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| Oh look, a paper trail ... |
WHEN I saw this letter on Tuesday morning, I knew this was going to be trouble. Unearthed by the South African media and then reported upon by the New York Times, this 2008 letter from the head of the South African FA instructs FIFA to set aside $10 million to contribute to the ‘Diaspora Legacy Programme Fund,’ a nonexistent Caribbean football development program invented by then CONCACAF Jack Warner. This letter corroborates the Justice Department allegation in this indictment which charges that Warner solicited a bribe from the South African FA and that, ultimately, it was paid out through FIFA accounts. The letter is addressed to Jérôme Valcke, who is the #2 guy at FIFA, which suggests that not only did Valcke know about the bribe, he appears to have had a hand in facilitating it. After the Zürich raids were undertaken last week, the FBI hinted that it was just the tip of the iceberg, and that the investigation was going after even bigger fish. It’s hard to get much bigger than the #2 guy. The only one bigger, of course, is the #1 guy in the office next door.
And after winning a 5th term as president of FIFA on Friday, and alternately acting defiant and gloating about it over the weekend in response, FIFA’s #1 guy, Sepp Blatter, hastily announced his resignation on Tuesday, a day that most everyone in the football-loving world – which is, well, almost everybody – will certainly remember. The news conference where this was announced was hasty and haphazard and short, which are three things that FIFA generally doesn’t do because, like all good authoritarian regimes, FIFA’s long on order and maintaining control of the situation. Blatter’s resignation was an awkward fall from grace, but as departing dictators go, there was considerably less kicking and screaming than is the norm.
“While I have a mandate from the membership of FIFA, I do not feel that I have a mandate from the entire world of football – the fans, the players, the clubs, the people who live, breathe and love football as much as we all do at FIFA. Therefore, I have decided to lay down my mandate at an extraordinary elective congress. I will continue to exercise my functions as FIFA president until that election.”
– Sepp Blatter
Now the FIFA spin here is that, after several days of reflection, Sepp Blatter has suddenly developed a conscience. But given that the Justice Department have followed the money and, apparently, the trail leads to the office next door to him at the FIFA HQ, I wouldn’t say it’s wild speculation to suggest that Blatter’s hand has been forced. The resignation seems an act of self-protection. It’s now suggested that Blatter himself is, in fact, the subject of the Justice Department probes, and the Feds are now apparently conducting their own inquiry into the bidding for World Cups 2018 and 2022. He cannot be extradited from Switzerland, but the Feds certainly can make foreign travel uncomfortable. I was somewhat joking the other day about the notion of the RCMP showing up and arresting him in Vancouver at the Women’s World Cup, but maybe that notion isn’t so fanciful after all.
Wow, what a mess. For The Lose, FIFA collapsing is Christmas in June. It’s the gift that will just keep on giving. It’s one part sports, one part politics, one part crime syndicate, and one part Vatican, given that the size of the egos involved reminds you of those clamoring to one day be the pope. There’s a $5 billion-sized pie which should be plenty for everyone to eat, yet everyone seems to want to take that pie and use it for a food fight.
Just ponder this story here to get a good idea of how insane this is. Here are two key grafs from the article, which centers on allegations of vote buying in the bidding for the 2018 World Cup:
England’s World Cup bid team uncovered a host of corruption allegations at the top of world football after using ex-MI6 officers and overseas diplomats in a spying campaign against Russia during the battle to host the 2018 tournament, according to new claims.
Private ex-intelligence investigators carried out surveillance on the eight other rival bidding nations for the 2018 World Cup, paid for by sponsors and associates of the bid team, according to the document. Britain’s embassies abroad were also used to collect information that was fed onto an encrypted database. Embassies tracked the movements of the Russia 2018 bid team as they travelled the world lobbying voters and provided information on the activities of two former members of the Fifa executive committee English crew were even using British embassies for the purpose.
The story then goes to dredge up some stuff that’s been floating around for a while in the world of football innuendo – stuff like how the Russians broke out a Picasso and some other stuff from the Hermitage Museum and gave it to court votes, and how Russia and Qatar backed each other as part of larger energy extraction deals and such. But wait a minute: why are World Cup organizers spying on each other? This is completely ridiculous. Where do James Bond and Tony Soprano fit into all of this?
But as I’ve said before, this isn’t just about a game. Witness the fact that Qatar’s stock market plummeted at news of Sepp Blatter’s resignation. This is big business and big money we’re talking about here. In the 40-page transcript released Wednesday, American soccer exec-cum-state’s evidence Chuck Blazer testifies that he was taking bribes on World Cup bids for as early as 1998, and as we’ve seen with the processes surrounding events such as the World Cup and the Olympics, the stakes are always ramped up, the ante raised for the next go around. By the time the vote arose in 2010 for the World Cups to be held in 2018 and 2022, the corruption had apparently gotten so bad, and become so deeply-rooted, that nations resorted to spying on each other to see if/when/how they were greasing the skids. This is NUTS!
And this all comes back to Blatter, in the end. He’s the one who built the organization into what it is over 40 years. He’s the one who’s presided over it all. He’s the one playing old school, country time politics, playing the sides and pitting one region of the world against the other. But Jérôme Valcke getting implicated – a day after FIFA officials lied about it, and tried to pin the South African bribery mess on a now-deceased Argentine bureaucrat – was the last straw. Blatter played dumb last week, insisting that he doesn’t know what everyone else is doing within his own organization and can’t control what they do. Not only is that not in keeping with dictatorial behaviour – autocrats have a pressing need to know everything about everybody – but it defies all credibility that the organization would then pass on $10 million to some supposed football development foundation without knowing whether or not it actually existed. That whole transaction implies that bribery, wire fraud and money laundering were just aspects of business as usual. It’s exactly the sort of business that the Justice Department’s New York offices have a penchant for putting a stop to.
“These scum have stolen the people’s sport. They’ve stolen it, the cynical thieving bastards. So, yes, it’s nice to see the fear on their faces.” – Andrew Jennings, British journalist
Blatter really had no choice but to resign. The organization, in it’s disgraced state, can no longer function. Those alliances he’s culled over the years through passing out lots of development money aren’t going to keep him out of trouble, and are more likely to cause him more of it, at this point. And it’s killing his on-field product at the moment. We have an incredible Champions League final this weekend in Berlin, as well as the start of the Women’s World Cup – two of the world’s greater sporting events – but no one’s talking football and everyone’s talking the politics of football. So long as Blatter was still around, the distractions would simply mount. I’m not sure in what form the palace coup d’etat would’ve eventually taken, but I suspect it would’ve happened. Dictators who seemed far more invincible than Blatter have fallen before. Unlike those who’ve been found hiding in dirt holes and storm drains, at least Sepp Blatter still had a slight shred of dignity about him.
The king is dead! Long live the king! … so, uh, anyone want to be king? Any takers? Anyone? Sigh.
Sepp’s divide-and-conquer politics have worked so well over the years that he’s left behind a dysfunctional body politic which makes the U.N. look harmonious. You have the European rich bitch neocolonial snobs v. the Afro-Asian kleptocrats – a couple of nonsensical stereotypes Blatter made a point of reinforcing to serve his own needs. All of these different clans have taken to bloc voting to pursue their own regional interests, which is going to make it difficult to try and find a candidate to replace Blatter. Difficult, but not impossible. The heads of the three confederations I just spoke of – Michel Platini, Issa Hayatou, and Sheikh Salman Bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa – have all been mentioned as viable candidates, but the distrust and animosity amid the confederations is so great that getting anyone to cross the lines will pose a challenge. Heaven knows what sort of support anyone could expect from the Western Hemisphere, now that all of CONCACAF seems to be indicted and it looks like it may open season on football execs in South America soon – not only are there rumblings about the Brazilian government going after some of the ‘Top Hats,’ but in Paraguay, the home of CONMEBOL, the president is threatening to strip the organization of the embassy-like status its enjoyed and which has afforded it to act with a twisted sort of diplomatic immunity over the years. It would seem that the best candidate has yet to emerge, and I suspect it’s likely a former player – someone like a Figo or a Clarence Seedorf, if he wants the gig – who may emerge as the best candidate for the job: a player who was highly-regarded on the pitch and yet has the intellect and integrity off it, and who hasn’t been sullied by all of these corrupt administrative practices.
Whomever wins will have to break the bloc voting somehow. The narrative set forth is that Uncle Sepp gave lots of development money to the third world, and that somehow that development if you let those imperialist neo-colonial Europeans, or anyone they support, back into control of FIFA. As such, Prince Ali wound up being viewed as some sort of Western shill in this last election – never mind that, thanks in part to some sound governance and development programs over the years, his home nation of Jordan went from being completely off the radar to being two games away from qualifying for Brazil. And Ali blew that argument to pieces – if you take out all of the graft, after all, it leaves you with even more money to put towards development. That such an argument got voted down shows you where the real priorities lay among the FIFA voters. This is what you’re up against if you want to run this lot. You have to win their trust just long enough while you find a way to throw their asses out the door.
It’s hard to get a grasp on all of this. This is what I get for deciding to write a sports blog. Maybe I should write about something simple instead, like nuclear physics.
Whomever takes over this job is gonna have one hell of an undertaking, as attempting to navigate the sporting, economic, and geopolitical landscape of soccer is dizzying. It’s hard to say who that will be, and hard to say who he will be presiding over. As I’ve said before, don’t confuse last Friday’s vote as being the will of the footballing public. It’s the will of the footballing politicians, and that is a big difference. Whomever doesn’t get snared by the Justice Department probe is, nevertheless, probably going to have to tread cautiously for a little while, and my hope is that a few more nations demand some accountability from the persons who act as the head of their FAs – a glorious position of seemingly endless entitlement, but one which has obviously gone unchecked for far too long. Reform is going to be the order of the day at FIFA, I suspect, as I’m not one who subscribes to the notion that Blatter is somehow going to hand-pick a successor, at this point. The best way to bring about reform is to bring about reformists.
And were that to happen, everything is on the table – including revoking those World Cup awards. I still think 2018 is going to be Russia. That’s too far gone, the event is fast approaching, and even with all of the allegations, the reality is that Russia was likely to win that ballot, anyway. (I would attribute the poor English showing in that vote more to their penchant for being gadflies and making enemies within FIFA, no matter how justified they may have turned out to have been in acting that way.) But 2022? Well, I think Qatar has reason to be nervous.
But the problem is, Sepp Blatter loved power more than football. He likened himself to god and angled to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He wanted to be seen as a world leader. He wanted to be thought of that way, and is someone who seems to me to be very concerned with his legacy. How strange to run what is now referred to by the Justice Department as a RICO enterprise – a term they generally reserve for organized crime – and be so vain as to think you’ll wind up looking favorable at the end of it. Because what Sepp Blatter be thought of most of all, however, is a crook, regardless of whether or not he is ever indicted or charged. And given the human tragedy unfolding in Qatar in the name of FIFA, Blatter may wind up looking even worse than a petty crook, in the end. But however we come to view him – almost certain to be unfavorable – he’s certainly deserved every derogatory moniker we can hang on him and his organization. And simply using the word “crook” as I write about Sepp Blatter makes me draw comparisons to Richard Nixon. Nixon once said that history would look favorably upon him but historians wouldn’t. But simply making that association in my mind proves to me that Nixon was wrong about that. When you destroy yourself so publicly, so colossally, just as Nixon did, and as Blatter is doing now, the words and the images surrounding your defeat resonate for lifetimes.
