The reality we at Josimar face is stark. Should we fail to raise 50 000 euro by 1 July, the world’s only investigative media dedicated solely to football will cease to exist.
We will no longer be in a position to commission and publish the investigations which have made our name over the past eight years. Our unique archive of award-winning journalism will be lost.
I’ll put modesty aside for a second. It does matter, not just for ourselves, but for football as a whole. This I won’t apologise for saying, as it’s not an empty boast. It is something that many of you have told us in the past. In those past eight years, we have not just led the conversation on many of the colossal problems facing world football. Very often, we started it. Without us, many of those conversations would not have taken place at all. Conversations on sexual abuse within football federations and Fifa, which led to perpetrators being put on trial and jailed; on the links between the world’s biggest clubs and betting sponsors linked to human trafficking and organised crime, which led at least in part to a complete re-think of the problem within the regulatory and law enforcement agencies; on the plight of North Korean slave workers employed on Russia 2018’s construction sites; on Fifa’s colonisation of African football and the quasi-dictatorial rule of its president Gianni Infantino; on Russia’s hitherto hidden influence within UEFA after its invasion of Ukraine; on the criminals who are using the multi-club ownership model to launder dirty money and are endangering the future of some of football’s most cherished clubs; and much more.
But grateful as we are for the compliments which came our way and the attention that some of our reporting has received the world over, it is not gratitude which will help us survive. It is money. €50k, a ridiculously low figure when you think of what is at stake; a fortune for us, the difference between life and death as an independent investigative media.
Why we find ourselves in this situation is easy to explain. Investigative journalism is a time-consuming exercise which requires unique skills and is far more expensive to produce than ‘ordinary’ journalism. We have survived on a knife edge for a long time, relying solely on the support of our subscribers and donors to publish our work; but we’ve now reached the point where we need something extra. To those of you who have already subscribed and donated, and there are many of them among you, all our thanks. What we have done and desperately want to carry on doing we couldn’t have done without you. Yet we need more.
We do not have the support of a global media group, a wealthy individual or a nation state. We want our articles to be accessible to the greatest number possible, which is why all of our investigations are free to read online for 24 hours. Our readership is widespread, and reflects our desire to cover all of football, be it in Brazil, South Africa, the USA, Pakistan or England. Many of our readers, particularly in the so-called ‘global South’, cannot afford to pay to access our articles.
We do not have any sponsors or advertisers, by choice as well as by necessity: we only want to be accountable to our readers and serve the greater good of football, not be enslaved to it and to those who run it for their own benefit. Nothing would please the wrongdoers of football more than to see Josimar disappear, as they know there is no one who is in a situation or has a desire to do it in our stead.
The journalists who have written for Josimar will struggle to find other outlets for their work. The subjects we broach often are too ‘hot’ for mainstream media (a source of immense frustration for their writers), be it because those media do not want to bite the hand that feeds them, because they’re part of the ecosystem themselves, or because they do not benefit from the protection granted by Norwegian laws on press freedom. The many dozens of whistleblowers and victims of wrongdoing who have come to us over the years will struggle to find anyone they know they can trust to tell their stories to.
Only you can save Josimarfootball.com. How?
By subscribing if you do not already. It’s cheap: only $3.99 per month or $39.99 for a year. By offering subscriptions to friends or colleagues in your own organisations. By donating whichever amount you can afford to give.
You can subscribe HERE. You can donate HERE.
You can also spread this message to others whom you think would be willing to help us.
Player agents, former Fifa president Sepp Blatter, Fifa itself, the organising committee of Qatar 2022, sports betting operators and quite a few others have threatened us with legal action in order to stop us from doing what we’re doing. Unsuccessfully. Season after season we’ve grinded out results, against the odds, down, but we’ve never been beaten, which is a testament to the care we take in garnering facts and documents and making sure our sources are unimpeachable.
As our editor Håvard Melnæs puts it, it’s now penalty shoot-out time in the game we’ve been playing for eight years, and which we believe we still can win – with your help. One month. $50k. It’s nothing. But it means the world to us.
Thank you.
Philippe Auclair, Josimar
