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A_Soporific t1_ix55pc3 wrote

They announced that they were going to dissolve the contracts involved. They didn't actually get out of the contracts for months. Some of them didn't actually leave so much as they created a new local subsidiary and transferred their assets to that "new" company with plans in place to reabsorb them at some future date.

Also, in that situation there would be big pain either way. Those companies that did stay in Russia face sanctions in other nations, and Russia is a small market compared to the EU or Texas. If you had a choice between losing the profit from Russia or Texas the greedy would save their position in Texas and leave Russia every time.

The point of sanctions and regulation isn't to turn the amoral into the moral, it's to align the amoral choice with the desired one by rewarding "good" behavior and punishing "bad" ones. Of course, these same practices are used by China to change the messaging in Hollywood movies and to stop criticism of their treatment of the Uighur by NBA athletes.

Turn out that morals aren't universal and lack power if people don't put in the work to give them teeth. It's important to put in the work to ensure that FIFA suffers for its corruption. You can't outsource that work to others. Media companies will do what they need to do to not fuck over their employees and stakeholders, if they see that it is more costly to air such a controversial World Cup than it is to break contracts then in the future they'll break the contract when FIFA does something stupid.

But, at the end of the day, FIFA is the western villain here. They are the ones who need to be punished. The whole organization probably needs to be razed and a new one built with controls to prevent (or at least make exponentially more expensive and challenging) the sort of corruption that's obviously endemic their decision making.

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