While FIFA continue to battle with snitches that cut deals to save their own backsides (literally yet metastatically, one hears), and after the movie-style orchestrated group-arrests have slowly lost their Zurich lustre, a New FIFA future is nowhere to be detected – as yet.
At the beginning of April, in the wake of serious allegations against him, I interviewed Asian football supremo Dato’ Alex Soosay. The under-fire Malaysian was unequivocal: he was innocent of any wrongdoing. Moreover, the dark days of the Asian Football Confederation’s corruption-tainted past were over, he said.
For the German Football Federation and its President Wolfgang Niersbach, it has already been a successful week, even before the major knockout matches are played in the Women’s World Cup and the U21 European Championship this weekend.
“Arsenal need to buy four players, they need that spine. They need a goalkeeper, they still need a centre-back, they still need a holding midfielder and, I’m afraid, they need a top, top-quality striker in order to win this league again.” Thierry Henry, Sky Sports
They have a statue of Thierry Henry outside the Emirates Stadium. For most Arsenal fans he was the champion of champions, the Achilles from Paris,
In the world of smoke and mirrors, behind the spin and the secrecy, the lies and vested interests, the tangled webs of international diplomacy, or lack if it, the posturing, the blinkered views and denials, one thing is sure about the astonishing FIFA crisis and its large global ripples.
“For the investor, a too-high purchase price for the stock of an excellent company can undo the effects of a subsequent decade of favorable business developments.” Warren Buffett
It’s hard to argue with any of the aphorisms spoken by the most successful investor in modern history. Warren Buffett has made himself a multi-billionaire, and lots of other people very rich too, with his seer’s ability to pick a stock through forensic financial analysis.
News that FIFA president Sepp ‘despot’ Blatter and Jerome ‘not me’ Valcke have lawyered up in the US with a couple of the most aggressive rottweilers available comes as no real surprise. Or does it? And does the fact that this is actually news tell us a bit more than perhaps the news leaker had intended.
If only the crooked bankers, as the criminal individuals they are, had caused so much excitement in the corridors of the EU.
From the days of Mrs Astor’s New York, and probably long before, all networks have had their must-attend parties. The annual summer party thrown by the late Sir David Frost, the media personality, is a good example of the sort of thing I have in mind. This past week in Lausanne, there was no doubting the invitation that those hooked into the Olympic “network” most wanted to get their hands on: it was for the June 8 reception to mark the inauguration of the new Association of National Olympic Committees (ANOC) Headquarters,
“There are no bad regiments, only bad colonels,” Napoléon Bonaparte (attribution)
When Naploéon’s Grande Armée embarked with hundreds of thousands of men on the so-called Second Polish War or, more accurately, the invasion of Russia, there was scant prospect of additional numbers to support the campaign. So it is for the regimental colonels of football competitions.
Let’s distinguish between the highly unlikely and the reality; let’s separate the hyberbole from the facts. Sepp Blatter made the right decision to announce he would be stepping down no matter how upset his legions of supporters in Africa and elsewhere might be. Root and branch reform is now needed at FIFA more than ever to eradicate the stench of rampant corruption.
We all know how the US Justice Department has moved the tectonic plates of FIFA. Yet the next few months, until the elective Congress meets to decide a new President, could also see major changes in FIFA and if Blatter gets his way these changes will not be very palatable to the Europeans and, in particular, the British. Indeed this could prove to be the most important period in FIFA’s history, even more important than the immediate post war years when a nearly bankrupt FIFA,
“Do you understand, sir, do you understand what it means when you have absolutely nowhere to turn?” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
There is something fundamental about the allegations in this FIFA crisis that recalls Dostoyevsky’s anti-hero Raskolnikov. Not a naturally vicious man, it was an intellectual compulsion that drove him to commit murder. He convinced himself that his crime would be justified due to his intellectual brilliance. As a virtuoso student,
Not for the first time, he wrong-footed us all. When the invitation to a FIFA press conference thudded into our inboxes on Tuesday at 3.36pm UK time, I don’t think anyone seriously expected two hours later to be listening to Sepp Blatter, one of the great survivors of our world, setting out how he proposed to “lay down my mandate” as FIFA President.
What tipped him over the edge? Did he walk or was he pushed? Is the net tightening around him in the United States as is being reported? Or was it simply that the sheer weight of pressure and the almost daily dose of bombshell allegations into systemic corruption simply became too much to bear – even for the great survivor?