Corruption plagues all walks of life. From rigged general elections in the political world to money laundering at your local supermarket, it’s everywhere. On October 25, Netflix aired the trailer for its upcoming documentary about the FIFA corruption scandal, which concerns the illegal affairs of the governing body of world football under the presidency of Sepp Blatter. In 2015, reports of money laundering, extortion, tax evasion and bribery came to a head when Blatter and numerous FIFA officials, including Michel Platini, were arrested. The potential criminality of the most powerful agency for the world’s biggest game shook the sport to its core, and so the scandal unfolded as the world’s media watched.
With the documentary FIFA discoveredpremiering on Netflix just weeks before the start of the already controversial FIFA World Cup in Qatar in November, sports and football fans alike will look forward to a detailed analysis of the level of corruption at FIFA’s headquarters in Switzerland, and the chain of events that led to Russia and Qatar illegally acquiring hosting rights for the 2018 and 2022 World Cup, respectively. Corruption in sports is a hot topic, and with the huge success enjoyed by the unprecedented exposé, icarus, interest in the subject has only increased. Here are some of the best sports documentaries about corruption…
5/5 Dirty Games: The Dark Side of Sports
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CNN investigative journalist Benjamin Best takes a journey through the state of the international sports scene in Dirty Games: The Dark Side of Sports. He travels the world to expose and report on worker rights events in Qatar as they build the infrastructure for the upcoming 2022 World Cup, where hundreds of Nepalese and other immigrant workers have died as a result of unsafe conditions. working conditions for NBA referees who bet on games they presided over during the 2007 NBA arbitration scandal, when officials used their in-game connections to chart basketball game probability, results, and scores.
Netflix’s sports documentaries bad sport points to corruption in various world sports, including basketball, cricket and horse riding. football gate forms one of the six mini-documentaries of the series, shedding light on the scandal in 2005 at the football club of the Italian giant Juventus, and how the club’s sporting director, Luciano Moggi, influenced the management of not only Juventus’ matches, but the matches of their rivals.
The documentary examines the corruption, including the tape recordings of several of Moggi’s incriminating phone calls that intimidate referees, as well as the subsequent investigation and aftermath of such controversy. It provides a fascinating insight into the mind of a man who has an unhealthy obsession with winning and a crush on personal gain.
3/5 Pantani: the accidental death of a cyclist
Marco Pantani was an Italian cyclist and a great sports personality, often hailed as one of the greatest cyclists the sport has revered. He won the two biggest prizes in the Giro d’Italia and the iconic Tour de France, remarkably in the same year. The documentary Pantani: the accidental death of a cyclist discusses the rise of the man called ‘The Pirate’ and his eventual fall from grace when it was discovered that he had taken performance-enhancing drugs, namely EPO, and the impact it had on him and his mental health afterward.
2/5 Stop at nothing: Lance Armstrong’s story
It seems the whole world has tuned in to that Oprah interview with disgraced cyclist, Lance Armstrong, who spoke candidly about his career in cycling, and the resulting revelation that he had used doping for years, particularly during all of his seven Tour de France victories.
Yet it was in the 2017 documentary Stop at nothing: Lance Armstrong’s story that we learned the true extent of the lie, and how one of sport’s biggest cover-ups became a catalyst for tougher, tougher drug testing in sport. It delivers the alarming truth about the extreme efforts Armstrong and his close-knit team and doctor went to not only to break the rules, but also to go undetected.
1/5 Icarus
Directed by documentary filmmaker and filmmaker Bryan Fogel, Icarus, who took home the Academy Award for Best Documentary, tells the story of a Russian state-run doping program. While making a documentary about doping in sport, Fogel accidentally got into a spider web of lies and deceit after interviewing Russian scientist Grigory Rodchenkov. When Fogel approached Rodchenkov to devise a performance-enhancing drug plan that industry-standard testing would fail to detect, he was utterly oblivious that he was on the brink of exposing decades of substance abuse for the purpose of performance. of Russian athletes.
The documentary further demonstrates the widespread use of PEDs in all Russian sports, which was largely approved by their own government. This revelation helped the World Anti-Doping Agency reprimand Russia, and led to the exclusion of the Russian Olympic teams from the 2020 Olympics, and a four-year ban on participation in international sports was imposed.