Stakeholder #2

In this post, I will be analyzing Stakeholder #2 and identifying how this controversy affected it.

Unknown. "Old Visa Logo" Uploaded 8/30/2010 via wikimedia. Public Domain.

The next large stakeholder in this scandal is Visa. This multinational financial company does a majority of its business through online money transfers throughout the world, operated by customers using their Visa cards. Visa became a sponsor of FIFA in 2007 when they partnered up before the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa. They were also involved in rugby tournaments throughout Europe in the early 2000's. Visa has also been a world sponsor of the Olympics since 1986. Visa is involved heavily in American Football, sponsoring several teams including the San Francisco 49ers. They have headquarters in Foster City, California, where they conduct most of the companies operations. They host many customer appreciation based competitions and sweepstakes, which strengthens their public image and makes them appeal to their customers. They have not been partnered with FIFA for as long as some of the other sponsors, yet their contributions to the world of soccer makes them an integral part of FIFA, both financially and publicly. Visa is generally viewed positively though they themselves have fallen victim to a few scandals. However, these scandals have been mostly resolved so Visa holds a widely shared favorable opinion with the people of the world.

As mentioned in the blog about stakeholder #1, the main sponsors of FIFA agreed that there needed to be a change in the leadership of FIFA. Visa went public on the issue by saying “Given the events of last week, it’s clear it would be in the best interests of FIFA and the sport for Sepp Blatter to step down immediately.” Visa has the same power as Coca-Cola in enforcing their recommendation. They can do little more than just go public and hope that applies enough pressure to put things into action. Once again, Joseph Blatter was adverse to this point of view.