Corruption Murder and the Beautiful Game.docx

1、Corruption Murder and the Beautiful GameBRIAN PHILLIPSCorruption, Murder, and the Beautiful GameOn FIFAs scandalous historyBYBRIAN PHILLIPSON AUGUST 23, 2011PRINTOn December 2, 2010, FIFA president Sepp Blatter stood before a giant blue screen at his organizations headquarters in Zurich and announce

2、d the two countries that had won the rights to host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. After hours of presentations and last-ditch lobbying efforts from Prince William, David Beckham, Morgan Freeman, and Bill Clinton, FIFAs 24-man executive committee down to 22 after two members were caught trying to sel

3、l their votes to undercover journalists had elected Russia and Qatar to follow Brazil as the next hosts of soccers biggest tournament.On the face of it, the choices were surprising. FIFAs inspection team had evaluated all nine bids1and rated Russia and Qatar as the riskiest of the lot. Russia presen

4、ted major infrastructure problems. Qatar got so hot in the summer that the inspectors deemed a World Cup there a “potential health risk for players, officials, the FIFA family and spectators.” Nevertheless, Blatter, a winking, bald-pated 75-year-old from FIFAs home country of Switzerland, looked ove

5、rjoyed as he read out the results. “I am a happy president,” he gushed.FIFA has a longstanding reputation for corruption, and even before the executive committee convened, there was widespread concern that the voting would be rigged. Alarming details had been leaking out for months. In October,Sunda

6、y Timesreporters posing as American lobbyists had secretly videotaped two ExCo members, Tahitis Reynald Temarii and Nigerias Amos Adamu, demanding hundreds of thousands of dollars for their votes. They each claimed that the money would be used for development projects a soccer academy in Auckland, N

7、ew Zealand, four artificial fields in Nigeria but wanted the money to be paid to them directly. Three days before the vote, the BBCsPanoramaprogram broadcast an investigation into FIFA corruption that accused three current ExCo members of taking bribes in the 1990s.In the weeks after the vote, the s

8、uspicion intensified. It was noted among the losing nations that the committee had handed the World Cup to two oil-rich countries with troubling, arguably outright authoritarian governments. In doing so, it had voted down bids including those from the United States, England, and Japan that outperfor

9、med the winning nations in both tournament-readiness and revenue potential. Englands bid, one of the most highly praised by the inspection team, received a paltry two votes. Multiple newspapers reported that the delegates from CONCACAF, the governing body of North American soccer, had voted against

10、the country from their own confederation, the United States.FIFA had faced this sort of suspicion before. Both Blatters election as president in 1998 and his first reelection campaign were dogged by allegations of bribery. The old boys on the ExCo it has never had a female member had long been rumor

11、ed to buy votes, manipulate TV deals, get fat on corporate kickbacks. Sometimes there were more than rumors. In 2006, Jack Warner, the head of CONCACAF, was censured by FIFAs Ethics Committee when an Ernst & Young audit found that hed made a million-dollar profit selling World Cup tickets in Trinida

12、d.None of this had ever really fazed FIFA. But the rumblings about Russia and Qatar persisted for months, and they came at the worst possible time for Blatter. His third term as president was up in June, and he faced an unexpected challenger in the election: Mohammed bin Hammam, the Qatari head of t

13、he Asian soccer confederation and a key mover behind Qatars successful World Cup bid. Bin Hammam had once been known as a Blatter loyalist; now, somewhat breathtakingly, he was capitalizing on the widespread mistrust of Blatter by running for the presidency on an anticorruption platform.By May 22, w

14、hen the allegations followed Blatter on a trip to South Africa, the normally merry president was reduced to pounding his hand on a table and exhorting journalists to “stop please to say FIFA is corrupt. FIFA is not corrupt! Definitely not.” Three days later, however, under pressure from bin Hammam,

15、FIFA surprised the soccer world by launching a major corruption investigation. Its target: bin Hammam himself, whom a curiously timed report had accused of trying to buy the votes of Caribbean officials for $40,000 each. Bin Hammam insisted he was innocent. “If there is even the slightest justice in

16、 the world,” he declaimed, “these allegations will vanish in the wind.”They didnt. On May 29, bin Hammam was suspended from FIFA. On June 1, Sepp Blatter was reelected as an unopposed candidate. In his column for , Blatter painted a colorful picture of what he insisted had definitely not happened:“T

17、o now assume that the present ordeal of my opponent were to fill me with some sort of perverse satisfaction or that this entire matter was somehow masterminded by me is ludicrous and completely reprehensible.”Should it matter to soccer fans if FIFA is corrupt? By almost any measure the game is thriv

18、ing, with more fans in more corners of the world, every day. If the combined audience for just the final two rounds of the 2010 World Cup were a country, it would be, by far, the most populous nation on earth. Most of these fans seem to be enjoying themselves, so if a cabal of scheming old men in Zu

19、rich happens to be pulling strings behind the scenes, why should the rest of us worry?Its easy to see FIFA as unimportant in part because, as the Blatter-bin Hammam wrangle illustrates, theres something deeply silly about many of the organizations Machiavellian twists. One of the common misconceptio

20、ns about FIFA corruption is that it flourishes because the organization is rolling in money. In fact, if FIFA were a corporation, its revenue of just more than $1 billion a year wouldnt get it within a Tim Howard goal kick of the Fortune 500. In 2010, ExxonMobil raked in $284.6 billion; Blockbuster

21、Video, the 500th company on the list, had revenues more than four times the average for world soccers governing body. By the global scale on which it operates, FIFA is at best a medium-sized outfit. And its the organizations middlingness, combined with its exposure to much larger economic powers, th

22、at determines the peculiar character of its scandals.“Should it matter to soccer fans if FIFA is corrupt? By almost any measure the game is thriving, with more fans in more corners of the world, every day. If the combined audience for just the final two rounds of the 2010 World Cup were a country, i

23、t would be, by far, the most populous nation on earth. Most of these fans seem to be enjoying themselves, so if a cabal of scheming old men in Zurich happens to be pulling strings behind the scenes, why should the rest of us worry?FIFA executives tend to be vain bureaucrats and unctuous politicians

24、rather than cutthroat businessmen. From an economic standpoint, their only real purpose is to control the point of access to the World Cup, from which the organization derives 87 percent of its income. FIFAs top executives are thus in a position to be courted around the clock by massive corporations

25、, which want to secure one of the competitions prized sponsorships, and by governments, which want the prestige of hosting the tournament. Its easy to imagine how a sports administrators ego would unfurl under these conditions; the majestic, indomitablebeard of Chuck Blazer, the American functionary

26、 who wrote the report accusing bin Hammam,2provides a useful visual aid. As a result, the FIFA corruption stories that become public and there are presumably many that dont tend to be silly, tawdry, or decadent rather than chilling or deeply outrageous. Theyre just a bit of glitzy filth, the mildew

27、of globalization.The best recent example of this is the case of Lord Triesman, the former chairman of the English Football Association and head of Englands 2018 bid. In May 2010, Triesman was ousted from both roles after a former aide secretly taped him saying that Spain and Russia were trying to br

28、ibe World Cup referees. A year later, as bin Hammam and Blatter were plotting against each other in Zurich, Triesman appeared in London, testifying before a parliamentary committee about the failure of Englands bid. The location was significant. Under Europes stringent libel laws, making accusations

29、, even against public figures, can lead to heavy penalties. Speak under parliamentary privilege, however, and youre immune from legal action.Triesman thus had the perfect stage from which to take revenge on FIFA. He cheerfully obliged, offering up a series of anecdotes that were hilarious, unsubstan

30、tiated, and off-putting, all in about equal measures. In one, Jack Warner demanded to be bribed with, among other things, 500,000 under the guise of buying World Cup TV rights “to lift the spirits of the people of Haiti.”3Ricardo Teixeira, the head of the Brazilian Football Confederation, was more b

31、lunt, interrupting Triesmans pleasantries with a snort: “You come and tell me what you have for me.”Best of all was Triesmans meeting with Nicols Leoz, the six-term president of the South American soccer confederation. “I was guided from the table,” Triesman said, “to a display cabinet, in which the

32、re was a large book.” In the book were facsimiles of the honors Leoz had been given by various countries knighthoods, photos of streets that had been named after him, and so on. Leoz told Triesman through an interpreter that “he believed the appropriate way of recognizing his achievements in world football were not by money, he didnt need money, he already was personally a very wealthy man.” Instead, Triesman continued, “I was shown the facsimile of hisLgion dhonneur.4I was then told, through the translator but directly after he had spoken, that he believed