Contemplating Fifa’s modern disgrace, the shocking arrests and charges of nine senior figures in May 2015 in Zurich, days before Sepp Blatter’s re-coronation as president, Chuck Blazer’s and others’ pleas of guilty to huge frauds, it is natural to look back at the founding fathers and imagine them turning in their graves. Like the beginnings of football itself in England’s market towns, schools and inner-city churches, the origins of Fifa are heroically small scale. The organisation was formed at a meeting on 21 May 1904 at 229 rue St Honoré, Paris, in a back room of the offices of the Union des Sociétés Françaises de Sports Athlétiques, an amateur French sports association. Representatives of only seven countries’ fledgling football associations were there, wanting to facilitate international matches between their teams: Holland, Switzerland, Denmark, Belgium, France, Sweden and Espir FC Madrid, representing Spain, with Germany wiring their intention to sign up. That these associations solemnly and grandly called themselves the Fédération Internationale de Football Association after such a threadbare meeting was a statement of sporting cooperation and ambition. Yet the men in the room can have had no idea how remarkably football, and their organisation, would grow throughout their century.
The English journalist Guy Oliver, editorial director at the Fifa museum in downtown Zurich, a diplomatic distance from the organisation’s bunker-like headquarters up the hill near the zoo, cherishes these founders’ original mission and achievements, but cautions against overidealising their motives. It was not consciously, Oliver has found looking through the archives, all about world peace, diplomacy through sporting endeavour or any other of the vaulting political hyperbole indulged in by Blatter in his pomp. Oliver contrasts the formation of Fifa in that sparse back-room huddle with the re-establishment of the Olympic Games ten years earlier in 1894, also in Paris, at a conference held in the amphitheatre of the Sorbonne. Pierre de Coubertin, the initiator, was explicitly inspired by ideals of internationalism, pacifism and peace among nations, and seventy-eight delegates attended, from countries in Europe, the USA and New Zealand. The modern Olympics were draped from the beginning in such proclaimed virtues, but Oliver has learned that the founding principle of football’s international federation was more grounded: to play the game and organise competition between countries.
While acknowledging that, you can still recognise there was idealism and innocence in these beginnings, that exactly ten years before Europe would be torn apart in a terrible war, men from different countries were gathering for the simple purpose of agreeing the rules for a game to play with each other. Money does not seem to have been any part of the motivation; there was very little to be made from football then, in those European countries. Later, after the First World War, Jules Rimet served as president of Fifa from 1921 to 1954, a thirty-three-year era of determined globalisation including his landmark foundation of the World Cup in 1930. He was a religious Christian who did subscribe to de Coubertin’s view of sport as a force for peace and goodwill between nations. Rimet talked of Fifa at the end of his tenure as ‘a spiritual community to which we all adhere with one heart and one will’, and of football as ‘a channel for imparting the finest human qualities’, listing discipline, moderation and solidarity among its virtues.
‘Loyalty to the spirit of the game, fairness to the adversary, is perhaps the most remarkable quality of football,’ Rimet said, in his noted address to the Fifa congress in Rio de Janeiro before the start of the 1950 World Cup held in Brazil. ‘Without it a match would be devoid of all meaning and would return to the condition of the barbarous games of antiquity.’
He concluded that football had moral benefits it should impart to the world: ‘Our aim must be to transfer these idealistic qualities of the game to our everyday life.’
The founders had tried and failed at the beginning to involve the English FA, by far the strongest and longest-established football association, which had its flourishing professional league by then, a bristling population of clubs at all levels. The British had codified the game and given it to the world–literally, as many clubs in Europe, South America, Africa, Asia and Oceania were founded on the initiatives of British expatriates or commercial travellers. Robert Guérin, the Frenchman who initiated Fifa, approached the gentlemen of the FA by letter and went to London twice in 1903, but found Lord Kinnaird, the chairman, and Frederick Wall, the top-hatted, frock-coated secretary, sniffy. Guérin complained, in a famous phrase cited in all the histories, that dealing with the English was like ‘slicing water with a knife’.
For an English lover of football, to understand this early history is a wincing, at times embarrassing journey, with uncomfortable parallels to growing British isolationism today, a recognition of lessons not learned. The FA wrote to Guérin after he had taken the trouble to see them, replying in November 1903 that its council ‘cannot see the advantages’ of an international federation. The FA did not take part in that inaugural meeting in Paris, sending a letter of apology instead of a delegate. Then, bizarrely and insultingly, the year after the seven European countries formed Fifa, the English FA held its own conference at the Crystal Palace in London, on April Fool’s Day 1905, and resolved that some new international union should be formed.
Guy Oliver’s delvings into the Fifa archives have led him to seek some rehabilitation for the English attitude, though, and plead also for some understanding and perspective.
‘In 1904 [when the FA was invited to be part of Fifa’s founding] the four nations of the United Kingdom were the unrivalled powers in football,’ Oliver has written.
‘So an international body created by anyone else faced a Herculean task of being taken seriously by the British. Consider the following parallel. Imagine American football enthusiasts today in France, Denmark, Belgium, Sweden, Spain and the Netherlands decided to set up an international federation for American football. That such a body could become the pre-eminent body in American football within a decade would seem absurd, but that is exactly the scale of what Fifa achieved in association football.’
Oliver reads the correspondence from the English FA, with the fact that the football associations of Argentina, India, Canada and South Africa were already affiliated to the FA, and the Crystal Palace conference, less as insularity and more as illustrating a keenness to be a dominant force in organising international football. By 1906, the FA decided to become fully involved in the new Fifa organisation, and sent a delegation to the June conference in Bern, Switzerland, including Daniel Woolfall, the FA treasurer and Blackburn Rovers committee member. He was elected Fifa president at the meeting, a recognition of the English FA’s size, history and know-how, and he served until 1918. Woolfall was the first of three English Fifa presidents out of just six in total during the seventy formative years of Fifa, before its culture irrevocably changed after the Brazilian João Havelange was elected president in 1974.
For forty years after that, British influence waned and sank, as the organisation widened its activites far beyond its founding European focus. Fifa had only two more presidents: Havelange, for a monumental twenty-four years until 1998, when his protégé and former secretary general, Blatter, achieved the reward for a lifetime’s ambition and obsessive self-advancing by ascending himself, and he held on for seventeen years.
The 1906 Bern congress laid the foundations for Fifa’s status as the undisputed international federation, and for football’s global growth. The delegates agreed that the laws of the game should be those of the English FA, that only one national association from each country, truly controlling football there, would be recognised and admitted to Fifa, and that international matches be arranged at Fifa’s annual congress. Woolfall and Wall reported back to the FA’s constituent members in its council that its game was evolving steadily beyond British shores. They cited ‘the importance of continental football’, and ‘the opinion that in a short time clubs under the jurisdiction of the Football Association will consider continental football a part of their arrangements and will regularly visit and receive continental clubs’.
They continued, with a landmark view: ‘The Football Association should use all its influence to regulate football on the continent as a pure sport and give all continental associations the full benefit of the many years’ experience of the Football Association.’
The strength and depth of English football compared to the nascent game developing in other European countries is illustrated by the fact that, to play international matches and give other countries a chance, the FA formed and fielded an amateur team. Still, the team was so strong that England’s amateurs won the first two football tournaments played at the Olympic Games, in 1908 in London, beating Denmark 2–0, and Stockholm in 1912, again defeating Denmark, this time 4–2. Oliver has argued strongly that these and the three subsequent Olympic football tournaments were in effect the first World Cups, which explains the twenty-six-year gap between Fifa’s formation and the first World Cup, played in Uruguay in 1930.
Sadly, England had flounced out of Fifa twice by then, after rows in which the English high-handedness looks dismal yet painfully familiar. First, in 1920, after the slaughter of the war was over and when other European countries’ football associations were slowly resuming sporting relations, the British FAs resigned because they did not want to recognise associations which authorised matches against Germany and the other defeated countries’ teams. The British FAs rejoined in 1924, but then had another dispute with Fifa, this time disagreeing over the purity of amateurism in the Olympics, which argued that players should be compensated for time taken off work. This was in 1928, for the second time in four years, and two years before Fifa would first organise the greatest international football tournament in the world.
In his excellent book Fifa: The Men, the Myths and the Money, Professor Alan Tomlinson winces at the condescending, ‘British know-all fashion’ with which Frederick Wall delivered the decision to Fifa’s then secretary, the Dutchman Carl Hirschman: ‘The great majority of the Associations affiliated with the Fédération Internationale de Football Association are of comparatively recent formation,’ Wall sniffed, ‘and as a consequence cannot have the knowledge which only experience can bring.’
Rimet is credited with marrying his religious idealism for football’s human potential with a real-world recognition that working men had to be paid for their time. He absorbed football associations from Africa–Egypt, in 1923, was the first–Asia and Central America, extending Fifa well beyond Europe during his tenure. And he steered an acceptance of full professionalism, which meant football breaking with the Olympics and founding its own World Cup. Oliver argues that this pragmatism by a Fifa visionary spared football the oppressiveness and pettiness with which amateurism was piously enforced at the Olympics and in other sports for far too long, and partly accounts for the game’s great growth and accelerated capturing of the world’s imagination.
England, still not members of Fifa after storming off, did not play in the Uruguay World Cup, won by the host country which had secured the right to stage it partly by promising to cover the other national teams’ travel expenses. Nor did England deign to participate in the World Cups of 1934 and 1938, both won by Italy, before Europe was convulsed by war again.
Fifa moved to Switzerland in 1932 after it was plunged into financial crisis by precipitous losses Hirschman had made on investments in the Great Depression. Initially, and for twenty-two years after that, Fifa ran world football’s affairs and organised the World Cups from just two rooms in an office building on Zurich’s main Bahnhofstrasse, which runs through the centre of the city from the grand old train station. To professionalise the operation after the Hirschman debacle, Fifa took on its first actual employee as secretary, the German former player Ivo Schricker, who administered the operation from those cramped rooms, with just one assistant, for twenty years.
In 2006, seventy-three years later, Fifa moved into its current headquarters, an impenetrable-looking black block of predominantly Brazilian granite, set high on a hill, in grounds with manicured football pitches, the flags of all its nations, and plants and foliage in the gardens from football’s six global regions. With floors sunk underground, although predominantly for parking, it is perennially described as a bunker, and looks inescapably like a building an organisation would choose if it had plots to hatch, secrets to hide. To build this House of Fifa, from the fortunes it was making principally from selling TV and marketing rights to the modern World Cup, Blatter’s organisation had spent 240m CHF ($235m).
The move to Switzerland had partly been prompted by the basic need to have a permanent base somewhere; for years the address of football’s world governing body had been Hirschman’s home in Amsterdam. Switzerland was neutral in the war and an agreeable, well-appointed country in which to settle; de Coubertin had moved the International Olympic Committee to Lausanne, in 1915, while the First World War was raging. Switzerland’s welcome extended to a generous legal status for sporting associations, which are spared taxation on their profits as they are considered to be dedicated to the public good. This freedom from tax and the transparency required of commercial companies–Switzerland was home to discreet, private banks which would be accused of accepting deposits of Nazi gold during the war–was no doubt helpful in 1932, but the privileges became the focus of fierce criticism as Fifa rang in multi-billion dollar television and sponsorship deals in the modern era.
Looking back from the current mega-money and scandal-strewn incarnation of Fifa, it is remarkable to think that the president, for thirteen years from 1961, was an Englishman as rigid and imbued with the amateur spirit as Sir Stanley Rous. Viewed with a jaded eye today, it is easy to lampoon Rous as a stiff-backed man out of his time, obsessed with protocol and the rulebook, as the world changed around him. He was, it is true, the ultimate FA blazer, although he began his career as the FA’s secretary in 1934 being ticked off for not wearing a top hat and frock coat to his first match, as Wall, from whom he took over, had done. Rous had opted, he recalled in his memoir, Football Worlds, for ‘a dashing pair of plus fours’.
Written in 1978, four years after he lost the election to Havelange, Football Worlds is actually a priceless historical document, chronicling a prodigious life in sport, from his birth in Mutford, a tiny Suffolk village, in 1895, at the beginnings of football itself, to Fifa president, organising the World Cups on colour television of Pelé, Cruyff and Beckenbauer. His childhood reads like a football administrator’s version of Cider with Rosie, Laurie Lee’s classic evocation of isolated English village life before cars and technology changed it forever, only without the flushed sex under a cart with a girl like Rosie–and without any cider, either. In just the third paragraph of the first page, young Stanley, aged fifteen, is lining up grown men, ‘assembled farmhands and off-duty fishermen’, and organising them into a football team. Rous wondered if it had been ‘my own fervent enthusiasm’ or ‘the fortunate accident’ of being six foot tall, ‘which gave me a certain air of authority beyond my age’.
The most lasting image in his remembrances, which took in a career as a top-class referee, twenty-seven years as the FA secretary, thirteen as Fifa president, organising the 1948 post-war London ‘austerity’ Olympics for which he received his knighthood, and unquantifiable voluntary work in the service of sport and charity, was a reminiscence from his youth. Rous used to cycle the twenty-five miles, two hours there and back, from his small village to watch Norwich City at their then ground, The Nest. He wrote that he had an extra step fitted to the back axle of his bike so that ‘the keenest of my village boys’ could stand on it, with hands on Rous’ shoulders, and so he would be able to cycle there taking a passenger, too.
‘We had to be keen to do that journey on a rainy day,’ Rous wrote, ‘but we thought it well worth the effort when any of the contemporary heroes was in form.’
Rous’ was, when you consider it, a remarkable life and career of dedication to sport, which can be argued to have been in the best of English traditions. True to the British integration of sport into schools, Rous qualified as a teacher and had impressed with his coaching methods and organisational skills at Watford Grammar School when he applied for and got the job of succeeding Wall at the FA. Among the other many careful modernisations he introduced to football’s first ever governing body was to rewrite the rules of the game, which he completed in 1938. The rules had been first written in the Victorian English of 1863, and then their additions and modifications had become sprawling and sometimes difficult to understand, as Rous had found as a referee. So he unscrambled and collated them, producing a newly streamlined set of rules so clear that they lasted without a further overhaul for almost sixty years, until 1997. Rous wrote in his memoir that a member of the FA staff arranged to have the new laws copyrighted in his name, but he never charged any fee in the forty years the copyright lasted. He said: ‘My object was simply to ensure they could not be tampered with, without my being consulted.’
When his successor, Denis Follows, was understood to have suggested to Fifa that the FA should charge a fee for use of the rules which the English body had developed, Rous said: ‘Privately I warned him off a course which would have lined no pocket but my own.’
In the Fifa museum in Zurich, they have an extract of Rous’ original rules as an exhibit in one of the glass cases. It is his first page, noting from rule one: Number of Players:
‘The game shall be played by two teams each consisting of not more than eleven players.’
Then he noted the dimensions of ‘the ground’, the markings, the size and position of the goals ‘joined together by a horizontal cross bar 8 feet from the ground’; and below that, rule number three: The Ball.
The rules in the Fifa glass case were handwritten by Rous on a basic, now yellowing piece of lined A4 paper, which looks as if it came from a standard school exercise book. Seeing it there was a surprisingly emotional experience, far more stirring than the caps and cups of legendary players housed in other cabinets and even the huge, actual World Cup trophy, whose lump of gold looks just a little gross and over the top, while still redolent of heroic feats. It was not just the simplicity of Rous’ rules, forming the basis for so extravagantly successful a world sport as football. There is something almost childlike in them, as if he did it for homework; you could imagine Rous leant over his desk, sucking his pen, frowning hard, then making his best effort at the rules in his neatest handwriting.
His ultimate supplanting by Havelange, a formidable and icily ambitious Brazilian businessman, and the global development work and commercialisation of Fifa after that have cast Rous as a stuffy, incongruous, stuck-in-time colonialist, overtaken by modernity. But that is a caricature; his achievements merit a more generous assessment, and he was more forward-looking than superficial hindsight suggests; indeed at the time, he was described in the press as a moderniser and internationalist. He had the view of the FA’s purpose expressed by Woolfall after that 1906 Fifa congress, that it should be part of and seek to influence football worldwide rather than turn away from it. Rous was always involved in international cooperation, even as a referee, and he criticised the ‘aloof’ FA which ‘withdrew into ourselves’ and flounced out of Fifa. Of the FA’s absence from the world governing body, he wrote: ‘I certainly had no thought that this was splendid isolation. To me it was a matter of regret and a constant cause of difficulty that we were not more closely associated with Fifa.’
He became determined to lead the FA back into Fifa as soon as he could after the war, and as early as November 1945 went to an executive committee meeting in Zurich with Arthur Drewery, the FA chairman. They found a welcome there, the FA and other British associations were readmitted in 1946, and Drewery, a fish-processing businessman and former chairman of Grimsby Town, would become Fifa president in 1956. Those were still the days, despite an increasingly internationalised organisation which included many more South American and Asian countries’ FAs–the African FAs mostly joined after their countries gained independence in the 1960s–of European domination at Fifa. It seems to sum up how different an age it was, to think that the president of Fifa, administering the sport for the whole world, was the former chairman of a northern provincial English football club like Grimsby.
Rous’ steady, sterling work at the FA and Fifa, his organising competence, attention to detail and commitment to progress, led to him being asked to take on the role of president in 1961, although he too had to win an election over two other candidates. He was always unpaid at Fifa, and says in his book that he did the job on his pension from the FA, which must have been modest. He was already sixty-six when he took this on, describing his presidency at Fifa as ‘the most exciting and the most exacting 13 years of my life’. Rather than seeing it as being ‘pensioned off,’ he said:
‘Here was the chance to use all my experience and to indulge my lifelong interest in international cooperation… I was determined Fifa should take the broadest view looking at problems from a world viewpoint, not from Europe’s or South America’s. I was determined too that Fifa should keep the game moving smoothly on without undue checks in the pattern of development.’
In modern times, Rous is remembered for his stance on the whites-only Football Association of South Africa (FASA), standing firm against the boycotting of the apartheid country demanded from the early 1960s by the growing number of post-colonial, independent black African nations which were members of Fifa. Rous gave the impression of being instinctively sympathetic to apartheid and hostile to African football development, and the votes against him by some African football associations made the crucial difference to Havelange winning the 1974 election. Rous himself resented that suggestion, and seems to have been genuinely bewildered by it, and he was aggrieved at the loss of so many African votes in the election.
Rous maintained that his view on South Africa was consistent with a principle he repeatedly restated, that sport itself should not indulge in politics. He argued that if a country was internationally recognised, Fifa should accept its football association and not set itself up as a judge of its politics or social conditions. That was, for example, the basis of his backing the readmission of German FAs to Fifa after the war, which was opposed by members of some countries which had particularly suffered under the terror of the Nazis. ‘That was successfully achieved in 1950,’ Rous wrote, ‘and what a major contribution Germany has since made to international football.’
But his stance on embracing FASA within Fifa was never accepted by most African countries’ FAs. The Confederation of African Football (CAF) had banned FASA for refusing to send a racially mixed team to the first African Cup of Nations, the year of CAF’s formation, in 1957. After FASA were suspended in 1961, Rous decided to conduct a fact-finding commission in South Africa in January 1963, taking with him a white USA representative, Jimmy McGuire. They concluded that ‘notwithstanding the [South African] Government’s policy of separate development, FASA was not itself practising racial discrimination’. He based this on arguing that FASA was only following its government’s policies, which it was not entitled to defy, and that it was allowing associations representing football played by other racial groups to affiliate: the Bantu, Indian and ‘Coloured’ associations. He argued that FASA was working towards integration despite apartheid, which he said he always ‘disliked’.
This was a very long way from good enough for the African FAs and a majority of the countries populating Fifa. At the Tokyo congress the following year, FASA were suspended again, for twelve years, until the 1976 congress in Montreal, when the FA of the still-apartheid country was expelled. Some African FAs wrote to Rous accusing him of condoning apartheid, and then, furious at the lack of places available for African countries at the 1966 World Cup, CAF organised a boycott of the tournament. Rous’ insistence on a fine separation between sport and politics, and perhaps his cultural perspective as a product of colonial Britain, seems to have led him to underestimate, and not himself feel, the visceral repulsion and opposition of the black Africans to apartheid.
He also took a position on Chile in 1973 which looks ludicrously blind to political reality: refusing to allow the Soviet Union to play their World Cup qualifier in a neutral country, because, they had complained, the national stadium in Santiago had been used to torture and kill left-wing targets after the brutal coup of General Augusto Pinochet that year. Rous is identified with the refusal to agree to this request, and to insist the Soviet Union play the game in Chile, although it was a majority decision of the relevant committee, which sent two representatives to look, and received the report that ‘based on what they saw and heard in Santiago, life was back to normal.’ Rous believed he was offering a special privilege to suggest the game be played in Chile but at a different stadium, and he was nonplussed at the Soviet Union’s refusal. He oversaw their automatic elimination from the 1974 World Cup for refusing to play the qualifier, then pronounced himself bewildered at the ‘political vendetta’ he complained the Soviet Union waged against him afterwards.
But it is a mistake to judge Rous’ entire tenure and character by these two episodes when his approach appeared to jar seriously with decent thinking. His insistence that Fifa should not take a political stance was elsewhere robust and admirable: he stood up against China’s demands that breakaway Taiwan should be banned from Fifa, on the same basis, that it was an internationally recognised independent country, and Fifa should not be used to fight a political battle. Often described as ‘paternalistic’, he was internationalist at Fifa and believed he always did his best to encourage development of the game everywhere around the world.
Rous pushed for the development of confederations, the groupings of countries’ football associations by region, including CAF, because, he argued, it was ‘essential that Fifa decentralise rather than become a vast bureaucracy based in Europe and out of touch… and unsympathetic to the needs of other continents’.
This encouragement of the confederations looks innocent now. Rous saw them as a necessary buffer between the national football associations and Fifa in the running of the game, on which he argued everybody involved must be wholly focused. He drafted the first statutes for Europe’s confederation, Uefa, which was established in 1954, and as the FA secretary he supported the participation of English champions in the new European Cup, against the parochial objections of the Football League. Rous specifically encouraged the formation of Concacaf, and efforts to hasten the development of football in the US, which he always believed ‘has the capacity to become a world leader in the game’. He also helped in 1966 with the formation of the newest confederation, Oceania, then including Australia, whose FA moved to the Asian Football Confederation in 2005. The secretary right back then was Charles Dempsey, a Scot living in New Zealand, celebrated still by Oceania as its founding ‘father’.
In 1966, the year the detailed plans Rous left at the FA for the World Cup in England came to delirious fruition for the home country, he was, at Fifa, propounding a new system of making financial grants to African and other developing football countries. Rous believed in this initiative; he travelled the world to document the need for Fifa to help financially with development, and he worked hard to persuade the European-dominated executive committee to endorse the policy, and the finance committee to release 500,000 CHF to fund it. The aims were to provide direct financial support to confederations serving developing countries, in order to employ a full-time secretary, pay for and encourage coaching courses and conferences, make technical films, help with the administrative and equipment costs of improving courses, and with the cost of tournaments.
Havelange, when he challenged Rous, promised to fund more development programmes, and expand the number of countries playing in the World Cup from sixteen to twenty-four, to open it up to more developing countries, which has created the perception that Rous was against both. Guy Oliver has found in the archives that this standard view of Rous is unfair. In fact, Rous circulated proposals as early as July 1970 asking for the confederations’ views on expanding the World Cup to twenty-four, or thirty-two teams, as it subsequently would be. Expansion to thirty-two, he proposed, would allow four countries from Africa, four from Oceania and Asia, and four from Central and North America, alongside, on merit, thirteen from Europe, five from South America, plus the host country and holders. He was suggesting this could happen as soon as the forthcoming 1974 World Cup in West Germany.
Rous received a virulently negative response from Uefa, always jealous of ceding European control and dominance of international football, and the proposal was blocked. The African countries still did not have a single guaranteed place at that World Cup, having to go through a play-off with the Asian Football Confederation qualifier to make it to the tournament. Havelange, ultimately having won the election casting himself as the patron of international development, was then able to push the proposal through given his mandate, expanding the World Cup from sixteen to twenty-four countries’ teams for the 1982 tournament in Spain. Rous, when facing the rival candidacy of Havelange, declined to actively electioneer, issuing only a modest pamphlet saying he would stand on his record, which he believed was self-evident: thirteen years of achievements, development and admirable progress. Given the stories, then and since, that Havelange was dispensing cash and promises to win votes, Rous’ final statement in what passed for his manifesto looks a little barbed: ‘I can offer no special inducements to obtain support in my re-election, nor have I canvassed for votes except through this communication. I prefer to let the record speak for itself.’
As he acknowledged himself, it was not enough. In his memoir, Rous had reined in the bitterness he felt and had expressed in the immediate aftermath, but he still said:
‘The major disappointment for me was the African reaction. They had 38 votes to Europe’s 33 and their influence was decisive in Havelange’s election. The hurtful part of this was that I had done so much for the development of football in Africa during my term as president. Indeed the Europeans who contribute the bulk of Fifa’s money often criticised me for giving too much aid to African associations.’
It has been written that the reason Havelange secured the votes was bribery. One report of the time talked of ‘small brown envelopes in large black hands’, a phrase which has not travelled well down the decades. It may have been true, like many other allegations of bribery which have infested Fifa elections and votes since that key regime change of 1974, but no cases have been provably documented. David Yallop, in his book How They Stole the Game, is repulsed by Havelange and alleges, based on research, that he was corrupt in business and at Fifa. But an example Havelange volunteered himself, about the 1974 election campaign, can also illuminate a different dimension of world football politics at play.
Havelange told Yallop that a friend of his, who was a senior executive at the airline Lufthansa, had paid for the travel costs of six African delegates to go to the crucial congress in Frankfurt–and there they voted for Havelange. That looks like a suitable case of bribery, or at least a blatant conflict of interest, if Fifa had had any kind of structures to enforce an ethics code in 1974. But it also demonstrates that in 1974 significant numbers of African football associations had no money, not even enough for the air fare to send their president or another representative to a congress of Fifa as important as the one which would elect the president.
More recently, in April 2016, the Brazilian academic Luiz Guilherme Burlamaqui presented research at a Harvard University conference, ‘Soccer as a Global Phenomenon’, documenting further the poverty of the smaller football associations in Rous’ time. The FAs had a small fixed fee to pay for their membership of Fifa, in addition to the levy on international match income which Fifa still charged as its basic means of income to run itself. Burlamaqui found that in 1974 the fixed fee was only $150 annually, yet ‘for minor [African] federations, such as Togo or Chad, the $150 was significant and they were constantly late’. In February 1974, Rous’ secretary general at Fifa, the long-serving Helmut Käser, wrote to CAF that as many as twenty-eight associations owed fees, and threatened to bar them from the congress if they did not pay up. Elias Zaccour, an agent and match promoter who was acting for Havelange’s campaign in Africa and the Middle East–a long-term Fifa lobbyist and fixer–said in a televised 2004 interview that he paid the dues of fourteen African national associations who could not afford the fees. ‘So I paid,’ he said. ‘And they were able to vote, otherwise “they” won’t vote. These 14 vote with us.’
Havelange did, without question, help himself to bribes from Swiss marketing company International Sport and Leisure (ISL) in the 1990s and almost certainly earlier than that, and was therefore embroiled in instituting a culture of corruption in this governing body of world football which had such admirable and idealistic founding principles. Yet the overwhelming focus on this, and his use and exploitation of patronage, can obscure Havelange’s attractions and talents which were also factors in his election victory and his career at Fifa. Born Jean-Marie Faustin Godefroid de Havelange in Rio de Janeiro in 1916 to a wealthy Belgian father, Faustin, who made his money in arms dealing, João died in 2016, having reached the age of 100. He was a strong athlete in his youth, made the swimming team for Brazil for the 1936 Olympics in Hitler’s Berlin, and competed in the water polo team in 1952. He studied law, then became engaged with transport and other industrial companies–including arms, according to Yallop’s investigations.
Havelange became involved with the Brazil sports confederation, the CBD, and was elevated to its presidency after the failure of Brazil’s football team to win the 1954 World Cup in Switzerland, which was seen as unforgiveable. The tournament was won by West Germany, a historic, nation-building success dubbed ‘the miracle of Bern’ for the country recovering from the ashes of war and disgrace of the Nazi era. Adidas, started by and named after Adi Dassler, Horst’s father, claimed some credit for the victory, having developed for the West German team a football shoe which was a revolution in lightness compared to the clumping football boots still worn by other teams.
Havelange served as the CBD president, running the confederation of twenty-three national sports governing bodies from 1958 until 1973, when he mounted his campaign to be Fifa president. While the world gasped in awe at the Brazilian players’ ‘natural’ skills when, with a wonderful seventeen-year-old, Pelé, in the side, they won the World Cup in 1958, and again in 1962 and 1970, in fact Havelange had implemented a dedicated, professional operation for the team. It was financed by the government and business interests, seeing the prestige which a victory would bring to Brazil, and it facilitated medical and technical expertise to support the players, who would be thoroughly prepared for the tournaments. As early as 1962, the global ambitions of Brazil’s business and political classes were beginning to press on Havelange the suggestion of standing as Fifa president.
Burlamaqui found in his research on the genesis of Havelange’s campaign that it was aiming for an extension of the international acclaim and profile which Brazil accrued via its brilliant football talents. Brazilian business and the government–the military dictatorship, in the grimmest period of repression–supported Havelange’s campaign as a vehicle for Brazilian nation-making. Havelange dedicated himself to electioneering, famously flying to eighty-six countries to talk directly to the voting delegates of Fifa’s worldwide FAs, often accompanied by the Brazilian or Santos teams playing a friendly, or just by Pelé himself, sprinkling the candidate with the most golden of stardust.
Quoted by David Yallop in his book, Pelé said himself of his status in Africa: ‘I represented to the blacks in those countries what a black man could accomplish in a country where there was little racial prejudice, as well as providing physical evidence that a black man could become rich, even in a white man’s country.’
Havelange was white, and rich, but he successfully presented himself as being from a racially mixed, less well-off and non-European country, and as sympathetic to the complaints and needs of the African FAs, positioning himself in opposition to the struggles they had had with Rous over South Africa. He already had the support of the South American countries, and he listened to the aspirations of the African FAs, promising them more development programmes and an expanded World Cup.
Emmanuel Maradas, a journalist from Chad who edited the magazine African Soccer and covered the political struggles of the African FAs, says Havelange, and later Blatter, understood their needs and how to talk to them:
‘South Africa was a big factor, at the time of national liberation movements,’ Maradas says. ‘João Havelange went round and lobbied the leading nations, Ghana, Nigeria, Egypt, whose delegates were vocal in Fifa congresses. He promised to help Africa, for them to have a seat on the executive committee, a slot at the World Cup, youth development. They knew how to use the right words with a strong message: that money was there, and they would be helped.’
The lament as written by Rous, that he just got on with his work and expected it to stand for itself, is not quite the full story either. He was supported by the tireless lobbying efforts of Horst Dassler, who had succeeded his father, Adi, as the boss at Adidas, busied himself relentlessly in the politics of sports governing bodies and would later set up the pure sports marketing company, ISL. Dassler, running a kit and boot company, worked to have presidents elected who would owe loyalty to him, and do deals for sponsorship with him, promoting the Adidas brand through their sports and teams. According to Patrick Nally, at the time a young English marketeer who worked in partnership with Dassler after Havelange’s election, seeking sponsors for Fifa, ‘Horst Dassler had seen the sense of collaborating with the federations, which would then do a deal on what kit would be worn, and what brands would be allowed to be seen… He understood that rather than paying athletes to wear kit and boots, which was complicated and could result in problems, it was better to collaborate with the federations themselves.’
Dassler did maintain endorsements from the very best of German players, his executives concluding deals which would last a lifetime with Franz Beckenbauer, from his playing days at Bayern Munich. The Franz Beckenbauer tracksuit, with its three stripes down each arm, sported by the star player in 1967, was the first sports clothing made by Adidas, which previously had always concentrated on boots. But once Dassler saw that major brand dominance lay with the branding of the federations, he even developed an international relations arm of Adidas, which schooled young executives in sports politics, lobbying and scheming to have favourable presidents installed. Fedor Radmann, a German long-term operator in football politics and close adviser to Beckenbauer, decades later a key official with Beckenbauer in Germany’s bid to host the 2006 World Cup, worked at Adidas in the 1970s, where from 1979 to 1989 he became a director responsible for ‘promotion and international relations’.
At the 1974 World Cup which took place just after Havelange’s election, Adidas certainly was showcased, the three stripes worn by Beckenbauer as he stroked the Adidas ball extravagantly to victory, and by so many other teams. But Dassler had, in fact, lobbied for Rous, already an ally, because he was comfortable at Fifa and saw a Rous re-election as continuity for European dominance of the key football federation. The night before the vote, Dassler held a large banquet in support of Rous’ presidency, to which Havelange complained he had been refused entry.
Nally says that Havelange nevertheless respected Dassler from that time, because he believed Dassler’s efforts had made the contest closer than it otherwise would have been. At the epochal vote, sixty-two FAs voted for Havelange in the first round, to fifty-six for Rous, then Havelange won the second by a decisive sixty-eight votes to fifty-two.
‘Horst Dassler was made aware just prior to the election that Stanley Rous was going to lose because of the character of João Havelange, travelling the world with the Brazilian team, with a vision for sport to be significantly greater and more important, as it was in Brazil,’ Nally says. ‘Dassler was talking to people, lobbying them to stick with the existing structure, helping Rous. And despite all that work and going round the globe, Havelange nearly didn’t win, which he put down almost entirely to Horst Dassler, whom he saw as a powerful and influential man. It created a bond between the two individuals, and mutual respect.’
Havelange had won, Sir Stanley Rous had lost, and he admitted to feeling ‘rejected by old friends’, and ‘disillusioned’, before regaining the restrained bearing with which he had made his way to the heights of world football from his little village in rural Suffolk. He had become in several crucial ways a man from another era, a patrician administrator dedicated, as he saw it, to the game he always loved and believed in, when the world had changed around him. He was also seventy-nine by then, and there is a strain in football administration of powerful men whose absorbing and thrilling work has become their whole life, who do not recognise when they are too far past their prime, who do not really know what they would do with themselves if they retired. Blatter, elementally clinging on for a fifth term in 2015 despite the arrests of senior Fifa officials at the Zurich hotel days before, still spinning the political wiles he learned for years at Havelange’s side, was the same age.
Havelange, for whom he found kind words in public, and with whom he did enjoy a continuing good relationship, as an honorary president, for years afterwards, offered Rous a pension, but he declined it. Rous reasoned that as he hadn’t been paid when he worked for Fifa, he couldn’t be paid for not working there, and he retired on his FA pension. In a famous passage reflecting on his exit, Rous wrote: ‘There was in my defeat something symbolic of changing attitudes and standards. In football the talk was all of money, and my own lack of personal concern with it may have seemed outdated and amateurish.’
Amateurish is an ambiguous word, carrying within it the virtue of doing something for the love of it, for pure motives, as well as the failing of being unprofessional and bumbling, which Rous certainly was not. His lack of interest in money was, though, certainly outdated, and at Fifa, under Havelange, it was all going to change.