FIFA AND THE FOOTBALL FAMILY: THE PERFECT OXYMORON

Published in Tribune magazine 11 June 2007
by Terry Moore in Brussels

Last week's news that the England 2018/2022 Football World Cup bid was being referred to the FIFA Ethics Committee encapsulates the way that utterly undemocratic international organisations such as FIFA and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) etc., are way beyond satire and way beyond any known concept of legal oversight.

It should come as no surprise that only weeks before the World Cup 2010 is die to start the gutter politics of the FIFA Executive Committee are being brought to bear. After all, there are many in FIFA who would prefer future World Cups to be beyond the scrutiny of a semi-free press in the UK and other countries. Hence Russia may become the favoured bid. Even the Murdoch press may be interested as they are currently locked out of covering FIFA's premier competition.

What has given FIFA the excuse to intervene is merely the rather sad romantic interests of a late middle-age Labour Peer (with very poor personal judgement) and a young female assistant serve as an example to us all of the false moral indignation stoked up by the right-wing press in this country and gleefully given legs by self-serving international sporting fat cats in pursuit of their own nefarious ends.

The supposed private conversations that were secretly recorded and ended up being spread over the morals-free zone of Paul Dacreland had no resonance until put into the public domain by the Mail On Sunday. The recordings are the comments of a naive fool apparently more concerned with his love life than his professional life.

However, what is now in play is the award of a prize that will engender massive amounts of corruption and gross indulgence by FIFA personnel and national hangers-on as they jostle to see who will be awarded the FIFA World Cup for 2018 and 2022.

International Sporting bodies are the last redoubt of the junketeering, free-loading, morally repugnant, grasping individuals that should never be put any where near a budget that extends to more than three figures. These metaphorical pigs with their snouts deep in the trough of excess financed by Sports Media and Sports Goods barons are the worst role models to today's youth.

Although less nefarious than FIFA, the European Union of Football Associations (UEFA) has its own network of junketeers, dubious links with sponsors and a too-close relationship with TV rights-holders across the Continent. Many such as Murdoch's SKY TV see UEFA competitions such as the Champions League as one of the main drivers behind selling their Sports packages to subscribers to PAY TV channels.

Many Football fans would agree that the UEFA Champions League itself has distorted sporting competition and entrenched a system whereby the richest clubs in the richest leagues in Europe become part of an informal cartel that rewards its members to such a degree that it is very difficult, although not impossible, for outsiders to break-in.

However, to observe a UEFA organised football event is to see the quite incredible amount of junketeering that takes place. Junketeering that ultimately is paid for by the supporters of clubs and national teams and who pay for the season tickets of TV subscriptions that underpins everything.

Firstly wherever the event is hosted, all of the very best Hotel Rooms are reserved for EUFA and its guests. The number of guests will run into the high hundreds and doesn't include those guests of sponsors and associated partners. Every Head of any European sporting body (and their partner) will be invited. These will include such notables as the Head of the European Handball Federation, the Head of the European Swimming League etc etc.

All will be invited to partake in UEFA's hospitality with their home organisations paying for travel and 'pocket money' only. Of course, reciprocal invitations to other organisations official events are the order of the day in a self-serving circle of perpetual junketeering indulgence.

Not only will it be sporting administrators from other sports but it will also include the head of all the national affiliated partners of the sport and an extensive guest list of lackeys and hangers-on to complete the equation. Major football events are becoming so laden with VIP dross that up to 50% of the available tickets can be taken up by non-interested guests of sponsors and organisers.

Many of sport's governing bodies are based beyond international scrutiny in secretive Switzerland and these organisations claim they are above the law in individual countries and regularly suspend member organisations if a National Government attempts any form of real oversight on the nationally-based affiliates of e.g. FIFA.

Sepp Blatter's iron grip of FIFA has been the subject of countless articles on the financial degrading shenanigians of his organisation and of its senior members. The International Olympic Committee has been no better in the past, with a long history of venal corruption and nepotistic behaviour.

As Andrew Jennings has written (How FIFA corruption empowers global capital) in Chapter 4 of the admirable work, Player and Referee: Conflicting Interests and the 2010 World Cup, FIFA and other International sporting organisations such as the International Cricket Council (ICC) and the IOC have become the Trojan Horse of global capital over local culture partly depends on the battering ram of rights holders to International sporting competitions, especially the FIFA World Cup and the Olympics.

A full copy of Player and Referee: Conflicting Interests and the 2010 World Cup can be downloaded from the Institute of Security Studies website which can be found at :-

 http://www.iss.co.za/uploads/Mono169.pdf . NB Health Warning, the full document is a truly depressing expose of naked greed and avarice by those closely associated with FIFA and the organisers of the World Cup in South Africa, you will need a strong stomach to put up with the depths of venal corruption uncovered.

However, this is no tale of corruption being endemic in Africa, the biggest crooks, thieves and gougers are most definitely supposedly respectable white men in highly expensive suits hiding behind Swiss anonymity laws.