Anyone who knows Lise Klaveness can attest to how she’s firm on principle and her devotion to football. As president of Norway’s football federation NFF, she’s not wavering now in her criticism of the international football organization FIFA and its controversial president, Gianni Infantino.
Klaveness was among the few to stand up for what she calls “this beautiful game” back in 2022, when she made her debut at a FIFA Congress in Qatar and challenged FIFA over corruption and human rights abuses within international football. At that time she called for transparency and enforcement of FIFA’s own rules and regulations regarding ethics in sports.
Now she’s making headlines again, after making it clear that NFF was backing an official complaint to FIFA’s ethics committee from the human rights organization FairSquare. It claims Infantino has broken FIFA’s own rules about political neutrality. The complaint stems from Infantino’s awarding of a new FIFA “peace prize” to US President Donald Trump last December.
The prize surprised many, and was widely viewed as a means of appealing to Trump’s vanity before World Cup play kicks off in June. Norway’s largest newspaper Aftenposten editorialized on Wednesday that the prize was “undeserved,” that FIFA should avoid awarding any prizes that can be viewed as political, and that FIFA has rules that it should remain politically neutral.
Most serious, according to Aftenposten, was how the prize to Trump had been arranged without being handled by FIFA’s own board. “That says a lot about how (FIFA) president Gianni Infantino leads,” wrote the newspaper. “A small circle of people decide the most important cases. The rest of the organization is barely informed.”
Aftenposten noted how that makes FIFA resemble Trump’s own administration: “It’s completely in violation of the reforms that were supposed to make the football organization more democratic after a major corruption scandal in 2015.”
Now Klaveness is in Vancouver at a new FIFA congress, and told Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) that she hadn’t received much reaction to her own new attempts to enforce fair play. “We arrived late last night, so haven’t heard much reaction (to NFF’s new challenge),” Klaveness said. “FIFA has known for quite awhile that we evaluated supporting the complaint, they were at our congress themselves.”
Klaveness also told NRK that NFF “has had dialogue with FIFA at the administrative level about this, and how we intend to handle it.” She said some FIFA countries had also commented that “others should have received the peace prize,” while still others spoke of a “don’t mention the war” mentality.
She was undisturbed by reported comments from a White House spokesman that “no one deserves FIFA’s first peace prize more that President Trump,” and suggested anyone thinking otherwise must suffer from “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
Klaveness claims that NFF’s objections to the prize and how it was created and handled “has nothing to do with Trump of the White House.” Rather, she claimed, “we believe as a matter of principle that it’s a prize that is outside FIFA’s mandate and not anchored” in FIFA’s own organization.” She maintains that regardless of who was given the prize, it defies the arm’s-length distance FIFA should maintain with national leaders.
She suspects there are efforts to retain “FIFA’s peace prize” in the years to come, but that more objective criteria must be established and the process of choosing a winner must be better. She’s not backing down and admits that Norway’s efforts to abide by FIFA’s own rules and regulations “come with a price. It’s not easy for us.”
Klaveness insists, however, that it’s important to “push back” and state Norway’s position: “We stand amidst change now, and we must be there to influence it.” She has already stated that NFF is requesting that FIFA’s ethics committee address FairSquare’s complaint.
She has plenty of support at home, in a country that currently claims some of the world’s best football players who will be competing in the World Cup. She’s also gone public, along with NFF’s secretary general Karl-Petter Løken, about the serious concerns over costs tied to the upcoming World Cup and how expensive it will be for all involved.
“It’s important for Norwegian football to stand up for its own values also when it’s uncomfortable,” Aftenposten editorialized on Wednesday. “The sad thing is that it would all have been hushed up in the football world if Lise Klaveness hadn’t spoken up.”
NewsinEnglish.no/Nina Berglund
