Unless FIFA Climbs Down on Its World Cup Internet Coverage Restrictions It Will Pop The Cork Off That Bottle Called “The Power of the Press” And That Is The Very Last Thing That FIFA’s Commercial Sponsors Will Want to Experience

Philip M. Stone February 24, 2006

FIFA owns the World Cup competition and says the media must play by its rules and accept that no game pictures can go on the Internet until a match is over. The media, in turn, accuses FIFA of violating editorial freedom, and breeching freedom of information. Talks have broken down and it is getting increasingly ugly between the two mighty giants.

FIFA is running its own World Cup Internet site in collaboration with Yahoo and as far as FIFA is concerned if football fans around the world want to see still pictures of matches that are still being played then there is only one place to go and that is FIFA’s site. And it wants the agencies to play traffic cop and ensure no other web site breaks the imposed limitations. Not only that, it also wants to restrict how many pictures newspapers run,  and how those pictures are edited.

To the world’s media that is all just plain unacceptable. Most newspapers in the world operate their own web sites. They receive still pictures from the international news agencies and they license with those agencies to be able to put those pictures onto their web sites. Many independent web sites have separate agreements with the news agencies for their picture services. FIFA believes, therefore,  that without restrictions it is just inviting web sites around the world to steal the FIFA site’s thunder (read: lose lucrative revenues to be earned from its own web site).

To a point FIFA does have a legitimate fear. These days with electronic cameras, mobile transmission and the like it takes less than five minutes from the time a photographer at the stadium clicks that electronic shutter until that color picture is delivered globally via satellite, And this writer remembers a World Cup game several years ago between England and Argentina in which Reuters moved more than 200 photos on that game alone. So if you were FIFA would you want to see competing web sites with that kind of coverage while the games are still going on?

So FIFA does have cause for concern, but the problem is that it is going about trying to protect its turf in exactly the wrong way. It may claim it has “legal right” on its side; the media has something far more awesome on its side – the power of the press.

What has FIFA gained by agreeing negotiations at the highest levels with organizations that represent all of the world’s major news agencies plus the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) that represents 18,000 newspapers, including 73 national newspaper associations, and newspaper executives in 102 countries, and then a month later getting those people really mad by delivering a rather rude letter that basically says ” here are our final terms. No more discussions.

Does FIFA really want to be on the media’s bad side? Apparently so.

The media, meanwhile, says it is now bringing in the lawyers, getting European and German politicians involved, and it is going to explain the media facts of life to FIFA’s sponsors – this latter move will probably do the media more good than anything else.

But first a few basics. FIFA claims it owns the tournament and it has the right to license coverage accordingly.  Case law on both sides of the Atlantic supports such a view. But while it is common in television, for instance, to observe very stringent rights rules, that usually does not filter down to the written or still picture press. But that’s not to say, again according to case law, that it couldn’t.

The media takes the view, of course, that FIFA’s actions are nothing more than a denial of freedom of the press. The position is perhaps best summed up by Monique Villa, Managing Director of Reuters Media: “We fight for the freedom of reporting news as it happens, without restriction. In our view, sport must be treated as any other area of news. We would never allow a politician or a government to choose which bits of a debate or speech we can cover, or how long our articles can be, or how many pictures should go with the story. Why should we accept this from sport organizations? “

Well, the difference between straight news and covering sporting events, according to the courts, seems to be that if a rights holder has made a significant investment in time, money, and technology, and staffing then it is more than likely that it can license that information accordingly. And no one can really say that FIFA hasn’t done that.

But this matter should not be decided on the legalities, but rather with some plain common sense.

 What it comes right down to is that FIFA is not just interested in promoting the game of football, but additionally how the game of football can earn millions of Swiss francs for FIFA. That’s why they don’t want competition to their web site.

But FIFA does have its own Achilles heel – corporate sponsors who pay millions of whatever currency you care to name in having their name associated with the sport, and that includes the media mentioning them because of that sponsorship. That free media coverage is equivalent really to free viral advertising -- it is very very powerful and very important to sponsors.

But what if that free viral publicity was to disappear? No longer did the media mention a FIFA sponsor’s name. No longer were any pictures distributed around the world that showed the logo of a FIFA sponsor. What if those sponsors just fell off the news pages of many many newspapers globally? You think those sponsors might want to have a word or two with Mr. Blatter, FIFA’s president?

Could such a thing really happen? Last year the English Football Association tried to impose similar reporting restrictions on the UK media. Then one newspaper, followed by others, stopped naming the sponsor of the Premier League; no longer in a picture could you see a sponsor’s logo on a jersey – photo editors made sure to use a photo that gave no free advertising. Within a couple of weeks the FA capitulated and a deal was done.

The media has sent Joseph Blatter, FIFA President, a letter telling him that FIFA sponsors are going to be advised of “the very clear loss of exposure from which they will suffer owing to FIFA’s publishing restrictions.” That doesn’t mean the media will resort to the tactics used against the English FA by the British national newspapers. But that precedent is already there and it is certainly a possible weapon in the arsenal, and should serve as a clear warning of what is possible  and how sponsors howled because of it.

Just knowing of that weapon and the media’s current anger could well be enough for the sponsors to pressure FIFA to get this thing resolved, and pronto.

The letter, signed by Timothy Balding, WAN CEO, and Pierre Louette, President and CEO of Agence France Presse who also is representing AP, Reuters, Getty Images, DPA, and EPA, also warned it would be “informing the German government, as well as European institutions, about the media freedom issues at stake here.”

So is there a way out of all of this?. Of course there is if cool heads prevail. FIFA’s strategy of time delays is all-wrong. The news business is built on getting the news (pictures) out to people as quickly as possible. This writer has been involved in the news agency business for 30 years. It simply is not in the blood to accept time delays. If a goal is scored that picture should be in global newsrooms in minutes, and not wait until the end of the match. That’s a very simple basic news agency principle.

Where the negotiations should focus is on the number of pictures that a web site can print. FIFA has proposed five pictures per half and two per extra time including penalty shoot-outs, and none of that until the game ends.  That’s nonsense; on the other hand 200 pictures a game is out of sight, too. And while it is distasteful for the media to accept restrictions on the number pictures it provides its clients that is not to say it hasn’t agreed to this in the past.

Several years ago, for instance, the Paris couturiers became very concerned at the large number of pictures taken from their fashion shows that were turning up on the Internet. For various reasons they wanted to get that restricted, and they told the news agencies that they either restricted the number of pictures they made available for the web or they wouldn’t get press credentials to cover the fashion shows. And guess what, the number of pictures that went to the web got restricted.

So there is precedence for this. It is a matter of coming up with the right numbers. It begs the question of how long is ball of string, but there were some very powerful knowledgeable media and football people who had agreed to work this out around a table and this really shouldn’t be rocket science to come up with the right answers.

It’s a matter of finding a balance between having the FIFA/Yahoo site being what it wants to be while at the same time ensuring the media can have enough pictures to fully be able to report each game in a timely manner.

The Balding/Louette letter did make a point that really should not get lost on FIFA. “We are truly saddened and shocked that in the name of maximizing the commercial exploitation of these events, FIFA should effectively turn its back on the news media which give life, on a daily basis, to football in all its different manifestations all over the world and have done so for decade.”

One can’t help but feel that at FIFA’s headquarters in Zürich they are not seeing this media forest because of the trees. For football to remain strong it must have a firm positive partnership with the media around the world.

For the media’s part, while it rests its arguments on the laurels of freedom of the press we all know that the media is a very big wealthy business and web sites around the world will no doubt do very well selling sponsorship for the World Cup coverage. And the agencies will do very well in selling their coverage to web sites. So what you really have is two groups of business people not doing very well at trying to make a deal.

As a longtime salesman this writer has never seen a deal fail to be done if both sides wanted it. There is surely enough meat on this bone to keep both sides happy and that way everyone wins, and, perhaps, even football.

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