“We who have loved football all our lives do not want to
believe that those who run the game, on their manifestos of doing good, are
this corrupt and rotten, and so
marinated in greed.”
When a World Cup is awarded to Qatar, a country without any
real record of football and a climate that makes playing it in the summer
almost impossible, you sense that something in the global game is not right.
This book unpicks the story of the spread of corruption that
spread across FIFA over decades and meant that most of the organisation's top
representatives were making a side income from back handers and bribes. Against a backdrop of a FBI investigation and revelations that exposed the depth of the corruption this book reveals that the culture of corruption has long been steeped in the organisation.
If you had to point the finger of blame at anyone other than
the individuals involved, and some of those like Chuck Blazer and Jack Warner
are almost cartoonish in their villainy, then it would have to be television.
The arrival of TV rights and the ever increasing sums of money that has gone
with it have created the opportunity for corruption.
The mixture of sponsorship and TV rights were sources of
income that would be paid to be involved and film World Cups but there was also
the opportunity for corruption to come as a result of the structure of FIFA.
With individuals holding influence over the votes for World Cup host cities and
the President role there were always going to be chances that their decisions
at the ballot box could be purchased.
Conn unravels a story that sadly got more depressing the
deeper he went into it. The fact that Sepp Blatter appears to be able to
shake-off the worst of the corruption allegations makes up very little for the
numerous country FIFA bosses who did admit to taking bribes.
The suggestion that a new president at FIFA has introduced a
fresh broom and a chance for the organisation to put the past behind it is also
pretty well destroyed by Conn revealing the greed over salary that Blatter's
successor displayed.
FIFA also appears to have been fairly consistent at
neutering any investigations and attempts to clean up the organisation and stem
the excesses of the past.
Reading this is not always easy because it clearly quotes a
lot of legal documents and in order to make sure it does not fall foul of the
lawyers keeps the text and the accusations very clear and dry. But there is
enough drama here to make it keep you wanting to read on until the end.
If you love football then this book will depress you. It
should because the corruption has been excessive and the way the game has been run
has been a disappointment. But if you love football then there is also the ray
of hope that even with some of these crooks running the game the sport still
manages to move people all over the world.
My love of the game is becoming harder to maintain because
of the influence of money and the billions pumped in by TV rights is also
something that echoes in the Premier League. It's all a long way from kicking a
ball around in the back yard and a few more books like this and maybe I too
will become like to grey hairs in the crowd moaning about the good old days
when everything seemed more simple. The tragedy is that as the case of FIFA
shows you have to go back quite a way to find any good old days.
