Death of a whistle-blower away
Chuck Blazer told everyone who asked that his idol was Joao Havelange. Both worked hard for football, and that deserves to be acknowledged, yet both bent it into a game of self-enrichment. The goal became power and personal wealth, and while power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
And not only in sport, but in politics, business and religion as well. Sepp Blatter, a man who should know (and who should know better), was fond of quipping that football could not expect to be immune to “the little devils of society”. True, but knowing he was supping with these little devils around the FIFA boardroom table, Blatter’s ultimate failure was in acquiescing, not acting.
Havelange worked his way up from Brazilian Olympic swimmer to national sports supremo to World Cup-winning director to FIFA president. That opened his bank vaults to the commissions/ bribes of ISL Marketing.
No wonder Blazer, who has died at 72 after a long battle with cancer, admired Havelange. Where Havelange led, Blazer followed – all the way to the enforced and selfincriminating admissions which lifted the lid on the scandal-wracked excesses within FIFA’s leadership and FIFAGate.
Blazer was a successful business adventurist before becoming caught up in football. He was one of the original influential figures in the rise of professional football in the United States. There was no money to be made back then, only money to be lost. But the work of Werner Fricker, Blazer, Sunil Gulati, Clive Toye, Alan Rothenberg and others converted what was an underground movement into the vibrant US soccer scene of today.
Significant stepping stones included the bankruptcy-bound bubble of the NASL – which taught its survivors a host of valuable lessons – the hosting of the World Cup in 1994 and the launch of MLS.
As for Blazer, he developed the USSF’s national team programme in the 1980s, served one term as its executive vice-president and was then commissioner of the American Soccer League. He then gained access to the levers of international football power through CONCACAF, where he became general-secretary in 1990 – just as Trinidadian history lecturer Jack Warner was taking up the presidency. They seized the sponsor-rich potential of the forthcoming US World Cup to turn a hitherto sleepy confederation into a political force within world football.
One of their first grandiose steps was to move CONCACAF’s headquarters from Guatemala City to Trump Tower on New York’s Fifth Avenue. But that was also their first big mistake because it brought CONCACAF’s business within the ultimately fatal ambit of the US law and revenue services.
Blazer’s particular pride was in the high-tech television control centre he constructed within a Trump Tower suite. CONCACAF also funded his two private apartments. One he shared with his parrot, Max Blazer; the other, famously, was a home for his girlfriend’s cats.
Warner helped ensure that Blazer was soon a fixture within various FIFA committees. They also engineered a change of CONCACAF regulations permitting a paid staff member to stand for election to the FIFA ExCo – as Blazer did in 1997 after the death of the long-serving Mexican, Guillermo Canedo.
No one has estimated how many millions Warner generated personally from patronage, influence and the World Cup bid bribes as set out in the FIFAGate and associated documentation. Blazer, it is known, pocketed more than $20m from CONCACAF, including $17m in commissions.
He also enjoyed the values of those Trump Tower apartments and used at least $4m of CONCACAF money to buy property in the Bahamas. But this was probably just
CONCACAF funded his two private apartments. One he shared with his parrot, Max Blazer; the other, famously, was a home for his girlfriend’s cats
the tip of the dollar iceberg.
Blazer both enriched and enjoyed himself at football’s expense. He kept a vintage Mercedes-Benz parked in the FIFA garage in Zurich and regaled his social media followers with endless tales of his five-star travels.
Indeed, such high living saw Blazer grow so corpulent that he had to use a mobility scooter to get round. It was while "scooting" to a favourite New York restaurant that his career was brought to a literal halt by FBI and IRS agents.
The rest has been well detailed: the fall-out with Warner over the cash-for-votes scandal entangled with Mohamed Bin Hammam’s doomed FIFA presidential bid; the use of a hotel keyfob at the London Olympics to record incriminating conversations; the lifting of the lid on the web of corruption.
Blazer’s death meant that, with a sentencing date still to be set by a Brooklyn court, he escaped justice.
So too, for what it may be worth, did Havelange.