Anti-corruption Reforms and Retrenchment in International Sport Federations: The Case of FIFA

Drawing on a longitudinal qualitative case study of FIFA (2016–2024), this study examines the retrenchment of anti-corruption governance reforms in organizations characterized by entrenched institutional logics that enable corruption. Building on institutional theory, we analyze how changing external pressure interacts with an institutionalized clientelist governance logic to shape reform trajectories over time. We identify a three-phase process in which initially adopted reforms suppress but do not dismantle clientelism, rendering them structurally fragile. As external pressure wanes, clientelist practices re-emerge, first through policy–practice decoupling in which reforms are maintained symbolically, and later through regressive recoupling in which reform policies themselves are partially reversed or reinterpreted to realign with restored practices. We contribute to research on organizational corruption and institutional change by theorizing retrenchment as a temporally unfolding, politically embedded process and by extending decoupling theory to account for downward realignments of formal governance standards.