FIFA IS SO CORRUPT IT WILL INEVITABLY FALL LIKE ALL ROTTEN EMPIRES
But Blatter and his FIFA cronies seem to be banking on the notion that no one really cares
ALMOST 35 years have passed since I tried to exchange sterling banknotes for roubles at the reception desk of a Moscow hotel. It was a modest sum, about £30, but the receptionist became agitated. ‘Don’t change here!’ she whispered. ‘We pay only the official rate.’
‘Where, then?’ I asked. She pointed across the lobby at a figure in a sombre green jacket, with stiff-brimmed cap and face blank as an empty soup plate. ‘Him!’ she said. ‘He pays six times the rate.’
She reached for my notes, and hurried across to the militia man. They held a brief conversation, the transaction was made, and she returned, smiling. ‘He asked me where you are from, and I told him Britain,’ she said. ‘He said he likes British, so he gave me seven times.’
She picked out her own, modest, commission, and handed me a bundle of roubles. The deed was done. It was all perfectly open; nobody reacted, nobody seemed to care. That was the way life was lived in Soviet Russia.
I repeated the performance three or four times over the period of the Moscow Olympics. The man would nod to me as I walked through the foyer; occasionally he would pat the wallet in his inside pocket. I told myself that, while illegal, it was harmless, a victimless crime which everybody committed.
It was several weeks later, when the Olympics were over and I was back home, that the doubts started to crowd in. Of course Russian society was hopelessly corrupt from top to bottom. But through my complicity in that tacky deception, hadn’t I helped to make it a little more squalid?
Which brings us, quite naturally, to England’s hapless bid to stage the 2018 World Cup.
In this column on December 5, 2010 − three days after the humiliating vote − I related details of a private dinner party I had attended in a Mayfair hotel. The dinner had taken place 11 months earlier, and guests included senior civil servants, three or four journalists, and leading members of the England World Cup 2018 bid team.
After the meal, the bid’s chief executive, Andy Anson, was asked about rumours of corruption among the FIFA executive committee who would choose the host nation.
To general amazement, he told us that the matter had been given a great deal of thought, and he and his team had concluded that, of the 24 voting members, ‘at least 13 are buyable’. It was a major faux pas, and one which Anson’s underlings were swift to smother.
Retractions were made, explanations were offered, assurances of FIFA’s probity were uttered. But he had said it, he clearly meant it, and the conclusion was obvious: if 13 were ‘buyable’, then presumably they would be bought. But bought by whom? For how much? And what measures had the bid team taken to obtain such damaging facts?
I remember worrying about the issue for several weeks. On the one hand, the dinner was a private function, with everything off the record. On the other, the bidding team were spinning the story that England had great expectations of success. Media criticism was contemptuously rejected, international rascals were shamelessly embraced, squalid promises were lightly offered and about £21 million was wastefully spent. And all this on a bid which 13 ‘buyable’ chancers had already rendered irrelevant; a bid which they knew was doomed to fail.
Had Anson’s remark been reported, then FIFA would have erupted and England’s bid would have been instantly withdrawn. And we, the dreaded media, would have suffered the blame and the consequences.
And so, having promised silence, I said nothing, wincing as the charade unfolded and biting my tongue as breezy, baseless forecasts were doled out to a wholly unsuspecting public. And it came to pass that a magnificent bid which was superior to the rest by every criterion − and immeasurably superior to the Russian entry − received just two votes and went out on the first ballot.
Once again, Anson tried to blame the media, a reaction which would have been hilarious were it not so depressing, and with the medieval emirate of Qatar profiting through an even more outrageous fix, the movers and shakers at FIFA celebrated a clean sweep for the bad guys.
THE fact is, they feel themselves to be invulnerable. And after last week’s farcical developments, who shall blame them? The details have been well ventilated; the former US prosecutor, Michael Garcia, composed a deeply damaging report on the bidding processes for 2018 and 2022. He had faced certain drawbacks: his inquiry could not demand the presence of witnesses, he was banned from visiting Russia, and many of the Russians by and large declined to turn up, then told him their computers had been destroyed and their emails were lost, the high-tech equivalent of ‘the dog ate my homework’.
The Qataris, similarly, lavished £1.15 m on the African Confederation’s conference and doled out seductive grants to developing countries through their ‘Aspire Academy’. FIFA decided against publishing his 430-page report, but instead commissioned a precis by Hans-Joachim Eckert, the chair of the adjudicating chamber of FIFA’s ‘Ethics Committee’. His conclusion, that everything was sweetness and light with both bids, seemed to be repeatedly contradicted by much of the evidence he had published.
Even when Garcia complained with great bitterness that his report had been wilfully misrepresented, their complacency was unshaken. People read the headlines, you see; the small print does not carry the same impact.
So, it’s trebles all round and a whitewash well done. For the truth is, they believe they can get away with it. And history tells us they are probably right.
The FA chairman, Greg Dyke, called it ‘a bit of a joke’, which was an understatement, but he also said something of real importance: ‘The whole of the way football operates at that sort of level is suspect, and has been for many years. I don’t think FIFA are a straight organisation and haven’t been for many years.’
Think about that: the man who leads the oldest football association in the world believes that the world governing body is not straight; in other words, it is crooked, and is has been for years.
Is that not a desperately serious allegation? FIFA is corrupt, indefensible, unfit for purpose; yet it expects to sail serenely on, led by its dubious, 78-year-old president Sepp Blatter, who has an outrageous ambition to serve his fifth five-year term.
They all appear to be banking on the notion that nobody really cares, that things will always be this way, that wholesale, deep-rooted corruption is a way of life.
Soviet Russia, a rather more substantial monolith, harboured a similar delusion. Yet scarcely a decade later it was gone, buried beneath the debris of its own moral anarchy. There may be a lesson there, if Blatter and his cronies care to learn it.