Analysis: This article examines published records and attributed reporting ahead of the 2026 FIDE election.
International sports federations get judged on two things: whether they run events properly, and whether they handle money honestly. Over the past several months, FIDE has faced serious questions on both.
None of these questions come from rival campaigns or anonymous critics. They come from FIDE's own published documents, from players and federations who were at FIDE's flagship event in September, and from legal action brought by five member federations at the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
Before the chess community votes on who runs the game for the next four years, the record deserves a clear look.
A Flagship Event, and a Familiar Failure
The Chess Olympiad is the biggest event FIDE organises. National teams travel from across the world, many on tight federation budgets, and it's the one occasion where the whole chess community lands in the same place.
When the 46th Olympiad opened in Samarkand on 15 September 2026, multiple delegations arrived to find their accommodation hadn't been arranged. India's team spent hours at the airport without rooms. Grandmaster Srinath Narayanan posted publicly that five hours after landing there was "absolutely no clarity" on when rooms would be assigned. Vidit Gujrathi called the first impressions "very poor." FIDE acknowledged the failures the following day and announced compensation for teams who had arranged their own rooms at their own expense.
Accommodation looks like a logistical footnote. It isn't. When a governing body can't house its own players at its own flagship event, the failure sits upstream, in contracting, in oversight, in who checks the work before the teams land.
Players spend years preparing for an Olympiad. Federations spend money they often don't have to spare to send them. The organisational standard should be commensurate with that.
The Sponsorship Numbers
The commercial picture is harder to look at. According to FIDE's own Verification Commission report, FIDE budgeted three million euros in sponsorship revenue for 2024. The actual figure came in at 166,000 euros.
That's a shortfall of roughly 95 per cent.
The Verification Commission put it plainly: "Setting large amounts for sponsorships in budgets without a clear source for this money is problematic. FIDE cannot spend money it does not receive." Sponsorship income is what funds development programmes, youth events, arbiter training and support for smaller federations. When the projection misses by that margin, the shortfall hits the people with the least room to absorb it.
There are two ways to read the numbers. Either the original budget was built on projections nobody had reason to believe, which is a planning failure. Or the commercial operation simply didn't deliver, which is an execution failure. The Commission flagged both risks explicitly, noting it lacked "confidence" the 2025 sponsorship projections could be met either.
Chess has real commercial potential. Online audiences have grown substantially in recent years. Broadcasters and brands have shown genuine interest in the game. A governing body sitting on that kind of attention and converting it into 166,000 euros against a three million euro target owes its members an honest account of what went wrong.
Where Are the Accounts?
The financial questions don't stop at sponsorship. Ahead of the September 2026 election, audited financial statements for 2025 have not been published. Delegates voting on the next FIDE president are doing so without a complete, audited picture of how the organisation managed its money in the most recent financial year.
This matters most in an election year. Delegates are being asked to renew or withdraw a mandate. They're entitled to see the audited record before they cast that vote, not after.
The basic standard for any federation is straightforward: publish the accounts, on time, audited, every year. When the accounts aren't available going into the vote, members are left to make one of the most consequential decisions in chess governance on incomplete information.
Federations Take FIDE to Court
The most significant development of recent months involves FIDE's own members going to court. Ukraine, England, Norway, Estonia and Germany filed a joint appeal at the Court of Arbitration for Sport in January 2026, challenging resolutions adopted at FIDE's General Assembly in December 2025 over the return of Russian and Belarusian national teams to international competition with full national symbols.
Taking a governing body to CAS is a last resort. These federations depend on FIDE for ratings, titles, event calendars and international representation. They went to arbitration because they believed the way the December vote was conducted breached the rules governing their own organisation. The federations are represented by the law firm Covington and Burling. This isn't a minor procedural complaint.
Whatever CAS eventually decides, five federations choosing arbitration over internal resolution says something concrete about the state of trust between the membership and the leadership. Governing bodies that work resolve disputes internally. When that stops happening, members go elsewhere.
The Term Limit Question
Running alongside the finances and the litigation is a structural change with longer consequences. In December 2023, FIDE's General Assembly voted to remove presidential term limits, with 108 federations in favour. Article 18.12, which capped presidents at two four-year terms, was removed from the FIDE Charter. That article had been introduced by Dvorkovich himself as an election promise in 2018.
Term limits aren't about any individual president. They force organisations to build systems that don't depend on one person staying in office. They create guaranteed moments of renewal. Without them, power tends to consolidate around whoever holds the office longest, and the institutions around that person weaken accordingly.
Sports governance has plenty of examples of what happens when term limits go. Very few of those examples end well for the members and athletes the organisation is meant to serve.
Several Problems Together
Each of these issues has an explanation available in isolation. Events go wrong. Sponsorship markets are difficult. Legal disputes happen. Governance rules change.
But the accumulation matters. Accommodation failures at the flagship event. Sponsorship income at five per cent of budget. No published 2025 audit ahead of a presidential vote. Five federations at CAS. Term limits removed by the assembly that same leadership commands.
Taken together, that's a management record. Weak planning, unclear accountability, insufficient commercial delivery and governance structures that a substantial part of the membership no longer fully trusts.
That said, FIDE does real work. The ratings system functions. Titles are recognised globally. Hundreds of events run every year through the effort of organisers, arbiters and volunteers. Criticism of the management is not criticism of the institution or the people inside it.
The Questions That Need Answering
Every candidate in the 2026 election, incumbent or challenger, should be asked to address the record directly:
On events: what specifically failed in Samarkand, who was responsible, and what changes prevent a repeat at the next Olympiad?
On money: why did sponsorship revenue reach 166,000 euros against a three million euro budget, and what does the commercial plan look like now?
On transparency: when will the audited 2025 accounts be published, and why were they unavailable before the vote?
On governance: why are five federations in court against their own governing body, and what reform of internal dispute mechanisms would make such litigation unnecessary?
On structure: what is the justification for removing term limits, and what safeguards replace them?
Vague reassurance won't do here. The record is documented. Any candidate who can't explain what went wrong and what changes specifically, should expect those questions to follow them through the campaign.