Reforming FIDE, Part 1: The Big Picture
Last week I had the pleasure of chatting with the wonderfully congenial Ben Johnson for his Perpetual Chess podcast, discussing my just-released 4-part documentary Through the Mirror of Chess: A Cultural Exploration, together with Chessays, the accompanying book of personal reflections based on my deep dive into the chess world.
I was expecting Ben to start the conversation with some specific comments about what he liked or disliked about the films or the book, or ask me the standard question about what motivated me to suddenly embark on such an intensely chess-related venture. But instead, he began our discussion quite differently: “If you could change one thing about the chess world,” he asked me, “what would it be?”
For a split second I was taken aback. After all, that’s the sort of question that one might imagine posing to Garry Kasparov or Hou Yifan or Danny Rensch, not some self-professed “tourist” in the chess world. But it didn’t take me long to answer: “Dismantle FIDE,” I replied unhesitatingly, once it became clear that he was genuinely interested in my opinion.
Of course, Ben had read my book beforehand and so likely knew how I’d respond. But there is, I think, a larger point to be made here that was likely driving his line of inquiry: it’s often very helpful to step back and listen to an outsider’s view of your world, particularly when the outsider in question has invested considerable time and effort to inform himself of the relevant issues at hand and personally interacted, both formally and informally, with a great many experienced insiders.
Not coincidentally, FIDE was by far the single most dominant point of frustration voiced by the many people I spoke with throughout my detailed investigations across the international chess community; and it was not hard to see why.
Near universally recognized as hugely self-serving and irredeemably corrupt, FIDE nonetheless somehow manages to evoke sentiments of despondent acceptance: most citizens of the chess world regard their official governing body as little more than an irritating obstruction that must be routinely navigated, an awkward ball and chain that they have somehow become irretrievably saddled with and will unfortunately never overcome.
But I’m writing this series of FIDE-related blog pieces to tell you, the global chess community represented by chess.com, that that’s simply not so. Looked at properly, FIDE doesn’t actually have the mythical levels of power that are so often attributed to it. You do. And it’s high time that you used it to create an exciting, modern system of international chess sporting excellence that you all richly deserve.
That’s the (very) good news that needs to be borne in mind throughout; and I’m very much looking forward to discussing how, precisely, you might go about wielding your power and changing the global chess landscape for the better. And here’s still more good news: the timing has never been better than it is at this very moment.
But before we get there, we’ll have to journey for some time through the dark, soulless underbelly of graft-riddled, self-important, politicized bureaucrats in order to better understand the hugely unsavory details of the current situation. It can’t be helped, I’m afraid: you can’t cure the patient if you can’t diagnose the disease.
When discussing structural issues, the obvious starting point is to examine what, exactly, is being done and how, before contemplating how it might be improved. In my experience it’s usually helpful to twin such an investigation with a brief historical inquiry to determine how we got into our present state in the first place.
A BIT OF HISTORY
In FIDE’s case, the basic history is pretty straightforward: it was created in the 1920s through the efforts of several passionate, internationally-inclined people (led by, but not limited to, the Russian chess master Eugene Znosko-Borovsky) to coordinate the efforts of various national federations and try to somehow enfold chess within the larger ambit of the modern Olympic movement. And so it was that the founding international chess tournament that gave rise to the birth of FIDE was specifically created to be held in parallel with the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris.
With that out of the way, let’s turn to what FIDE officially does, roughly a century later. This, it turns out, is a surprisingly difficult thing to determine, even by their own admission (a dead giveaway that something is clearly deeply amiss on the organizational front). If you go to the IOC’s website, for example, you will be informed straight away that “The International Olympic Committee is the guardian of the Olympic Games and the leader of the Olympic Movement,” while if you go to FIFA’s website, you will learn that “FIFA exists to govern football and to develop the game around the world.”
Now understand that I am hardly the world’s biggest supporter of either the IOC or FIFA, two organizations that, on the corruption and wanton politicization front, are singularly positioned to give FIDE a particularly good run for its (i.e. your) money. I would moreover happily concede that the phrase “to govern football and to develop the game around the world” is sufficiently vague as to be almost meaningless.
Yet it is, at least, an important starting point: an explicit pro forma pronouncement of the organization’s mandate and reason for existing. The logical implications are clear: without the IOC there would be no Olympic Games—or at least a very different sort of Olympic Games—and without FIFA there would be no “governance structure” and “suitable development” of football around the world, whatever that might actually amount to. You might disagree with such claims, or believe that the world would be better off without the IOC and/or FIFA, but at the very least you have a good sense of what they’re convinced that they’re actually doing.
Now, let’s turn to FIDE’s website. I will pass over (well, sort of) sundry money-grubbing backslapping pronouncements of how FIDE has become “the first international sports federation to launch its very own NFT marketplace,” and instead simply point out that FIDE’s self-declared mandate, such as it is, is hardly prominently displayed.
The closest thing to one that is on offer can be located by clicking on the “FIDE” link in the toolbar and going to the “About FIDE” section, where you will learn that: “The International Chess Federation (FIDE) is the governing body of the sport of chess, and it regulates all international chess competitions. Constituted as a non-governmental institution, it was recognized by the International Olympic Committee as a Global Sporting Organization in 1999.”
Under this strikingly anodyne declaration lies another paragraph that tells you that it was founded in 1924, trumpets how it was one of “the very first International Sports Federations” and has “199 affiliate members, in the form of National Chess Federations” (which is, as it happens, precisely the reason why it is so easily subjected to such rampant politicization, as anyone familiar with the situation knows—of which more later).
But you will, curiously enough, find no mention of FIDE’s responsibility for “developing chess around the world” on par with, say, FIFA’s triumphant messaging.
Which is all to say that before I explicitly demonstrate how FIDE does effectively nothing—or at least nothing positive—to impact the global popularity of chess, it’s very much worth pointing out that FIDE itself actually claims no such official responsibility for doing so.
The closest thing you will find is this: “Chess is nowadays a truly global sport, with dozens of millions of players in all the continents, and more than 60 million games on average played every day.” I have no wish to argue with this statement, any more than I would disagree with, “Albert Einstein has received a total of 28,404 citations of his 147 scientific articles between 1901 and 2019” or “The Kansas City Chiefs won Super Bowl LVII,” but it’s worth emphasizing that there is no causal link between FIDE and any of them, and not even FIDE formally maintains that there is.
A BIT OF BACKGROUND:
My name is Howard Burton and I am documentary filmmaker and author. I produced a recently released 4-part documentary, THROUGH THE MIRROR OF CHESS: A CULTURAL EXPLORATION, about the remarkable impact of chess on culture, art, science and sport. I also wrote a book, CHESSAYS: TRAVELS THROUGH THE WORLD OF CHESS, about all sorts of chess-related issues that I encountered during my time spent as a tourist in the chess world.
