the departure

FIFA announced this week that Chief Operating Officer Kevin Lamour has "departed" the organization. (I am not making this up.) The announcement came weeks after Lamour publicly criticized FIFA President Gianni Infantino's plan to sell a commercial stake in the World Cup and other FIFA tournaments to private investors.

To recap the sequence of events, which I will do because this is the kind of sequence that rewards close attention: Kevin Lamour was hired to oversee FIFA's operations. He then performed that job by raising concerns about a deal that might, operationally speaking, not be in FIFA's long-term interests. He then departed, which is also a kind of deal, though one with somewhat different terms.

What makes this particularly clarifying is the specificity of the objection. Lamour did not criticize a vague FIFA policy. He criticized the plan to sell a stake in the World Cup itself — the event that is FIFA's entire reason for existing, the thing that FIFA has spent approximately one hundred years building, and also the thing FIFA now apparently needs to sell a piece of because it needs money. (This is also not something I am making up.) His job was to make sure the organization ran properly. He noticed a plan that might affect whether the organization ran properly. He said so. Weeks later, he was gone.

FIFA has not specified why Lamour left. The official announcement described it as a departure, which is a technically accurate description of what occurs when someone is no longer at a place they previously were. Pressed for further detail, the organization has so far declined to provide any, on the grounds that it is FIFA and this is what FIFA does.

The World Cup commercial stake remains available for purchase by interested investors. Kevin Lamour is not available, having departed. His concerns about the deal have also departed, in the sense that FIFA has not addressed them and has instead chosen a different approach, which is the approach where the person with the concerns departs.

FIFA has not announced a replacement COO. It is unclear whether the replacement, when hired, will be briefed on the full range of concerns available to them and then asked to assess those concerns freely, or whether a different arrangement will be described as a departure.