If you’re going to blow your cover, national television is a good place to do it.
Mary Harvey was working in Germany as a management services consultant in 1989, helping
international corporations build stock options and trade futures. But she had a secret:
unbeknownst to her colleagues, Harvey had joined FSV Frankfurt, a local club soccer team.
“I learned very quickly that nice girls with good educations from good families didn’t play
football,” she says. “Maybe they watched it, but women, back then, played tennis or golf. I
learned not to talk about it at work.”
Keeping things quiet got more difficult when her team went to the club final, which was played
before the men’s club final in the Berlin Olympic Stadium in front of 75,000 people – and
televised. Two minutes before the end of the game, the other team was awarded a penalty.
Harvey, the keeper, saved it. Now, she was featured in every news story about the match.
“The next day I was back at work and people were like, ‘Were you on television this weekend?’
she laughs. The word was out and from that point on, Harvey never hid her involvement with the
sport. In the decades since, she has played a central role in shaping how it is governed both
nationally and internationally.
Within six months of her arrival in Germany, Harvey was called up to the U.S. Women’s
National Team which went on to win the first Women’s World Cup in 1991 and the first
Olympic soccer gold medal in 1996. She served on U.S. Soccer’s Board of Directors for 12
years, including five on the Executive Committee and in 2003 she became the first woman – and
first American – hired by FIFA as its Director of Development. During five years at FIFA,
Harvey managed a $160 million per year budget and worked with 208 soccer federations around
the world.
At the time she joined it, the organization had gone through five previous Directors of
Development in five years and key programs lacked both oversight and transparency. Culturally,
no one was quite sure what to do with her. “I was a member of senior management who deserved
to be there based on track record and from a career perspective,” she says. “But I was also
female. And American. What do Americans know about football? What do women know? They
wanted to put me in a ‘she’s not qualified’ box but they couldn’t because I had a bona fide
credential in the sport.”
Harvey was used to working primarily with men from her corporate experience, but FIFA was
different. “I’m a performance-based creature,” she explains. “There had always been a
scoreboard. As a national team athlete, performance is how you get paid. Management
consulting means you’re convincing someone to pay you $300 an hour for your brain, so it’s
absolutely about outcomes.” She assumed FIFA would be the same way.
That assumption didn’t last long. Soon it became evident that less tangible issues determined
what was possible, such as whether or not then-President Sepp Blatter liked you. “That was a big
adjustment for me,” she says. “When I got there, people wanted to discount me for so many
reasons. So I said, ‘I’ve got to have a scoreboard and a timer. I have three months to prove why
I’m here.’”
Her first move was to clean up FIFA’s Financial Assistance program, through which soccer
associations in 208 countries received $250,000 every year. Over 90% of the staff’s time was
spent on that program, which Harvey describes as ‘a mess.’ “It was fragmented, ad hoc and
reactive rather than proactive.” That meant that FIFA’s other two development programs, GOAL
(an infrastructure program which provided funding for countries to build stadiums, training
centers and fields) and Education (a program to train coaches for men’s and women’s soccer,
futsal and beach soccer plus refereeing and medical skills) were getting scant attention.
Meanwhile, within the Financial Assistance program over 60% of the associations chosen to be
audited by KPMG each year had adverse findings. “There were clearly big problems,” says
Harvey. “It very clear to me was that we needed to redo regulations and put a process in place to
review how people were planning to use their money once a year. That sounds obvious, but it
wasn’t happening. It was a stretch for developing countries, because everyone was in firefighting
mode: we need money right now for this or that.”
Her team created a system in which every country that received funding had to provide a
proactive business plan. If they were audited and the audit showed misuse of funds, those funds
would be deducted from the following year’s payment. In particularly egregious cases, funding
was suspended until things changed. “Within the first three months of my time at FIFA, we got
regulations in place that had gotten past the Executive Committee,” Harvey notes.
Creating the system was one thing; now they had to get people to buy into it. As part of the
change management process, the entire development team broke into groups and traveled to 180
countries within six weeks to meet with different federations and explain the new process – and
how it would benefit them.
“It was about enrolling them in why transparency and accountability are good things for them,”
says Harvey. “If you do it this way you get money four times a year. You have reliability in
terms of cash flow, you know when the money is coming, and we’re going to help you through
it. Now, when the press wants to vilify you and say you’re a bunch of crooks, you can hold up
your audit.” The approach worked and the program has become one of Harvey’s legacies at
FIFA.
Then in 2006 another challenge emerged. When Harvey attended the Under-20 Women’s World
Championship (changed to U-20 Women’s World Cup in 2008) in Russia, attendance was nearly
non-existent, and so was media coverage. “The practice at the time was, we’re going to put a gun
to the head of each member of the Executive Committee and say, ‘You’re hosting the Under 20,
right?’” she says. “Nobody wanted it, they didn’t promote it and it looked awful on television if
it even got on television.”
How, then, to make hosting such a tournament attractive to countries where those in leadership
positions might not see its intrinsic value? By using it as a catalyst for change, says Harvey.
Learn what issues a given country is trying to solve domestically and then see where a program
that boosts participation in youth soccer might fit as part of an overall package that comes with
the U-20 tournament.
She cites England’s struggle with childhood obesity as a case in point. “When they started
looking, they found that this issue disproportionately impacts primary school girls,” says Harvey.
“Why? When somebody thought to actually interview a bunch of them, they said, ‘The boys get
to play football and rugby and we get netball and hockey. We don’t like netball and hockey.’ So
then the million dollar question is, if you could play any sport you wanted, what would you want
to play? It’s overwhelmingly one answer.”
Bringing an age-group competition like the U-20 tournament to a country like England provides
an opportunity to work toward health targets by creating programs around it as part of the
competition budget. “Leading up to it, we’re going to help you do programs in schools that bring
awareness to the tournament so that it is truly a catalyst for change,” says Harvey. “We’ll work
with you on whatever it is that helps you move against those domestic health objectives.”
The Legacy Program, as it became known, wasn’t implemented until after Harvey had left FIFA.
She doesn’t know exactly what impact it’s had or even if it still exists. “They might have
dismantled it,” she says. “That’s why you need changemakers on the inside as well as the
outside.” One thing she does know: when the program was implemented in Chile, the number of
female players nationwide went from 3,200 to over 50,000 in a two-year period.
Harvey left FIFA in 2008, becoming, to use her term ‘a changemaker on the outside.’ In 2018
she became the CEO of the Centre for Sport and Human Rights, an international coalition
focused on preventing human rights abuses within the industry and redressing those that have
already occurred. Although she’s no longer part of it, she believes FIFA has a significant role to
play in the expansion of women’s soccer.
“It’s not growing incrementally, it’s growing exponentially,” she says. “With that, you’re going
to run into bumps along the way. If you have your eye on the ball and are focused, you can
navigate down those bumps without falling down by being proactive and deliberate about how to
accommodate the growth that is happening.”