Undermined by whistleblowers within and dogged by corruption claims, can football's world body really go ahead with a presidential election when it is so badly in need of reform?
As the latest corruption allegations at Fifa came tumbling ? this time, crucially, from one of its own senior members, Chuck Blazer ? it prompted the recollection that just five months ago the prime minister and Prince William went to sell our nation to Fifa's decision-makers, and the Football Association's World Cup bid team attacked as "unpatriotic" the media who pointed to alleged bribe-taking at the organisation.
Now the facade of respectability at football's world governing body, with its motto For the Good of the Game and its power to award a host country the greatest sporting event on earth, has utterly cracked, on the cusp of an election for a new president. The incendiary allegations made by Blazer on Wednesday against Jack Warner, his long?term ally in the Concacaf region, and Mohamed bin Hammam, the electoral challenger to the president, Sepp Blatter, bring to nine ? more than a third of the executive committee's 24 members ? the number suspended or under investigation for alleged corruption.
Blazer's report to Fifa, that Bin Hammam and Warner were involved in organising a meeting of the Caribbean Football Union at which gifts were offered as inducements to vote for Bin Hammam, intensify Fifa's crisis into a different scale. This is the first time that such serious allegations have come from within and Fifa's own announcement of a rapid ethics committee investigation into them went out of its way to state explicitly that Blazer's report on Warner and Bin Hammam's conduct "includes bribery allegations".
The suspicion, which the FA's 2018 World Cup bid was so keen to suppress, that some among the Fifa exco seek to line their own pockets in return for the prize they dish out, burst into the open this month when Lord Triesman appeared before a parliamentary committee. He said that as the chairman of England's bid he received in 2009?10 what he considered to be improper requests for money or favours from four members of the executive committee: Warner, Nicol�s Le�z of Paraguay, Ricardo Teixeira from Brazil, and Worawi Makudi of Thailand.
Those four allegations, currently being examined for supporting evidence by the FA?appointed James Dingemans QC, followed the suspension of two exco members last year, Amos Adamu of Nigeria and Reynald Temarii of Oceania, exposed by an undercover Sunday Times sting asking for money in return for World Cup votes.
The select committee also published Sunday Times evidence from a whistleblower alleging the successful Qatar 2022 bid paid money improperly to Issa Hayatou, the exco member from Cameroon, and Jacques Anouma from Ivory Coast. This added to the allegations of huge bribe-taking made just before the World Cup vote by the BBC's Panorama programme against Le�z, Texeira and Hayatou, in response to which the FA's bid wrote to all exco members: "As members of the football family, we feel solidarity with you."
All those facing allegations have denied wrongdoing. However, the deluge of claims, particularly Triesman's wounding portrait of dealing with Fifa from the inside ? Teixeira, the former FA chairman alleged, asked him: "What have you got for me?" ? is shattering the credibility of the organisation before which England and the other bidding nations were prostrating themselves so recently.
In Fifa kremlinology, this new chapter ? Blazer reporting on Warner and Bin Hammam, with Blatter, still Fifa's president, in charge of the organisation now investigating his challenger and former major ally ? is drama close to civil war. Blazer's report to Fifa is understood to include sworn affidavits from Concacaf members at the meeting. If Fifa's ethics committee finds the allegations to be true, it does not only wholly taint the election process. The allegation is that Bin Hammam and Warner were indulging in bribery even with so many other allegations of corruption already swirling around Fifa, adding grand shamelessness to the straightforwardly huge allegation of bribery for presidential votes. Bin Hammam, the long?term exco member from Qatar talking of "transparency" without much visible detail, had already been battling to appear credible as the "Clean up Fifa" candidate. This extraordinary announcement from Zurich attacks his manifesto in its heart.
The timetable for the investigation looks almost impossibly quick. The ethics committee launched its action on Wednesday against Warner, Bin Hammam and the CFU officials Debbie Minguell and Jason Sylvester. They have two days, until Friday, to "take position" ? mount, prepare and lodge their defences. The ethics committee is to meet two days later, on Sunday, to hear the case. The object, apparently, is to have it all decided, the truth about the bribery allegations, in time for the presidential election to go ahead three days later, next Wednesday 1 June.
Many in the world "football family" already felt that Fifa, with its decision-making body of 24 ageing men holding the hugely lucrative World Cup in their gift, needed reform, not an election between two of them. Whether it can still credibly hold that election and, if Fifa believes so, whether Bin Hammam will still be allowed to stand against Blatter, the twice-elected president and his former ally, remains to be seen, by a world watching football's governing body implode under a repeated allegation ? corruption.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2011/may/25/fifa-family-at-war-corruption-claims
Work & careers Alex Reid Robert Schumann Blackpool Stephen Carr Stan Collymore
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