FIFA presidential election is beyond a joke
This travesty of a FIFA presidential election recalls the days of Comical Ali, the Iraqi information minister who declared impending victory over America while the rumble of American tanks shook the room in which he promised death to the invader.
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All will be well when there is a new leader of Sepp Blatter’s failed state, next week’s poll suggests, even though major criminal investigations are in full flow. The English Football Association board met last week to decide which of the five candidates to endorse. Two are senior members of political regimes – Bahrain and Jordan – where democracy, transparency and accountability are not noticeably constitutional bedrocks.
A third, Jérôme Champagne, is some kind of strange ghost in Blatter’s old machine. A fourth – South Africa’s Tokyo Sexwale – is accused of dining out on old Nelson Mandela anecdotes and has made no impression. Which just leaves the man the FA will end up plumping for by default on Friday. UEFA’s Secretary General, Gianni Infantino, whose boss, Michel Platini, has been banned for eight years.
Underpinning this Hobson’s choice is the theory that FIFA is capable of reform and can be born again, with new names at the top and a bit of a constitutional fiddle, such as fixed presidential terms. This is football’s version of Godot: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” But should they?
Even those who rate FIFA’s capacity for contrition and correction between zero and minus-one dismiss the possibility of outright abolition. How would it be done, they ask? Answer: by the Swiss attorney general and government closing FIFA down, as they would (well, in theory) any other Swiss firm that was flouting national and international law on such an epic scale on Swiss territory.
If the Zurich police found that “corruption is rampant, systemic and deep-rooted” (the US attorney general’s diagnosis) in a major corporation in that twinkling town would they allow it to continue trading on the promise of a change of leader?
The pursuit of happiness in football
Plainly, abolition would mean placing existing World Cup contracts under the supervision of a new independent body – an administrator. But the only victims would be the many fine employees at FIFA headquarters, some of whom could transfer over. This would be messy, for sure, but not half as messy as simply encouraging another power grab in a pseudo parliament where an alleged “24-year” conspiracy is said to have established a culture in which “well over $200 million” was exchanged in “bribes and kickbacks”. For this culture to thrive, there would have to be a supporting ethos of looking the other way, fearing to speak out, going along with it or outright complicity, in its many forms. The FA’s man in Zurich for example – the glacial Geoff Thompson – has devoted many years to FIFA committee work without stumbling across anything he felt he needed to blow a whistle on.
None of the candidates now canvassing in ways that often sidestep proper cross-examination attacked the Blatter regime, the Blatter culture, with its Messianic sideshows (an end to illiteracy in Africa!) and World Cup bidding stitch-ups (all the fish are sold!).
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Even if all five candidates are innocent of corruption, they could well appoint people, either knowingly or otherwise, who are currently under criminal investigation and could yet find their sleep broken by intruders in FBI windcheaters. An intriguing rumour doing the rounds is that Loretta Lynch, the pugnacious US attorney general who went to war with FIFA, is coming under is no political will to take 2022 away from Qatar while the Qataris are gushing sovereign wealth into western economies- political pressure to ease off. The theory is that any unfortunate discovery around the 2018 World Cup bid would start a clamour for Russia to be stripped and therefore complicate the geopolitical picture, particularly in Syria, just as there is no political will to take 2022 away from Qatar while the Qataris are gushing foreign wealth into western economies.