FIFA in ethics fiasco

SUCH is the farce at FIFA that their executive committee last week postponed dealing with a request from their own ethics committee to be transparent about who they are investigating.

So they cannot officially confirm that football’s two most powerful figures — Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini — are being probed by the two-chamber ethics investigatory arm, as has already been widely reported.

Ludicrously, the ExCo want the transparency request to be reviewed by FIFA’s legal committee whose head, Spain’s Angel Maria Villar Llona, has himself been under investigation by the ethics committee since last November.

Equally bizarrely, the ethics investigatory arm are not thought to be probing secretary-general Jerome Valcke, who was suspended by Blatter and confederation chiefs including Platini.

Meanwhile, David Gill has seemed reluctant to get fully engaged in FIFA politics since being elected to the British vice-presidency seat on the ExCo last March.

But he is expected to take the lead in sorting out the mess of the FA having prematurely announced their support for Platini as the next FIFA president despite the Frenchman being embroiled in the corruption saga. Gill also sits on the UEFA executive, where he is an increasingly influential voice.

MANCHESTER UNITED’S executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward, whose commercial expertise led to his rise to power at Old Trafford, is understood to be annoyed that two sponsorship account managers have chosen to leave United’s record-breaking operation for jobs at Liverpool and Arsenal. INSURANCE giants Miller are setting up a sports and leisure operation that will be led by James Hands and Steve Talboys, who handled many football accounts at previous employers Aon.