So despite all the hullabaloo in all sections of the UK press, ranging from outraged righteous polemic in the Guardian to The Sun “hilariously” sending Page Three models to present delegates with brown envelopes, English calls for moral rectitude were overwhelmingly ignored by Johnny Foreigner, and Sepp Blatter, with a victory speech full of Day Today-esque maritime metaphors, was re-elected FIFA president. But what does the whole episode tell us?
Firstly, of COURSE FIFA is corrupt. It’s a self-regulating, self-serving organisation outside any rule of law which is flooded with money; how could it be anything BUT corrupt? But then you might say that all of football is corrupt to some extent; clubs are allowed to exist with massive debts and to play by a completely different set of fiscal rules to other businesses, agent bungs, and “tapping up” of players are rife, players can buy privacy and pretty much anything else with the obscene amounts of money they earn, and the fans are milked like battery cows for every penny they’ve got by owners who have no interest in the game whatsoever. FIFA’s brown envelope culture seems fairly venial compared to what goes on in the upper echelons of club football, including English club football.
Secondly, Sepp Blatter is popular. Not with the British press, but then for Fleet Street, he commits the two cardinal sins of being a) slightly dodgy, and b) foreign. But compared to his predecessors Joao Havelange (who was even MORE corrupt, and financially useless to the point where FIFA was bankrupt when Blatter took over in 1998) and Stanley Rous (who backed the apartheid regime in South Africa and blocked the expansion of the game in developing nations), Blatter is a sweetheart. He’s promised to refer the current scandal to the FIFA ethics committee (which is laughable - a FIFA ethics committee is as oxymoronic as a very stupid male cow), and to ensure that future World Cups are decided by votes from all FIFA member countries rather than by the current shadowy 24-man committee (which, on the other hand, is a sensible idea - at least the brown envelopes will be shared out a little more equally!) Most importantly, the concensus worldwide is that, as FIFA president, he (whisper it soft!) actually hasn’t done that bad a job so far.
Thirdly, everybody hates the English. It’s a combination of distaste for our percieved sense of moral superiority, vivid memories of how we used to behave in the first half of the last century and in the centuries preceding (personnified by the likes of the aforementioned Rous), and mostly, visceral hatred for our press. (This latter factor is particularly easy to sympathise with; our politicians and celebrities have very little choice, but humble football administrators from abroad undestandably wonder why they should have to put up with the sort of bullshit dished out by the unprincipled, lying, ravenous pack of devil dogs that is the UK media). They also suspect - rightly - that our current crusade is in part fuelled by sour grapes over the award of the 2018 World Cup to Russia (whose oil-stained brown envelopes were always going to be considerably fatter than our own).
The long and the short of it is that this “scandal” has turned out to be a fairly insignificant storm in an English teacup. Our papers might scream that the only way is Ethics, but the rest of the world in turn suspects that we’re a bunch of bitter hypocritical preachers with over-fond memories of our colonial past. The truth, as always, is somewhere inbetween.
(PS- if anyone wants to read something a bit more intelligent / well-thought-out about FIFA, or football in general, I’d point them in the direction of Tim Vickery.)
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