A chink, the merest pinprick of light, has opened up in the grubby soap opera of Sepp Blatter, Fifa and the future of football. It came not, as it might have, in thedismayingly complacent account of affairs given by the chairman of the FA, Greg Dyke, to MPs on the culture, media and sport committee. Instead Mr Blatter himself, in an interview with Russian news agency Tass, has confirmed that the decision to award the World Cup to Russia in 2018 had been stitched up ahead of the vote in December 2010. He went on to reveal that it had also been agreed that the 2022 World Cup would go to the US, but when the votes were counted Qatar unexpectedly came through. He hinted at dark behaviour by European delegates.
Barring a tearful confession on live TV from Mr Blatter, there is almost no twist in this miserable tale that could come as a surprise. The impression of an organisation entirely without any sense of conventional morality that has managed to construct an organisational model embedding its voting members as clients of the organisation they are supposed to serve is complete. But at least the revelations from Mr Blatter – currently suspended from the Fifa presidency and due to be replaced, finally, in a vote at the end of February – seem to confirm one small aspect of the skulduggery around that vote. The claim even has a certain reverse credibility since its motive appears less a cathartic moment of honesty than the desire to put the boot into Michel Platini. Mr Platini, the FA’s choice of candidate for Fifa president on the grounds that he isn’t quite as hostile to the British media as Mr Blatter, is also temporarily suspended from football.
Mr Dyke, meanwhile, promised MPs that unless Mr Blatter says he was misquoted (which he clearly thought was likely), the FA would examine the possibility of trying to recover some of the £21m it spent on its 2018 World Cup bid. However, Mr Dyke neither looked nor sounded like someone with an appetite for the fight: nor was he any less pessimistic about the chances of reforming Fifa either from within or, by setting up a rival organisation, from without. He accepted that for the past 40 years it has been what he called a “corrupted organisation”, but attributed that to cultural differences that were unavoidable in any global organisation.
Football administration is in a parlous state. Mr Dyke does have ambitious plans for reform of the FA that he says would liberate more cash for the grassroots game. But, in episodes such as its failure even to interview Chelsea’s doctor, Eva Carneiro, after José Mourinho publicly swore at her, too often his organisation seems complicit in the questionable behaviour of the clubs it is supposed to regulate. Mr Dyke’s fatalism in the face of the Fifa soap opera is pathetic. He seemed to think that, if it could be done at all, it could only be done by pressure from the sponsors and the broadcasters. But he admitted he had made no attempt to influence the BBC either as director general or FA chairman.
The sponsors are, at last, demanding change. They have some leverage to insist that independent experts are brought in to begin the long process of unpicking the mess, and to impose the management reforms and the transparency that Fifaneeds. The broadcasters have more. Mr Dyke is right that a single member cannot do the job alone. But each has a part to play in cleaning up the governance of global football.
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