Havelange globalised beautiful game
JEAN-Marie Faustin Godefroid de Havelange, who has died aged 100, was president of Fifa – the governing body of world football – from 1974 to 1998.
Joao, as Havelange was popularly known, was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on May 8 1916.
He oversaw the transformation of the planet’s favourite pastime into one of the wealthiest industries in the world.
Even his detractors admitted that he successfully modernised the administration of a sport that was nearly moribund when he ousted his predecessor, the English former referee Sir Stanley Rous.
The game was then being run from a small villa in Zurich by a staff of a dozen who were content for the World Cup to remain a largely European affair.
Havelange’s coup was mounted with the backing of Fifa’s African, Asian and North American delegates – a deal that led directly to the doubling of World Cup finalists from 16 in 1974 to 32 by 2002.
Whether this made for a better tournament was debatable, but it certainly made the game more global – as did many of Havelange’s other initiatives, including his championing of women’s and youth competitions; of funding for development of the game in the world’s poorer regions; and of the return of China to the sport’s fold.
His principal contribution to football, however, was to realise its potential for commercial exploitation, underlined by his urging that the World Cup be staged in America and later Japan – countries that were rich but which lacked substantial domestic audiences for the game.
In fact, during Havelange’s autocratic reign, Fifa’s income was to be of an entirely different order. Since all in football seemed to benefit from this, it was not until after his retirement that the secretive and allegedly corrupt manner in which Havelange had arranged matters came to be questioned.
Many of the allegations were made by the investigative journalist David Yallop in his book
How They Stole the Game (1999), and later by the British investigative reporter Andrew Jennings, author of FOUL! The Secret World of Fifa: Bribes, Vote-Rigging and Ticket Scandals (2006).
To these charges, Havelange replied mostly with silence. Even to the casual observer, however, there appeared something amiss with his decision in the late 1970s to use as Fifa’s exclusive marketing partner ISL, a firm controlled by Horst Dassler, founder of the sportswear business Adidas. Havelange died on Tuesday.