A hero of the Fifa corruption exposé – step forward the British press
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Version 0 of 1. This week’s Fifa exposé is widely credited to the FBI and the tough US attorney general, Loretta Lynch. That they have brought about this crunch is welcome. It is also humiliating for the Swiss police, who know full well what such global agencies get up to on their turf, and for Britain’s Scotland Yard. Institutional corruption at Fifa has been public knowledge for a decade. Credit in this saga should go to the dogged obsession of a single reporter, Andrew Jennings, 71, who has traced Sepp Blatter’s footsteps for more than a decade. Jennings worked for the Sunday Times and BBC’s Panorama. His BBC film about Fifa corruption, The Beautiful Bung, appeared as long ago as 2006. Related: Footballers’ silence on political issues must end. The Fifa row demands it | Archie Bland Since then he, and subsequently the Sunday Times, have been merciless in pursuit of the story. Yet such is the potency of football money that Blatter’s cronies have been able to pocket millions over the years, shielded from accountability by Fifa’s arcane constitution. Occasional frowns from big sponsors, such as Visa and Coca-Cola, have triggered spasmodic “ethics inquiries”. Grandees such as Henry Kissinger, Lord Coe and Lord Goldsmith have been summoned to provide a veneer of respectability to Blatter’s regime. They joined the ranks of his patsies. Sports journalists, high on the Fifa hog, would just laugh when Fifa excused stories about $40,000 in envelopes to voting members as “intended for distribution to the poor”. Serious trouble for Fifa began only with Sunday Times revelations of a whistleblower in 2011, after the dubious awarding of the 2018 and 2020 World Cups to Russia and Qatar. So frantic were David Cameron and his team to “win the cup for Britain” that they ignored all warnings of what was to come and were duly humiliated. Sport sends politicians mad. The police should apply the same assiduity to the FA’s 2010 antics as it has to hacking journalists In 2012 the Sunday Times revelations sparked a genuinely independent inquiry by a former US attorney general, Michael Garcia. This report was delivered to Blatter, but he has refused to publish it in full. It contains criticisms of dealings between England’s Football Association and the ex-Fifa personality Jack Warner. International sports bodies play on the celebrity, spurious patriotism, and vast revenues from media and sponsorship rights to terrorise governments into silence. That one of these governments should be Britain’s is a disgrace. The FA should now have nothing to do with Fifa as long as Blatter is in charge. If the European football union, Uefa, continues to cringe before that man, the FA should withdraw from it, too. We might also ask Loretta Lynch to continue her service to world sport by investigating the International Olympic Committee. |