In 1974, the year I was nine, when football and Fifa’s World Cup claimed me for life via a colour telly in the living room in Manchester, the Brazilian João Havelange was fifty-eight, and moving in to take control of the governing body at Fifa House in Zurich. By then, the headquarters had moved, from the two-room offices downtown on Bahnhofstrasse 77 to, literally, a private house. It was up at the top of a hill at 11 Hitzigweg, in Sonnenberg, a quiet, enviably comfortable suburb of detached, classic Swiss homes, looking smugly down on the lake. There were still only twelve staff, and people who worked there at the time say that during Rous’ presidency Helmut Käser, the secretary general, would have his Labradors snuggled under the desk. Yet from there they organised sophisticated, modern World Cups, captivating spectacles broadcast around the world in colour, and tried and ultimately failed to manage the politics and demands of a globally expanding sport.
Havelange, clever, domineering, would remain in charge for a transformational era, celebrated by the establishment in Brazil and elsewhere in the world where he was considered a force for progress, suspected throughout by many others of lining his own and associates’ bank accounts. When he died in 2016, his extraordinary life was hailed as that of a visionary, a moderniser and worldwide developer of the people’s game, the strong-jawed general after whom stadiums were named, and he was denounced for corruption, his own and Fifa’s infestation with it. Both of those sides of the Havelange legacy are true, although for decades he, his protégé Sepp Blatter and Fifa boasted about their development record while publicly denying and condemning as false the mounting allegations of corruption.
Installed as the boss of Fifa House, Havelange had to make good on his policy of development to the African and other national associations which had voted him in on those promises. He would repeatedly say later that the Fifa left him by Rous at that house in Sonnenberg was virtually penniless, which was unfair. Fifa’s records show that it is another misperception to believe that Havelange, a commercially aggressive beast compared to the clerkish Rous, instantly transformed the finances. It was probably true that, like league football in Europe, the television rights for the World Cups were undervalued, but this was before the financial eruption of TV rights, and, for all his efforts and assertions, Fifa records show that under Havelange Fifa’s annual income only increased gradually after 1974, before the huge increase which arrived towards the end of the 1990s.
They did need to find some more money to fund the election promises, and so began to seek corporate sponsorship for the development programmes. Two men who were crucial then, and whose influence over Fifa’s direction seeps back for forty years to that turning point in its history, were Horst Dassler, the indefatigable boss of Adidas, and Joseph Blatter, his name always shortened to Sepp, a kipper-tied PR and marketing operator who came to Fifa from the Swiss timing firm Longines.
Dassler, according to Patrick Nally, saw Fifa’s promised global development plan as a long worked-for opportunity to expand the Adidas brand, and further the entwined relationship with Fifa under Havelange. However, Adidas was stretched and while it would be a sponsor, providing kit and footballs throughout the world, his company did not have the money to actually fund the programmes. Nally, in partnership with Peter West, a renowned cricket commentator, had been pioneering in London the sponsorship of sport by blue-chip companies which understood the prime and benevolent association it bought for their brands to the massive audiences of sports fans. John Boulter, a British former 800m runner whom Dassler had hired to work at Adidas, was dispatched to meet Nally, who then joined Dassler in a joint venture to sign up sponsors for Havelange’s new Fifa development programme.
Blatter recalled the background to this early part of his glistening ascent of Fifa in a long interview with me for this book. He agreed to see me in the summer of 2016, after he was banned from Fifa and football, devastatingly for him, and he was appealing his case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. He talked about his early career and recalled his entry to the organisation as the marketing man responsible for delivering the promised development programme. Blatter said that, contrary to the common telling of the story, Dassler did not originally recommend him to Fifa. In fact, he said, he was first called by Thomas Keller, the president of Swiss Timing, in November 1974.
‘He said the new president in Fifa is looking for a man who knows football but who specifically could sell a programme, because they had no money,’ Blatter told me.
Blatter’s take on the story is that Dassler ‘had the file’–the Fifa development programme, which included a youth tournament, to sell to a sponsor–but in these early days of sponsorship, he and Adidas had not yet managed to sign any company up.
‘Havelange tried in Brazil, made contact with different entities, banks and chocolate, insurance, whatever. I don’t know if they were not good salesman,’ Blatter said, with a glint of mischief in his eye, ‘but nobody wanted it.’
The ultimate signing up of Coca-Cola to brand the Fifa development programme has become a well-rehearsed tale of Blatter’s, a set-piece triumph in United Passions, the notoriously self-glorifying film his Fifa had made in 2015, and he rolled it out for me again in our interview. He said that Dassler had organised a meeting in a restaurant at the Parc des Princes, Paris, with Guinness, the treacly Irish beer company, before the 1975 European Cup final. Leeds United, the English champions, have always since complained about that match, the refereeing which denied them a blatant penalty and disallowed a Peter Lorimer goal for offside, Beckenbauer gleefully lifting the cup for the second of three consecutive Bayern Munich victories after a 2–0 win.
Blatter said that at his meeting before the match Guinness’s executives told him the football sponsorship wasn’t for them: they were an Irish and British drink of choice, not international, and an alcoholic drink was not the best fit for such a sporting programme. He says they gestured at his glass and said it was Coca-Cola–‘By the way I was drinking a Cuba Libre, with rum!’ he grinned–and they pointed out that executives of Coca-Cola in the UK were at another table, accompanying a Leeds United party.
From that initial contact with Coca-Cola, Blatter said he had further discussions with a Dutch representative of the company, and with Nally doing the presentation of the project they went to Atlanta in November 1975 to pitch to the Coca-Cola board. One of the lawyers around the table, Blatter says, asked him how many bottles of Coca-Cola Fifa would be selling on the company’s behalf, and Blatter says he replied: ‘You are not going to sell Coca-Cola; you sell an idea. And we invite Coca-Cola to join us with the idea.’
Called Project 1, the proposed development and promotional programme was typed up between bright green booklet covers. It also coincided with a ramping up of Fifa rhetoric about operating as a global good, and the brochure had a motto on the front: ‘Football is a universal language.’
For the 2015 congress in Zurich at which he was seeking his fifth presidential term–the coronation tarnished a little by the mass arrests at the Baur au Lac–Blatter had had the original Project 1 booklet reprinted. It was handed out to delegates from the national FAs to remind them of the president’s very long, forty-year history at Fifa, and his roots in the very beginnings of the development programmes from which so many of them had benefited. I picked up a copy at the excellent, well-resourced library attached to the Fifa museum in Zurich, and it is a fascinating document.
At the top, under the heading ‘The Idea’, it explains its purpose both to sponsors and the FAs themselves:
‘The Fifa Project No. 1, based on an initiative of its president, Dr João Havelange, has as its aim the development of football on a world-wide scale and should, above all, benefit the countries of the third world, generally called developing countries,’ it states as an introduction.
Nally, recalling the landmark deal, said that Coca-Cola gained the association of their name and product with the image and glamour of a pure sport, penetrating deeply into countries around the world. Besides the money itself from the sponsorship, Fifa also gained the expertise and clout of a powerful US corporation. ‘They had bottlers, distribution networks and relationships with governments in these countries, which were very useful for Fifa when setting up the programmes,’ Nally recalled.
Project 1 proposed a series of courses to promote football and strengthen countries’ national FAs, teaching administration, tactics and coaching, sports medicine and refereeing. The courses always included significant time doing physical training with the delegates themselves. Blatter says he presented the proposal to CAF in Addis Ababa in February 1976, and the African officials made it clear they wanted the courses tailored to the sporting culture of their countries, not imposed as a European blueprint.
The money sought was a total of $1.2m over three years of the programme. When Coca-Cola’s board in Atlanta finally agreed and signed up, Havelange’s Fifa could roll out a dedicated development programme to the national football associations which, although it looks rudimentary now, was then on a scale beyond what Rous’ grant-aiding had been able to do. Coca-Cola were buying incomparable brand marketing, and have remained a sponsor of Fifa ever since, as have Adidas, although the prices they have paid to soak their brand into football’s have dramatically increased.
Blatter told me that the project still needed to win over Fifa’s own executive committee, and there was resistance to it from European representatives, particularly from Germany, who wanted to restrict it to one probationary year. It was only the intervention of a long-serving African representative, Rito Alcantara, a pharmacist from Senegal, who served on the executive committee for twenty years from 1968 to 1988, which made the difference, according to Blatter’s account. He said that Alcantara had spoken up, to say he could not understand how such a development programme could be turned down, when the money was there and the sponsor signed up.
Consistent with his analysis of almost every episode over the whole course of his time at Fifa which we discussed, Blatter saw the reason for that initial resistance to the development programme as one of internal power politics and personal ambition. Nobody within the Fifa executive committee appears to have been troubled at this fateful sale of football’s image and qualities to junk drink, which would lead to the largely unquestioned spectacle ever after of junk food cleansing its brands through sport. Blatter said the Europeans were not opposed because they believed it was wrong to take such coaching and support around the world to developing countries, but because they were against Havelange.
‘They wanted Havelange out,’ he said, in a tone which suggested this political motive was obvious. ‘It wasn’t because they didn’t like to play football, it was a question that Havelange had to be stopped. They thought the development programme would help Havelange because he would have more alliances around the world, and he promised that, especially to Africa.’
If that was the fear of the Europeans, they read the impact of the programmes on Fifa’s internal political dynamics absolutely correctly. Such was the appreciation of the African and developing countries’ football associations for this sustained help they were now receiving that they did indeed always support Havelange, who remained unchallenged as president, becoming like an emperor of Fifa over twenty-four years. Blatter, itchily ambitious, very soon the secretary general of the organisation after Havelange brutally ousted Käser, observed the workings of that realpolitik, the electoral basis for the president’s authority, supported by constituencies directly benefiting from the regime, and he understood it, to his bones.
At the time of the next World Cup, in Argentina in 1978, I was thirteen and remember, with all the football-obsessed boys around me, looking forward to it with a desperate longing. I confess that I experienced it as a carnival of football, entranced by the ticker tape snowing down from the vaulting stands of River Plate’s vast stadium, and the flowing skill of Argentina’s star player Mario Kempes, with his long, thick hair and socks louchely rolled down to his ankles. The impression broadcast to me as a kid, then, was exactly as Argentina’s military junta intended it, when after their coup deposing Isabel Martínez de Péron two years earlier, on 24 March 1976, they concentrated on hosting a well-executed tournament as an advertisement for their regime.
Fifa cannot be accused of awarding the World Cup to a ruthless and murderous junta; Argentina was chosen as the host for the tournament ten years before the coup, in 1966, as Rous believed in giving countries plenty of time to prepare. But once the generals did take over and began kidnapping, murdering, torturing and disappearing tens of thousands of Argentinians deemed subversive, they viewed the great sporting event as sundry totalitarian regimes have through history: as an ideal vehicle for propaganda. There were protests and campaigns to boycott the tournament, although it seems there was no serious consideration by Fifa to move it: Rous’ policy of steering a ‘non-political’ line endured, and, anyway, Havelange was a creature of the military dictatorship in his own, neighbouring country.
Documenting the boycott efforts, particularly in France, by members of Amnesty International, Professor Raanan Rein has written:
‘In an attempt to silence both protests and fears [of violence against the regime during the tournament], the military spokespersons declared that Argentina was enjoying a period of social peace and that no violent incidents were anticipated. The junta launched an international campaign to improve its image and to discredit those accusing Argentina of systematic human rights violations.
‘Seeking to reinforce the image of a peaceful Argentina, the regime spent the months before the World Cup redoubling its repressive efforts, and slum residents in the cities selected to host World Cup events were forced to leave their homes in order to demonstrate that poverty “no longer exists”.’
The Estadio Monumental in Buenos Aires, where Argentina won the final in a ticker-tape wonderland and Kempes scored twice in the 3–1 victory over Holland, was just down the road from the Navy School of Mechanics, which was used by the junta as a place of torture. The generals hailed the national ecstasy which acclaimed the victory as a joyous vindication of Argentina and their fascist vision for the country. Rein quotes Hebe de Bonafini, one of the founders of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, who did not rest in publicly protesting the disappearances of their sons and daughters, saying: ‘It was a party for the masses and a tragedy for the families of the desaparecidos [disappeared].’
Commercially, Patrick Nally recalls that Fifa had signed away the rights to the 1978 tournament to the host country, and that he had to negotiate with the junta to restore them to Fifa so that sponsorships and TV deals could be sold. Still working with Dassler, they brought in Canon, Gillette and the airline KLM for the billboards around the stadiums where this World Cup of glories and terrible darkness was held. They moved on to the 1982 World Cup in Spain–the first that my generation would watch for which England actually qualified–expanded by Havelange, true to his promise, to twenty-four countries. There were fourteen places for European countries; two, Algeria and Cameroon, from Africa; Kuwait from the Asian Football Confederation; Charlie Dempsey’s New Zealand qualified from Oceania; El Salvador and Honduras from Concacaf; Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Peru from Conmebol.
The expansion meant that more money had to be raised to help Spain with the stadiums and other necessary preparations, and for Fifa itself; 45m CHF for both, according to Nally. Dassler had set up a company to raise the money, called Rofa, named after two of its other investors: Robert Schwan, the former general manager of Bayern Munich who became Beckenbauer’s personal manager–and Beckenbauer himself.
Nally says that as Dassler needed money at the time, he had agreed to buy out Dassler’s interest in their own joint marketing company, but then the Japanese advertising giant Dentsu offered Dassler huge money, $500m, to break the relationship with Nally and go into partnership with them. Nally said that Dassler told him he could keep the programme they were working on, but after that, his deals with Fifa would be via the new company Dassler formed with Dentsu in 1982: International Sport and Leisure, ISL.
‘From being quite successful one minute,’ Nally said, ‘the next, I was utterly bereft.’
Blatter’s take on that, when I met him, was brief. ‘Nally had problems with Dassler and if Dassler isn’t happy with somebody, he just kicked them out.’
ISL, according to Nally, was still going to be in position as a new company to acquire the rights to future World Cups from Fifa, because Dassler had ‘manipulated control with his special relationships’, including working on the ousting of Käser. ISL were finally exposed years later, after their monstrous financial collapse, for having kicked back bribes to Havelange and the South America football chiefs Ricardo Teixeira and Nicolás Leoz, among others, when paying Fifa for the marketing rights to the 2002 and 2006 World Cups. But that wrongdoing was not perpetrated by Dassler himself. He died from cancer in 1987, aged only fifty-one. His is a legacy still unravelling from the insides of Fifa, having become more than a boot and sportswear entrepreneur of the Adidas three stripes, which seduced mine and other generations as the acme of sporting sophistication. Dassler took the sale of gear, and its endorsement by elite sports stars, to their unrestrained conclusions, involving himself, his influence and his protégés far into the politics, deep into the workings, of the modern sports governing bodies themselves.
At the World Cup in Mexico in 1986, Michel Platini crafted his place permanently in the legions of enduringly great players, captaining France to victory on penalties over Brazil in a monumental quarter-final. Platini, born in a small mining town, Joeuf, in the provincial east of France to a footballer father, had played his way up from the local club, to Nancy, St Étienne, then to bestriding European football as the number 10, worshipped by fans as le roi, at Juventus of Turin. At Juventus Platini had lifted the European Cup at Heysel the previous year, but in the horrific context of the thirty-nine deaths of Juve supporters in a crush caused by a collapsed wall following a charge by Liverpool hooligans. In 1982 he captained his French team’s first announcement of its modern brilliance, to the semi-final of the World Cup, where an epic 3–3 draw and ultimate defeat to Germany on penalties was scarred by the terrible challenge of the Germany goalkeeper Harald Schumacher, who barged Patrick Battiston unconscious, broke his jaw and knocked out two of his teeth. In between, Platini lifted the 1984 European Championship for France, a classic victory for flowing, passing football and his particular art of deftly quick attacking midfield vision. After retiring from his stellar playing career, Platini would first become the national coach of the French team, then co-president of the national organising committee for the 1998 World Cup in his home country, which brought him into Blatter’s intimate company.
At the 1990 World Cup in Italy, Cameroon, memorably led up front by Roger Milla, an experienced striker in Europe, delivered some fruits of Fifa’s programmes and African football development, reaching the quarter-final where they gave England a genuine challenge before losing 3–2. My generation, which had seen England fail to qualify for two tournaments, watched disbelievingly as the team, managed by Bobby Robson and featuring Paul Gascoigne, Gary Lineker and Chris Waddle, actually improved as the tournament progressed and ought really to have beaten Germany in the semi-final. The tournament, Italia 90, rehabilitated football’s broader appeal from the shame of hooliganism, the ban of English clubs from European competition after Heysel, and the horror of Hillsborough, where ninety-six Liverpool supporters were unlawfully killed by police mismanagement of a well-behaved crowed at the 1989 FA Cup semi-final against Nottingham Forest. The BBC’s coverage of the World Cup just one year later, presenting the tournament as an involving operatic drama, with ‘Nessun Dorma’, sung by Luciano Pavarotti, as the theme tune, drew a nation back to football’s essential beauty, and readied public sentiment for the excitement, marketing and payTV consumption of the Premier League era.
Germany won the World Cup again, beating Diego Maradona’s Argentina team 1–0 in a dire match ruined by the Argentinians’ widely criticised fouling and diving, which included the first ever sending off in a World Cup final, of Pedro Monzón for a foul on Jürgen Klinsmann. Germany’s coach was Beckenbauer, looking older, upright and dignified in his jacket and tie, wearing glasses, his curly hair receded further back on his head, as he ran with his clenched fists raised to celebrate another ultimate triumph. He has the distinction of being the only person ever to captain as a player, then manage, his country to victory in a World Cup final, and the second man, after Brazil’s Mário Zagallo, to win the tournament as both a player and a manager. The place of der Kaiser in the affections of the German public was raised to iconic status; he also always seemed thoughtful, decent and perceptive, and was liked as well as worshipped.
Four years later, Fifa successfully organised the first World Cup in the USA, part of long-term efforts to crack soccer in a potentially huge territory and market, where it had always struggled for recognition beneath the major US sports of football, baseball and basketball. That 1994 tournament marked its further expansion, as promised by Havelange–and first proposed by Rous–from twenty-four to thirty-two teams, with three African teams, Cameroon, Morocco and Nigeria, and two from the Asian Football Confederation, Saudi Arabia and South Korea. As part of the hosting arrangements, the US football authorities had to commit to forming a competitive domestic league, which they founded from scratch with the clubs as a centralised system of franchises which owners could buy: Major League Soccer. That initiative went along with more coaching and grass-roots programmes to have young people playing the game, which soccer entrepreneurs like Clive Toye, a former English journalist who ran the New York Cosmos in the 1970s, had always argued was the key. Despite the game’s lesser profile and popularity in the US, a World Cup of generally tactical caution was watched by huge crowds in the great stadiums of the states, with 94,000 watching the final between Brazil and Italy at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. The image of Roberto Baggio, Italy’s star of the tournament, on his knees in despair having missed the crucial penalty in the shootout which ceded the trophy to Brazil, was the defining one of the tournament.
Havelange had presided at Fifa over this double expansion of the World Cup, a commercial and sponsorship packaging up of the tournament and greater broadcasting income, and years of development programmes which secured allegiance from the member FAs. There had been agitation from the European FAs and Uefa, complaining at too little transparency at Fifa about how the money was handled, and that information was kept tight among a trusted inner circle. The full scale of what had been happening through the Havelange years, that behind the hype, marketing and lionising of the president was an entrenched culture of corruption, would not be exposed for years yet. By the late 1990s, Havelange was ageing. Sepp Blatter had been at Fifa since 1975, working diligently for his regime, and as the secretary general since 1978. There was to be a sudden multiplication of income for Fifa, but this was not a result of João Havelange’s business brilliance, rather a consequence of the TV rights hyper-inflation which Fifa reaped principally after the France World Cup in 1998.
The organisation of Fifa, its work and its political shape and intricacies had become Blatter’s life, and he began to see that when Havelange finally stepped down he could become the president himself, after a lifetime of servicing them. He bolted too early, appearing at a Uefa executive committee meeting in 1996 seeking backing for a challenge to Havelange. Lars-Christer Olsson, the Swedish Uefa secretary general, who like many of the Scandinavian administrators is contemptuous of Blatter, seeing him as a hustler for self-advantage, nevertheless acknowledges him as an expert player of the politics. Olsson said the Uefa meeting, at which Blatter seemed to be ‘challenging his own president, trying to throw him overboard’, was too soon and irregular, and the executive committee dismissed him.
But Havelange did indicate his intention after that to retire two years later, in 1998. Lennart Johansson, the Swedish president of Uefa, determined to stand for the Fifa presidency, and introduce what he propounded were necessary European standards of governance and transparency, while still funding development programmes, particularly in Africa. At Uefa, Johansson had made much greater collaborative moves towards the other confederations and initiated the Meridian Project, an agreement with CAF which included providing development support from the rich European confederation to the African FAs struggling for resources. With those moves, Johansson and his European supporters believed they had a foundation for marshalling enough support in Africa and worldwide to succeed Havelange and restore a European model of administration.
Blatter took his time, to the consternation of his European opponents, and waited almost to the deadline, before finally declaring himself a candidate. He told me that, typically, he was motivated in part by preservation of his own role within Fifa, saying he might have been willing to stay on under Johansson as the secretary general, if that had been guaranteed.
‘This would have been a possibility,’ he said, ‘but in Europe they approached me and they said: “We don’t want only to get rid of the patriarch, we also want to get rid of you, the prophet.”’
The Europeans supporting Johansson’s Scandinavian vision for running Fifa were looking for a change of culture and cleaning of the stables after Havelange, and Blatter was seen as his long-term, eager lieutenant, the continuity candidate.
‘I was approached by a member of Fifa from Italy, saying: “We don’t want you.” I said: “If you don’t want me to go on with my job as secretary general, then maybe I will go as president.” He was laughing. I thought: OK. At the end, they tried to convince me not to go, but it was too late. This was the big risk I took in my life.’
When he finally declared his candidacy, on 30 March 1998, the secretary general showed he had learned the electoral lessons from Havelange, who had had the aura of Pelé bestowed on his campaign in 1974. Doing the same for Blatter, and also splitting the European football associations’ vote, was another genuine star, a player, coach and icon of the world game, globally recognised and idolised: Michel Platini, suddenly at Blatter’s side, supporting his campaign for the ultimate office.