Corruption plagues all walks of life. From rigged general elections in the political world to low-level money laundering at your local convenience store, it is everywhere. On Oct. 25th, Netflix aired the trailer for its upcoming documentary on the FIFA corruption scandal, which concerns the illicit affairs of world football’s governing body under the presidency of Sepp Blatter. In 2015, reports of money laundering, racketeering, 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 body for the world’s biggest game shook the sport to its core, and so the scandal unfolded as the world’s media watched on.
With the documentary FIFA Uncoveredset to premiere on Netflix just weeks before the commencement of the already contentious FIFA World Cup in Qatar in November, sports and football fans alike will be looking ahead to a detailed analysis of the level of corruption at FIFA headquarters in Switzerland, and the chain of events that led to Russia and Qatar illegally obtaining the hosting rights to the World Cup in 2018 and 2022 respectively. Corruption in sports is a hot topic, and with the vast success enjoyed by the unprecedented exposé, Icarus, interest in the subject has only intensified. Here are some of the best sports documentaries about corruption…
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5 Dirty Games: The Dark Side of Sports
Scorpion TVW-Film
CNN investigative journalist Benjamin Best takes a trip around the state of the international sporting scene in Dirty Games: The Dark Side of Sports. He travels around the globe, uncovering and reporting on events from worker’s rights in Qatar building the infrastructure for the upcoming 2022 World Cup, where hundreds of Nepalese and other immigrant workers have perished as a result of unsafe working conditions to NBA referees gambling on games they were in charge of during the NBA refereeing scandal of 2007 when officials would use their connections in the game to map-out the likelihood of a basketball games events, outcomes, and scores.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
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4 Bad Sport: Footballgate
Netflix
Netflix’s sports docuseries Bad Sport highlights corruption in several world sports, including Basketball, Cricket, and Horse Riding. Footballgate makes up one of the series’ six mini-documentaries, and shines a light on the 2005 scandal at the football club of Italian giants’ Juventus, and how the club’s sporting director, Luciano Moggi, influenced the officiating of not only Juventus’ games, but the matches of their rivals.
The documentary explores 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 that has an unhealthy obsession with winning and an infatuation with personal gain.
3 Pantani: The Accidental Death of a Cyclist
Marco Pantani was an Italian cyclist, and major sports personality, who is often lauded as one of the greatest cyclists to grace the sport, winning 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 dubbed ‘The Pirate,’ and his eventual fall from grace, when it was discovered that he had been taking performance-enhancing drugs, namely EPO, and the impact it had on him and his mental health thereafter.
2 Stop at Nothing: The Lance Armstrong Story
BBC
It seems the whole world tuned into that Oprah interview with disgraced cyclist, Lance Armstrong, who spoke candidly about his career in cycling, and the consequent revelation he’d been doping for several years, most notably, during all of his seven Tour de France victories.
Yet, it was in the 2017 documentary Stop at Nothing: The Lance Armstrong Story that we learned the true extent of the lie, and how one of the sport’s largest cover-ups became a catalyst for tighter, more rigorous drug testing in the sport. It delivers the alarming truth, about the extreme lengths Armstrong and his tight-knit team and doctor went to, to not only flout the rules but to go undetected when doing so.
1 Icarus
Impact Partners
Directed by documentarian and filmmaker Bryan Fogel, Icarus, which took home the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, tells the story of a state-run Russian doping program. While making a documentary on doping in sports, Fogel inadvertently stumbled into a spider’s web of lies and deceit after interviewing Russian scientist Grigory Rodchenkov. When Fogel approached Rodchenkov to create a performance-enhancing-drugs plan that industry-standard tests would be unable to detect, he was completely unaware that he was about to uncover decades of substance abuse for the purposes of improving performance among Russian athletes.
The documentary further demonstrates the widespread use of PEDs across all Russian sports, which was largely endorsed by their own government. This exposé helped the World Anti-Doping Agency reprimand Russia, and led to the Russian Olympic Teams’ expulsion from the 2020 Olympics, and a four-year ban on competing in International sport was imposed.
