It was exactly thirty-five years later, when I had grown up a bit, and become a journalist drawn into investigating modern football’s entanglements with money, that I first encountered the American Fifa chief, Charles ‘Chuck’ Blazer. It was in the Gulf, in Abu Dhabi, in the summer of 2009. I was there because I was inquiring for the Guardian into the improbable takeover of my boyhood football club, the beloved sky blue of Manchester City, by the scion of that far-flung country’s ruling family, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan. Mansour’s executives had suggested that to understand Abu Dhabi, and its intentions for City, I should come and see the country when preparations were stepping up for the Fifa club world championship, which they were hosting as part of their broader nation-promoting activities. There was to be an update and a press conference, some excitements at the country’s one big football stadium, and the local Al Jazira football club, which Mansour also owned.
That was why Blazer was there: he was the Fifa executive committee member with responsibility for overseeing the club world championship. A New Yorker, he had in 1996 garnered this position of power among the twenty-four men of the world governing body’s highest decision-making forum, whose responsibility extended to voting on which country should host the World Cup. His ascendance came six years after Blazer had been appointed the secretary general, like a chief executive, of his geographical football region, Concacaf: the Confederation of North and Central America and Caribbean Football Associations. In that position, he had worked intimately for twenty years with Jack Warner, a former college history lecturer in his native Trinidad whom Blazer had supported to become the Concacaf president in 1990. Warner had since, as the two of them planned, led a coalescing of power for the small Caribbean islands, uniting to cast their votes as a block of thirty-one among Concacaf’s forty-one countries, which included much bigger nations, principally the US, Canada and Mexico. In the election of a president, all Fifa’s 211 countries’ FAs vote, so Warner could become a man of influence, wielding the block Concacaf and Caribbean numbers.
Concacaf were entitled to elect or appoint three members to the Fifa executive committee, the same number as the South America football confederation, Conmebol. Oceania, representing New Zealand and mostly Pacific island countries, had one representative, the Confederation of African Football and Asian Football Confederation had four each. Uefa, representing Europe, the richest, strongest and oldest football region, had, through the politics and compromises which shaped Fifa over the years, retained eight representatives. The president, Sepp Blatter, elected by a majority of the member FAs in 1998, 2002 and unopposed in 2006, made it twenty-four, sitting around the top table at Fifa headquarters, the so-called ‘House of Fifa’, in Zurich.
Jack Warner would become a great deal more notorious after 2009 but he was already infamous then for his fiery, declamatory manner and for his involvement in ticketing scandals over the years. The first, in 1989, concerned the crucial World Cup final qualifying match for Trinidad and Tobago, which his home country had only to draw with the USA to claim a place in the 1990 World Cup. Terrible overcrowding outside and inside the stadium led to the accusation that Warner, the president of the Trinidad and Tobago FA, had had 15,000 too many tickets printed and sold, leading to a judicial inquiry which never reported. Watched from the packed stands the USA won the match 1–0, and they, rather than a devastated home side, went through to play at the World Cup in Italy. In 2006, Warner was found by Fifa’s own inquiry, conducted by the consultants Ernst & Young, to have had tickets for that year’s World Cup in Germany picked up by his son, Daryan. They were then provided to a travel company, Simpaul, owned by the Warner family, which sold them at a premium, above face value, in breach of Fifa’s rules. Fifa’s disciplinary committee reprimanded Jack Warner but took no action against him because, they concluded, it could not be proved that he knew about the resale of the tickets. Warner had declared himself ‘vindicated’.
Blazer had not been exposed for major wrongdoing then; far from it, he was still an undisputed master of the football universe. He was known for his unashamed big-ness, his outsized personality and social life which he exhibited on a blog, proudly titled Travels with Chuck Blazer and Friends. Pride of place at the top of the blog was a picture of an elderly Nelson Mandela, presumably being displayed as one of Blazer’s friends, in a private plane with a rug over his legs. It was taken when Mandela made the long and, to him, arduous journey from South Africa to Trinidad at Warner’s request in 2004, when South Africa were entreating Warner to vote for the country to host the 2010 World Cup. Blazer and his girlfriend, Mary Lynn Blanks, are smiling, facing the camera, their expressions saying: get us, on a private plane with the living legend, Mandela.
When I went to Abu Dhabi, it was August, impossibly hot, 40 degrees, and shirt-soaking 80-degree humidity. The locals, the Emiratis, and their visitors and expatriate professionals, lived their whole lives in air-conditioned buildings, linked by journeys in air-conditioned cars. When I went outside, the heat and humidity immediately steamed my glasses up, the reverse of home where that happens when you go indoors from the cold. Mansour’s people showed me some projects the country was building to fulfil the plans of Sheikh Zayed, Mansour’s father, to develop an economy beyond reliance on oil, and to attain influence through cultural and sporting investment. They took me to Yass, to see the Formula One racetrack built at great cost for an Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, and the Ferrari visitor attraction adjoining it; to the Sheikh Zayed Stadium, and they talked me through the country’s wealth, and plans. I noticed, as all visitors presumably must, that the only people actually outside on the streets in that heat were Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi workers, in thick overalls and heavy boots, toiling to build the Emiratis’ towers, malls and hotels. I was aware of the campaigns by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International highlighting the poor wages, living conditions and lack of employment rights for these people, and I sought some out to talk to. They were not the worst treated; their pay was modest and accommodation communal, but they told me others had it worse. Their greatest lament was being away from their families, many with babies and very young children whose pictures they showed me, for so many months at a time. After the majority of the Fifa executive committee, fourteen members, made the shock and far-reaching vote on 2 December 2010 to send the 2022 World Cup to another, rival Gulf emirate, Qatar, I often wondered if on their chauffeur-driven, red-carpet visits to the region, through their darkened windows, they much noticed the immigrant workers at all.
I first saw Blazer in the Emirates Palace Hotel, a vast, lavish kingdom of a complex, reported in the Dubai press to have cost $3bn to build, the second most expensive hotel in the world. The wide and long floors from the entrance to the room where Blazer was giving his audience were paved in endless marble. The domes in the roof were decorated with gold. The Al Nahyan family used the hotel partially as a seat, and the country’s ruling council, I was told, met there. There were expatriate professionals, in suits, walking briskly through the complex on business, while groups of Emirati men were often sitting serenely in the lobby in traditional ankle-length dishdasha robes and headdress, running their beads through their hands and chatting.
Blazer came crashing through this scene as if he, not the Al Nahyans, owned the place. He is a big man, with a very red face set into a bushy white beard and curly white hair. Some have said he is like Santa Claus, and so he was, a dystopic American version of Father Christmas. He was, it has unavoidably to be observed, grossly overweight, on a scale of obesity so beyond a normal sight that it took a moment to adjust the eyes to it. He was so sadly enormous that he could not walk except with great difficulty, and he was in a large mobility scooter, which he was riding like a giant dodgem car, hovering cheerfully around the marble floors of the Emirates Palace. He was quite brazenly unembarrassed about the spectacle he presented; he had assistants and Fifa staff always in attendance, and he was barking orders at them, like a cartoon bad boss in a caper movie.
It would be nice to be able to describe the attention being paid to him differently, but it can only be properly expressed as bowing and scraping. This was not because the young Fifa or Abu Dhabi football officials were natural sycophants to a character like him; far from it, they came across as very professional, preparing to expertly organise another international tournament in a new host country. Their obedient respect to him was clearly because his position demanded it. He was the Fifa boss; his executive committee had bestowed the tournament on this country, and now when he was here, everybody had to scurry. His status meant that he was routinely accommodated in luxury like the Emirates Palace Hotel, which has suites for presidents and princes; he would be met in a limousine at the airport, and never leave air-conditioning during his stay. One of those whose job it was to give a positive account of Fifa’s work and its people said Blazer was a football enthusiast who worked very hard–which did seem to be true–and even suggested his weight may have been due to some kind of illness, rather than a propensity to overindulge at a buffet. There was just one member of the entourage who could not help but articulate the thoughts of the honest child seeing through the emperor’s fine clothes, and he muttered, out of the corner of his mouth, that Blazer was an odd sight to be the public face of promoting the world’s greatest sport.
In my work up to then I had dug predominantly into English football, the Premier League club ‘owners’ who had previously been termed ‘custodians’; their great commercial carve-up for their clubs and the FA’s modern inadequacy in restraining it. This journey of investigation had led me into discovering and understanding the historic origins of football itself, and that the owners’ modern banking of vast personal profits was indeed as it felt: contrary to the traditions and ethos insisted upon for a century by the FA. The governing body had from the beginning sought to incorporate core sporting values for its game, before the FA was finally overwhelmed in the new moneyed era and lost administrative clarity.
I had learned that the roots of the modern, refined, global sport were indeed in the rough folk games which English villagers used to battle over in the Middle Ages, literally fighting to carry a ball miles into the ‘goal’ of forcing it into the opposition territory. Some of these muddy, heaving, steaming free-for-alls survive today, most famously the Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday sprawls between the ‘Up’ards’ and ‘Down’ards’, across fields, a river and through the town of Ashbourne, in Derbyshire. The phrase ‘local derby’, for near-neighbours clenched in an intense rivalry, derives from the grapples of old between two parishes, All Saints and St Peter’s, in the city of Derby.
These battles had been gradually shaped into more recognisable tests of athleticism and skill in the 1840s, the civilising years of the English public–in fact fee-paying, private–schools, while farmworkers and country labourers were being crammed into mines, mills and factories in smog-filled new industrial cities. When the public schoolboys left for university, work or the army, they wanted to continue playing the games, so the early clubs were formed.
Each school, however, had developed its own rules, so on 26 October 1863, twelve clubs met, at the Freemason’s Tavern in Lincoln’s Inn, London, to agree one common form of the game, and establish what they called the Football Association. These clubs, whose names are forever imprinted into the history of what would grow so phenomenally into the world’s most popular sport, were former graduates and army officers enjoying their Victorian leisure time in London and its then plusher suburbs: Barnes, the War Office Club, Crusaders, Forest of Leytonstone, No Names club of Kilburn, Crystal Palace, Blackheath, Kensington School, Percival House (Blackheath), Surbiton, Blackheath Proprietary School and Charterhouse–the only public school represented at the first meetings.
Blackheath would famously walk away because the other clubs decided to outlaw ‘hacking’–booting the opposition in the shins–as an integral skill of their game, and that south London club, still playing today, threw its future in with the code developed by Rugby school. The first football match ever under the new rules was played on Saturday 19 December 1863, a 0–0 draw between clubs housed in south-west London suburbs still leafy and well-appointed today, Barnes and Richmond.
‘The game was characterised by great good temper,’ the Official History of the Football Association, written by the revered journalist and BBC radio commentator Bryon Butler, cites from a contemporary match report, ‘the rules being so simple and easy of observance that it was difficult for disputes to arise.’
Football was gradually taken north and into the rowdy, grim industrial cities by former public schoolboys, whose families owned mills or other businesses, and they enlisted local men to make up the numbers. As the game’s presence and popularity grew, churches and enlightened employers began to see its benefits, physical and moral, and to form clubs themselves. So, some of England’s most famous great clubs, now Premier League corporations mostly owned by financial investors with no previous connections to them, have their origins in the search for spiritual space and greater church attendance in gin-soaked cities. Arsenal, Manchester United and West Ham United were formed in heavy industrial workplaces; Tottenham Hotspur was a schoolboys’ club, whose founder members first met under a street lamp on Tottenham High Street. The remarkable number of church clubs, which seized on football passionately enough to become serious and professional as the game became a mass popular spectacle, included Everton (St Domingo’s Church, Liverpool), Aston Villa (Villa Cross Wesleyan Chapel, Birmingham), Southampton (St Mary’s), and Bolton Wanderers (Christ Church). My own club, which so entranced me through my growing up, also began as a church team: St Mark’s, in Gorton, the stinking east of the world’s first industrial city, Manchester.
The early efforts found a vast, untapped public appetite for the game–perhaps, I always think, the folk memory of rough, rambling countryside contests had survived as a longing in the mines, mills and factories–and crowds began to gather to watch and roar. The FA established its cup competition, the world’s first, in 1871, and it was won for its initial eleven years by upper-class clubs before Blackburn Olympic, from the hard Lancashire cotton town, beat Old Etonians in 1882, 2–1 at The Oval in London. Forever after that, clubs predominantly fielding and supported by working-class men overtook the amateur aristocrats.
Inexorably, competition between the tough, ambitious new clubs in the north and Midlands had led to good players being paid, which the FA banned at first, as contrary to its spirit and ethos. Threatened by the clubs with a split, however, the FA agreed in 1885 to live with professionalism, and sought to protect football in other fundamental ways from outright takeover by commercialism.
After Fifa was formed in 1904 by seven European football associations–not the FA, by far the world’s strongest and longest established, which spent two years condescending before joining in–the new world governing body also drew an innate distinction between its sport and purely commercial entertainment. At the 1906 congress in Bern, by which time the English FA had joined and sent a delegation, among seven key founding rules was one which stated that international matches had to be between teams representing national associations, that the associations had to agree to matches being played between clubs from different countries, and that ‘No person should be allowed to arrange matches for personal profit.’
The English Football League, the world’s first, was formed in 1888, a more brass tacks business held at the Royal Hotel, Manchester, than the public school old boys’ recreational rule-setting in London twenty-five years earlier. For a competition which would inspire similar leagues all over the world and create such enduring glories, the league’s founding motivation was basic: to provide regular fixtures for clubs which now had the financial commitment of paying players and catering to supporters. The twelve clubs, six from the north, six from the Midlands, which have in their histories that they were the original, founder members of the Football League, were Accrington, Aston Villa (whose chairman, William McGregor, a draper and devout Christian, was the league’s initiator), Blackburn Rovers, Bolton Wanderers, Burnley, Derby County, Everton, Notts County, Preston North End, Stoke City, West Bromwich Albion and Wolverhampton Wanderers. At that very first meeting in Manchester, the representatives understood that clubs based in the cities could attract bigger crowds and so make more money than the clubs in the smaller towns. They agreed that, in order to ensure genuine competition between them, clubs should share the attendance money, the only source of income they had then, otherwise the big clubs would make more and therefore pay high wages to the best players, and dominate. So, the fair distribution of money was embedded as a principle in professional football from its very beginning.
A key discovery for me was that the Victorian gentlemen of the Football Association had also sought to restrain the potential for individuals to profit personally from the bristling commercialism of the industrial clubs. The FA allowed the clubs’ founders to form limited companies, to raise money and protect themselves from the liabilities of paying wages and building grounds, but introduced rules to prevent the shareholders making money for themselves. This bargain, between business and football’s founding principles, not perfect, perhaps too amateurish, but insisting on a core sporting purpose, was the basis for the Football League and its clubs’ remarkable growth into and through the twentieth century. It had grown to four divisions after the First World War, included ninety-two clubs throughout England and Wales, and marked an extraordinary 100 years of story-making in 1988.
The big clubs’ breakaway from this and the other essential bases of the sporting constitution came as the amounts of money available, principally from television, grew in the 1980s. In 1992, the First Division clubs broke away, to form the Premier League, so that they would not have to share the bonanza of a new payTV deal with the rest of football. A small group at the head of the FA somehow persuaded themselves that they would become pre-eminent in English football and deliver a blow to a Football League they had come to see as administrative rivals, by backing this big clubs’ breakaway. The FA also allowed the clubs’ shareholders to form holding companies to bypass the old rules limiting the cash they could make out of them, and as the money and exposure of the Premier League soared, the ‘owners’ began to make fortunes by selling the clubs.
Sheikh Mansour, an oil-rich prince with an enthusiasm for football, had in the 2000s seen overseas investors taking over Premier League clubs, paying the British shareholders tens or hundreds of millions of pounds, and began to consider a purchase of his own. When Manchester City arrived as a proposition, he considered it just right: a historic, big-city club, with many fans grown loyal over decades and a new stadium built for the 2002 Commonwealth Games and converted for City–not a club with an old ground, like Tottenham’s, which needed work. The Abu Dhabi takeover took the forces assailing modern English football into a different dimension. In Mansour, we had an education into the mega-wealth of the Gulf states and, in the absence of elected governments, their ruling dynasties; the Al Nahyan family had ruled in Abu Dhabi since the eighteenth century. The countries were sophisticated; their modern rulers agreed strategies to develop rapidly, looking also to a future when the oil or gas propelling their fortunes would run out. ‘Soft power’, the association with culture, sport and the media, for the countries to become a presence, economic partner and accepted part of the conversation in the developed West, had become integral to the strategies. In Qatar, Abu Dhabi’s neighbours and entrenched religious and political rivals, such a strategy resulted in the bid, which always looked spectacularly overreaching, to host the 2022 World Cup. Their stunning success in gaining enough votes was the catalyst which many people, Sepp Blatter included, believe heralded Fifa’s unravelling, because it appeared that its sole reason could only be money.
The Abu Dhabi nation-building strategy was a phenomenon, but had been steadier, over a longer term than Qatar’s. Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, Mansour’s father, was revered as the visionary, having taken over as ruler in 1966 and begun the process of shaping Abu Dhabi to a modern strategy. In Qatar, the Emir who strove for a similar plan to that of his rivals in the UAE, Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, finally overthrew his conservative father in a bloodless coup as late as 1995, and appears to have believed he had to catch up fast. In Abu Dhabi, they had built modern housing, hotels, offices and malls and more recently begun the soft power cultural acquisitiveness: buying prestige attractions such as branches of the Louvre and the Guggenheim, and building the Formula One racetrack at Yass. It was a part of this broadening out which led the country to consider bidding for Fifa events, but Abu Dhabi decided against the World Cup, which would have required a multi-stadium building programme on the same startling scale, in a tiny country, with which Qatar has now saddled itself. Instead, they bid for the 2009 and 2010 club world championships, played between the champions of Fifa’s six global confederations, which would still showcase the country on television around the world, and bring supporters to it. Abu Dhabi, they told me, had to actually pay Fifa for the right to host this championship, then pay to put it on–and, as part of the package, to host Chuck Blazer in the manner to which he had become accustomed.
At the Emirates Palace I interviewed him briefly; he was incidental to the story I was working to understand, but I talked to him for form, politeness almost, because he was there. From memory, I don’t think Blazer scooted over to me; I think at the appointed time, after his press conference, I was ushered to where he was sitting in his mobility scooter. He was jolly, very loud and bullish, about the merits of the tournament Abu Dhabi were staging for Fifa. It was getting good coverage, he said, and would be shown in more than 200 countries.
‘Our sponsors participate as well,’ he said.
I asked him how much it was all costing the country, as it has billions to spend on sporting and cultural assets like Fifa tournaments and Manchester City, and whether it was making a huge loss to put the championships on. Blazer essentially said it was, but it was worth it to Abu Dhabi:
‘Budgets and profits are strange things. How you measure them isn’t clearly defined, between governments and sponsors; the lines are fuzzy. In the end, it’s an investment they are making for the public. They end up with training facilities and infrastructure, trained people, then become integrated into other sporting events and they recognise it. Where else do you get a laboratory as perfect as this? You shouldn’t talk of it in terms of profits and losses–they are investments. Everybody is excited, so can you call it a loss?’
I asked him about himself and he told me, eagerly and a little boastfully, about having been the secretary general of Concacaf for nineteen years, a remarkably long tenure, and on the Fifa executive committee for thirteen. They had just finished the Concacaf Gold Cup, he told me with great satisfaction, at which a crowd of 80,000 at the Giants Stadium in New Jersey had watched Mexico beat the USA 5–0 in the final. The Concacaf club Champions League was now kicking off, he said; it was all doing very well.
I asked Blazer what his background was, what he did before attaining his positions at Concacaf and Fifa and becoming such an evidently great success story. He asked me straight away if I was familiar with the smiley face. Of course, I said, instantly. It was everywhere when I was young; I always associate it with my auntie Sharon and uncle Alan, who were teenagers in the 1960s and whose house in the seventies was filled with fun, LPs and frisbees.
‘I made the smiley faces,’ Blazer told me.
He left me with the distinct impression that he was saying he designed and owned the whole copyright on the smiley face, but I have dug out my notes of the conversation in Abu Dhabi and he seems in fact not to have gone that far. I just wrote down that he’d said he made them, that he had had a factory making smiley face buttons–badges, as we call them–from 1968 to 1972. He told me that he had made his fortune on that worldwide craze, sold the factory and had enough money to retire at twenty-seven. Before that he had been a prodigy, he told me; he had graduated from college at nineteen. Then he went into business, and he had done his first leveraged buyout at twenty.
It was a dizzyingly good and perfect story to tell; it certainly floored me. It declared his genius, that he was a man of wealth and substance, his fortune made from something cool and universally recognisable like the smiley face. His story also explained how he could be here, spending all his time on football, when it was not clear or yet public that the barons of Fifa, like him, were making huge money out of the game’s governing bodies. This large and booming character was, he was telling me cheerfully, a living embodiment of the American dream, and football was clearly very lucky to have him.
It was only years later that I learned with a start, feeling an anger which surprised me, that his smiley face story was a calling card of his, but that it was a trumped-up story. The truth was set out in the book American Huckster, written about Blazer by the New York Daily News journalists Mary Papenfuss and Teri Thompson, who broke the story in 2014 that Blazer, having been found to have committed tax evasion, fraud and money laundering on a gigantic scale at Concacaf, had in 2011 agreed to wear a wire for the FBI, to see if he could implicate some of his colleagues at Fifa. The book also found that having in his early years been a hustler in Queens, New York, Blazer went around telling people he invented the smiley face badge. In fact it was designed by graphic artist Harvey Ball, and marketed, on posters, mugs and dozens of different products including badges, by two Philadelphia entrepreneur brothers, Bernard and Murray Spain. Blazer had, it was true, been contracted by the Spains to manufacture the badges, when he was running a factory in Queens. The book said that in fact Blazer had defrauded the Spains, selling badges out of the factory back door to other retailers who had no licence for the smiley face, rather than keeping to his exclusive contract with them.
Via his daughter, Dana Spain, who recently stood to be mayor in Philadelphia and was easy to track down, I talked to Bernard Spain. He told me that he and his brother Murray, the sons of Russian immigrants, had opened their first Hallmark store, selling gifts and gimmicks, with ‘a bit of borrowed money’, in 1959. He said they hit on pop culture fads, Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup can design, the student craze for traffic signs–‘Our motto was: Why Steal Them Off the Street?’ he said–and built up the business ‘bit by bit’. In 2000, the Spains, who had moved into dollar stores, sold their whole chain of 101 stores to Dollar Tree, a Nasdaq-quoted company, for $300m.
‘We are a true American dream,’ he said, ‘not like Chuck.’
Remembering the smiley face, he said they had learned to expand the range of products on which a design would go, to maximise the sales while a craze lasted, and when the badges took off in popularity ‘We needed somebody who could pump them out in big quantities. Somebody said there was a company in Queens, New York, so I went there with my brother, met Chuck Blazer. I think the factory was owned by his wife’s uncle, not by him, and he was running it. He said he could do our order, and we paid him three cents a button, which we sold for ten cents.
‘Then when we were up to our ears in orders all over the world, we heard from one of our drivers that he saw buttons going out the back door of the factory, to other people. We realised he was making additional buttons and selling them on his own, or stealing from our own orders and short-shipping us. We complained all the time–“Where the fuck are our buttons?”–and he had his excuses. We didn’t sue; we’re pragmatic businessmen; in fact we never sued anybody in business, period, we weren’t litigious.’
I had not quite been prepared for how personally affronted the Spains would be, to hear that Blazer used their product as a claim to his own brilliant achievements.
‘We think nothing of him; he’s a cheat and a fraud, a bad guy, and if that’s all he can do, steal anyone’s thunder…’ Spain said, his wife calling out further insults of Chuck in the background. Spain also said that he and his brother, who did own the copyright on the smiley face and made a mini-industry out of it, did not make enough money out of it to retire when the craze fizzled out, and there was no way Blazer could have done by selling the factory, even if he did own it, which they believed he didn’t.
When he heard that Blazer had been caught up in the fall of Fifa, Spain said that after all the years, he and his wife were not surprised.
‘I thought he must be involved in criminal activity up to his neck when I heard.’
Looking back, the summer I met Chuck Blazer in the Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi was the high point for him before the fall, for many of the men who had been rulers of their football empires for decades, for Sepp Blatter’s Fifa itself. They were making fortunes for themselves, whole countries had to bow down in homage, they had the World Cup in South Africa to come in 2010, which would be feted for remaking Africa’s very image and for being a fitting tribute to Nelson Mandela’s humanity and heroism. Blatter’s ascendance from a childhood spent in the provincial Valais region of Switzerland in the Alps was still so stratospheric that he was said to be angling strategically for the summit of a Nobel peace prize. Fifa’s executive committee had not yet staggered the world with the majority votes for Russia and Qatar, Mohamed bin Hammam had not yet fatefully challenged Blatter for the presidency of Fifa in 2011, some of the chief power-brokers had not yet self-destructively turned on each other. The FBI had not yet decided that Fifa itself, the world governing body of football, might in fact be a RICO–a racketeering influenced criminal organisation–and begun to investigate. Chuck Blazer was not carrying a recording device, as he would in the fine hotels of the dignitaries at the 2012 Olympic Games, in his key fob, reportedly because he was too obese for a wire to be run in the standard way up his stomach. He was still a carefree baron then, free to bark his way merrily on his mobility scooter around a seven-star palace in the Gulf, every door opened for him, his every want fulfilled, cheerily telling the world that it had him to thank for the smiley face.