Rather like a goal that comes out of nowhere, the arrest on Wednesday of seven top officials in world football’s governing body, Fifa, came as a shock to everyone.
Yet it was also unsurprising: Fifa has been a byword for corruption and dodgy dealing for years. What is strange is how those arrests came about and what the circumstances say about European football’s unhappy acquiescence in what’s been happening. Where should we go from here?
The dawn arrests took place in a luxury Zurich hotel on the eve of Fifa’s annual congress. The most unexpected element in the raid, apart from the sight of these princes of the beautiful game being bundled away covered in sheets to minimise their embarrassment, was the fact that they were arrested by Swiss police at the behest of the United States. The USA is a country where soccer is only a minority interest so it seems odd that, despite the stench of corruption having hung over Fifa for years, it has been left to an American Attorney General to take the initiative.
She is Loretta Lynch and she has only recently been appointed to the job. The charges against the Zurich seven and seven others include with racketeering, fraud, money-laundering and taking bribes over the staging of football tournaments, including the World Cup of 2010 in South Africa. The charges stretch back to 1991. Ms Lynch said those accused had ‘used their positions to solicit bribes. They did this over and over, year after year, tournament after tournament.’
The reason for the United States taking the initiative is that much of the money it is alleged corruptly changed hands passed through American financial institutions, and also because the alleged crimes involved Concacaf, the governing body of football in central and north America (including the USA), which is a confederate part of Fifa.
The Swiss authorities announced they were making their own independent investigation into the circumstances of Fifa’s awarding the 2018 World Cup tournament to Russia and the 2022 tournament to Qatar. They said they would need to interview ten Fifa executive committee members in relation to this.
Fifa’s president, seventy-nine year-old Sepp Blatter, responded to these astonishing developments by saying; “This is a difficult time for football, the fans and for Fifa as an organisation. Such misconduct has no place in football and we will ensure that those who engage in it are put out of the game.”
Those remarks elicited a gale of hollow laughter, at least in Europe. Because although Blatter has not himself been indicted by the American authorities or anyone else, simply by presiding over Fifa for so long he has been regarded as, at the very least, the chief obstacle to doing anything about the corruption that has been such an open secret. Indeed his message on Wednesday seemed to be that everything should carry on usual as if nothing had happened. That includes proceeding with the annual congress and, most importantly of all, the election of the president in which it is a foregone conclusion that he will be re-elected for a fifth term, notwithstanding the fact that he had earlier promised not to carry on. He is guaranteed to win because of the votes of those countries (or at least of their football officials) who do best out of the system that has caused everyone else to hold their noses.
What may shake the confidence of Mr Blatter and those who benefit from the current system is the attitude of Fifa’s sponsors to what has gone on this week. One of the biggest sponsors, the American credit card giant, Visa, said it would ‘reassess’ its sponsorship if things were not cleaned up. Coca-Cola and Adidas said they were ‘concerned’. Whether they will end up pulling the plug, however, remains to be seen. Few are holding their breath.
What the events of the week, and especially the unexpected intervention of the United States, expose is the impotence, wilful or otherwise, of Europe’s football governing body, Uefa. No one can claim that Uefa was unaware of what is alleged to have been going on because it has been talked about for so long. Indeed the way the system of governing world football has evolved over the last couple of decades or so seemed to many designed to produce the very sort of corruption of which it is now accused. That’s because Fifa has become a vast patronage system in which the huge funds available to it can be used to buy votes and in which it is itself susceptible to those with the money to spend in order to become a part of the world’s greatest sporting tournament.
That was evident to everyone when Fifa awarded the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, a country with little history of involvement in football and where temperatures in the summer (when the tournament is traditionally played) are so high as to be prohibitive. Similar suspicions greeted the decision to award the 2018 World Cup to Russia. Unsurprisingly perhaps, President Putin wants President Blatter to carry on.
Aware of all this, Uefa has been accused of simply wringing its hands. Yet it could, say its critics, have taken decisive action. If Uefa had simply walked away and saiud that until the corruption had been rooted out, it was not going to take part in any future Fifa-organised World Cups, Fifa would have faced a crisis that would have forced action to be taken. It is not that Europe is the only footballing continent in the world - far from it - but a World Cup without Europe is not a World Cup.
So why has Uefa been apparently so supine? Some would argue that there are even bigger forces at work, notably national governments in Europe. It is not that they endorse corruption but that they may have other fish to fry. In particular, for European governments to have encouraged Uefa not to accept the decision to give the next two World Cup tournaments to Russia and Qatar would have risked causing diplomatic consequences that go far beyond football. Qatar’s huge sovereign wealth fund and its penchant for defence contracts make it a country few wish to offend; and, in the view of at least some European governments, we have enough troubles with Russia without making them worse by an argument over a football match. Now, though, things may seem different. World football has been brought down in the penalty area by someone we wouldn’t have expected to see on the pitch: the first black American woman to be her country’s Attorney General. Is it now time for those who run European football to follow her lead and say ‘Enough is enough’?
