The Price of a Football

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“FIFA cannot sit by and see greed rule the football world. Nor shall we."

                                                             Joseph Blatter, to the Financial Times, 2005


Today I am writing about football, and I am calling it football and not soccer because the whole world calls it that way, and I am going to apply a majority-rules thing here. If not, ask John Cleese.

Football scandals used to involve players: the hand of God, Zidane’s head-butt, Rojas’s razor blade incident. These things will always be remembered and discussed among fans of any team. There were also the tragedies: Hillsborough, Heysel, and so on. Football is the biggest sport on Earth and its history is rich for good and for bad.

Yet it seems that in the past couple of years we have hit an all-time low, not at the hand of the players, , the fans, or even the leagues, but at those of the mother of all football organizations, FIFA itself.

You’ve all seen the news, even if you don’t follow the sport. The U.S. Department of Justice ordered the arrest of 14 people, 7 of which were FIFA Executive Committee members involved in a corruption, bribery and money laundering scheme involving the sale of votes for specific companies to win the marketing rights of large sports events in the past and near future. The other seven arrests were of executives of the marketing companies paid for those votes.

To explain a little better how the currently-charged scheme worked:

According to the investigation findings, executives of 3 sports marketing companies bribed executives of International Football Associations (which are under the direct wing of FIFA and part of their committees) in order to have their companies granted the rights to several tournaments in the Americas, dating from 1990 to 2016. The rights that the companies would earn include, but are not limited to: the rights to broadcast games, to use FIFA brands to sponsor the companies’ names, and the rights to merchandising for each event. A handful of these companies kept a monopoly of these tournaments by buying the FIFA officials for over 2 decades. Once they owned the rights, they would sell them out and make millions and millions in profits.

Their mistake was to transact their business in the United States.

If there’s one thing, we the people in the United States banking industry have learned since the September 2001 attacks, it’s that the U.S. government pays a lot of attention to the comings and goings of money. There are controls in place to detect illegal activity that absolutely nobody would ever imagine would be implemented. So, when the money for these bribes moved through the United States, the clerks of financial institutions were watching, noting, and informing, because that was their job.

Russia claims that these arrests are a poorly-disguised political response to the Ukrainian crisis. People in banking will laugh, deny with their heads; we know better.

The truth is that I am glad that someone did something about FIFA, and I know that, as it happens with most large racketeering cases in the United States, once the Department of Justice has found a thread of evidence to follow, they will follow that thread until the whole tapestry of corruption becomes unraveled and public.

But I think it’s not just the banking industry that understands this. In the past few days the mud flinging among FAs, executive directors cooperating, and anyone with a say inside of FIFA has been escalating.

The Opening ceremony of the
South Africa World Cup in 2010

From proof that South Africa paid ten million dollars to win the votes for 2010, to The Ireland FA admitting yesterday that they got paid, by FIFA itself, to not contest a handball that might have cost the French national team its classification to the 2010 World Cup. A Caribbean FIFA executive who hopes to have a political career in his country is offering to provide proof of more monetary wrongdoings inside of FIFA to avoid going to jail himself; oh and he is doing this on paid television ads. The biggest show on earth has become a circus.

And there’s more: information has leaked worldwide involving the possible to downright clear purchases of votes for the election of World Cup sites: 1998 France, 2010 South Africa has already been proven, pretty much; I believe the actual bank wire was located yesterday; 2014 Brazil, and of course, they are keeping the lid down on all information relating to the election process for the upcoming tournaments, Russia 2018 and2022 Qatar.

It has been released that Qatar even offered to relocate the offices of the Asian Football Federation to Doha, giving the Federation millions of dollars in saved profits on real estate, staff housing, luxury cars and air transportation. The offer was rejected, but it gives you an idea of what a country with billions to spare and no football history to speak of can do to get to host the World Cup in 50° C (120°+ F) weather.

The ultimate speculation, of course is whether Joseph Blatter, the current head of FIFA, knew about all these scandals or received any bribes. The fact that he resigned abruptly a couple of days ago (even if he remains as president until the next emergency election that will take place at some point next year, and may just be another infamous Blatter maneuver to stay the boss while the waters calm) lead me to think that the Department of Justice has informed him that he is the next subject of their investigation. I am sure they are going through all of his bank accounts, with a magnifying glass. Personally, I think that he will face charges at least for the $40,000 bribes in envelopes that won him the 2011 election. 

Either way, either Blatter is done or FIFA is.

Football is not the sport of
a chosen few

It’s all because of money, money that we, the fans of this great sport have been paying for decades, so that we could enjoy the sport. Sport, not circus. And it’s about time someone reminded them.