it is worth.

What would empty the basement is not a mystery, and most of it has appeared above in its place: resale caps and bot enforcement that Ontario and New South Wales already run; a federal end to tax-exempt stadium bonds and referendum requirements for subsidies; permanent or rotating venues in place of the serial construction of disposable cities; hosting agreements with published bid books, labor standards audited by outsiders, and escrowed penalties; prop bet bans on individuals and a living wage in the lower tiers of sports that sell betting markets; safeguarding bodies funded independently of the federations they police, with mandatory reporting backed by personal liability. Not one of these requires inventing anything. Each exists somewhere, working right now. Their absence everywhere else is not a gap in human knowledge. It is a standing decision by identifiable people, league owners, federation executives, council members, state legislators, and agency heads, who have concluded, so far correctly, that nobody will make them decide otherwise.

The games are worth saving. That has never been the question. The question is whether the people who profit from them will ever be made to carry their own costs, and monopolies do not answer that question voluntarily. Somebody has to ask it with leverage: a city council that votes no, a sponsor that walks, a players’ association that strikes the calendar, an attorney general with a subpoena, a fan base that stays home for one season. The next final will come, and the one after that, and the basement will still be there after each trophy is lifted. It gets cleaned when the people paying for the party stop accepting the tour that skips it.