Fifa stinks,and everyone in football must play a fragment in rebuilding itA chink, the merest pinprick of light, or has opened up in the grubby soap opera of Sepp Blatter,Fifa and the future of football. It came not, as it might fill, or in the dismayingly complacent account of affairs given by the chairman of the FA,Greg Dyke, to MPs on the culture, or 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, and but when the votes were counted Qatar unexpectedly came through. He hinted at dim behaviour by European delegates.
Barring a tearful confession on live TV from Mr Blatter,there is nearly 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, and in a vote at the discontinuance of February – seem to confirm one small aspect of the skulduggery (devious behavior) 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 fairly as hostile to the British media as Mr Blatter, is also temporarily suspended from football.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com