Two senior football administrative figures, one a former Fifa executive committee member, have told me the same illuminating anecdote about the vote to send the 2018 World Cup to Russia, and the 2022 World Cup, still almost unbelievably, to the tiny Gulf state of Qatar. Neither of these men wanted to be named, because they were worried about any risk of jeopardising their current positions. Both, quite separately, told me that during the long and now most investigated and pored-over World Cup bidding process ever, they were told by Jérôme Valcke, Blatter’s secretary general: ‘If it is Russia and Qatar, we are finished.’
But then, on 2 December 2010, it was–and they are.
The executive committee, rather than all the national associations, had in 1964 been invested with the power to vote for the host of a World Cup, because it was thought then that this would ensure a more responsible, objective decision. Sir Stanley Rous had recommended the change because he said, as quoted in Alan Tomlinson’s Fifa: The Men, the Myths and the Money, that having the decision made by the individual FAs was putting a ‘strain on friendships’ and the choice of hosts was being made ‘on not wholly relevant issues’. After the executive committee’s credibility-shredding vote to send the 2018 and 2022 tournaments to Russia and Qatar, amid allegations that, at the very least, some executive committee members had sought money and favours for themselves or their confederations, the hosting decision has now been given back to the national associations. The need for bidding countries to pitch to all of Fifa’s now 211 countries is felt to be some kind of safeguard, diluting the favours which can be offered compared to the need to win the votes of just twenty-four people–but Rous’ experience, even back in more amateurish days, had clearly led him to the opposite conclusion.
Before the vote, Sepp Blatter was in a supremely rarefied position, for which he had worked and schemed all hours, all his professional life. After beating off the tough challenge from Johansson in 1998, then the acrimonious confrontation with Zen-Ruffinen and almost half his executive committee in 2002, five years later none of his opponents could even muster a candidate to challenge him. He was seventy-one then, but still obsessively attached to the workload, pressure, status and acclaim which came with being the head of world football and the organisation he had inhabited for thirty-two years. He was evolving his rhetoric in public, the increasingly messianic claims for football’s higher purpose. When he was confirmed in 2007 as the unchallenged president, he said football would ‘acquire a more pronounced and extensive social role’ in his third term. In his speech to the assembled national associations at the congress, he thanked ‘the help and support of members of the global football family’.
There were always stories that Blatter was fixated on capping his life journey from the backwoods of the Valais to the heights of Fifa with a Nobel peace prize. I had thought this was mischievous gossip, but then Per Omdal, the former Norway FA chairman, told me that he did indeed receive suggestions from allies of Blatter that he recommend him for a prize to the Nobel committee, which is based in Norway.
‘It was out of the question; we didn’t progress it at all,’ said Omdal, one of Blatter’s vehement opponents on the executive committee and criminal complainants in 2002.
The same had happened with Havelange, Omdal said; Fifa’s congress in the late 1980s actually decided that Fifa should formally promote the president for a Nobel peace prize. That, Omdal said, was ‘completely out of order’.
Internally, after the career-ending threat posed by Zen-Ruffinen, having turned whistleblower from so privy and trusted a position, Blatter conducted a purge. Zen-Ruffinen has always maintained that he had planned to leave if Blatter was re-elected, and would stay on only to steer the operation of the 2002 World Cup in Japan and Korea. He has said he did that, then resigned, and received a settlement from Fifa. Blatter insists that Zen-Ruffinen was fired. Whichever way it was, Zen-Ruffinen left. People who had worked at Fifa and known Blatter for almost thirty years, since he joined as a smart marketeer on the way up, complained that he had turned ruthless in shoring up his position.
Valcke, who joined Fifa from the French broadcaster Canal+ as marketing director in September 2003, was himself fired in December 2006, after Fifa lost a legal action brought by MasterCard, the credit card giant which had been replaced as a World Cup sponsor by their rival Visa. Valcke was found by a judge in the US to have lied to both MasterCard and Visa when they were bidding to be a ‘partner’ sponsor for the 2010 and 2014 World Cups for a price of $180 million. Valcke himself subsequently explained in an interview in the Independent: ‘I made the biggest mistake of my life by saying [in court] that in business we don’t always say the truth, and you could describe that as a commercial lie.’
But he insisted his intentions were honest, that he had not been seeking to engage in a secret bidding war between the two corporations by talking to Visa despite MasterCard having first refusal; Valcke said he only wanted to ensure one of the companies would sign up. Then, in May 2007, the original damning judgement was set aside on appeal, and Fifa and MasterCard were reported to have settled, costing Fifa $90m. Very soon after that, Valcke was back at Fifa and promoted to secretary general, right-hand man to Blatter. In that interview in the Independent, he said to the journalist David Owen about his rehiring by Blatter: ‘Our world is a very small world. We worked closely together for three years. Whatever Blatter asked me and what I committed to deliver when I joined Fifa, I did. So we have a strong relationship, Blatter and myself.’
During his initial three-year stint at Fifa, Valcke had streamlined the main sponsorships down to six: Adidas and Coca-Cola, as ever; Emirates, Hyundai, Sony and Visa, for 2007–14. Those corporations paid more than $1bn to have their names broadcast globally, wrapped around the World Cup. In the same interview, when asked about the widespread allegations that bribes or commissions were endemic in the awarding of sports rights, Valcke replied:
‘I agree with you. The old world was the system of commission. Twenty years ago… you were giving commissions to people in order to get market or to get product or whatever. Today the legal system has changed. I don’t know if it’s an improvement or not, I just say it has changed. You can’t do it any more.’
He said, however, that he had never been offered a kickback for signing up a deal with a partner on Fifa’s behalf, or to offer a beneficial deal on behalf of his Fifa masters. ‘I have never been asked to use commercial rights to please someone from the executive committee. I have never been asked to sell [anything] for less than market value to one of the countries represented by an executive committee member. [I have] never been asked by Blatter or a Fifa member to make [their] political life easier by using our commercial assets.’
The World Cup was held in Germany in 2006 following a bid led by Franz Beckenbauer which is, at the time of writing, now the subject of criminal investigations in Germany and Switzerland. The tournament itself was at the time hailed as a wonderful success and experience. If the 1954 ‘miracle of Bern’ had breathed greater confidence–helped by Adidas boots and screw-in studs–into the new country still wrestling with the aftershock of war and Nazism, and 1974 had strengthened West Germany’s confidence in its modern capabilities, 2006 showed the world a fun side to the reunified Germany. The innovation of the open-air fan zones, where people could have a drink outside and watch the matches on giant screens, was an unexpectedly huge attraction; the fan zone in Berlin, originally expected to cater for 25,000, had eventually to be expanded to host a phenomenal 900,000, once fervour for the football caught on.
The young German squad, managed by US expatriate and former national team centre-forward Jürgen Klinsmann, presented an attractive vision of modern Germany, playing smart, entertaining, passing football. These were the first fruits of the German game’s ‘reboot’, with its emphasis on sophisticated youth development, following dismal failure at the European Championships of 2000 when Germany finished bottom of their group. Klinsmann’s team reached the semi-final, where they lost 2–0 to the eventual champions, Italy. But above all, the World Cup in Germany was a celebration, joyful, imbued with a sense of humour, surprising some who experienced it. A documentary about the enchanted month of football, shown in cinemas around Germany was entitled Deutschland. Ein Sommermärchen (‘Germany: A Summer’s Tale’). This was a playful reversal of the poet Heinrich Heine’s famous work of 1844, in which he chronicled a visit to the country at a grim, repressive point in its history, entitled Germany. A Winter’s Tale.
Fifa, basking in the Sommermärchen, boomed again, recovered from the collapse of ISL, making a record $3.3bn over the four-year financial cycle up to and including the 2006 World Cup. The TV rights for the World Cup alone accounted for half that, $1.6bn; the sponsorships, with sixteen official ‘partners’, reaped $700m. Almost a quarter, 23 per cent of this income, was spent in development, including $100m on the GOAL programme and $300m on the financial assistance programme, cash paid directly to the national FAs.
In his foreword to Fifa’s 2006 financial statements, headed ‘Dear members of the football family’, Blatter pointed out ‘the extremely positive way’ Fifa had managed to recover from ‘the turbulent events’ of ISL’s collapse, a ‘rebirth’ achieved partly by having taken out a loan advance on the expected massive marketing income. Despite the difficulties, he said Fifa had managed to pay all its commitments to the member associations–and move into its new, granite, bunker-like 240m CHF headquarters near the zoo, ‘financed entirely from Fifa’s own coffers’.
Looking ahead to further fortunes for the 2010 and 2014 tournaments, Blatter said: ‘Football “made by Fifa” is a prized product that makes it possible to provide a house for everyone–as embodied by the Home of Fifa.’
Blatter had not wanted that World Cup to go to Germany; to be fair to him, as the president, he does seem to have wanted tournaments to be where strategically they would expand football territorially, but he had to try and manoeuvre the characters on the executive committee his way. Blatter supported the bid of South Africa to host the tournament for that year, wanting the landmark of a first World Cup in Africa, rather than in Germany again. He was deprived of being able to deliver a casting vote in the event of a 12–12 draw by the abstention of Oceania’s Charlie Dempsey, still the subject of the allegation that Dempsey was paid $250,000 by ISL before the vote in 2000, which Dempsey always denied.
For the 2010 World Cup, Blatter got his wish: the first World Cup in Africa, hosted by the country liberated from apartheid, a landmark for Fifa, too, after having expelled South Africa in 1976 following Rous’ tortuous tolerance. An ageing and ailing Nelson Mandela, father of the post-apartheid nation and one of the world’s most respected and beloved heroes, had been pressed into lobbying work in the service of winning over the Fifa executive committee for the bid in 2004–particularly Jack Warner. When a majority on the committee did vote for South Africa over Morocco, Mandela, then eighty-five, said he felt ‘like a young man of fifteen’.
When the tournament came round six years later, he was weaker and older, but still managed to be a totem of the historic celebrations. After dire warnings about violence and high crime levels in South Africa, the tournament, played in a winter chill and to the wailing of the vuvuzela, was proclaimed a triumph, felt by the government to have broadcast to the world a more positive image of the country, and the continent of Africa itself. Of now six African countries with qualification places, Ghana went furthest, to the quarter-final, losing to the Uruguay of Edinson Cavani, Diego Forlán and Luis Suárez, who was sent off for a notorious handball which prevented a certain Ghana goal in the last minute of extra-time. Asamoah Gyan failed to score that penalty, then Ghana went out in the penalty shoot-out. Germany, now coached by Joachim Löw, reached the semi-final again, losing to the mesmeric passing of Spain, who won the World Cup for the first time in their history with a 1–0 victory over Holland. Mandela–Madiba–made it in person to the closing ceremony, days from his ninety-second birthday, and managed to wave to the crowd, although his grandson complained that Fifa had put Mandela under ‘extreme pressure’ to be there.
More than the World Cups played in the US or Europe, where stadiums were already built, severe doubts have since been expressed about whether the cost was worth it to South Africa, with its range of entrenched social problems and poverty. An official report released two and a half years later, in November 2012, stated that the government had spent $1.1bn on building and upgrading stadiums, some of which did not have a viable future after the few games played in the one month of 2010 were over. A further $1.7bn was spent on transport and ports of entry. But the government which had itself pressed Fifa so determinedly for the tournament, involving the president, Thabo Mbeki, having personal meetings with Blatter, insisted there was an ‘intangible’ legacy of pride and unity in the hosting of Africa’s landmark great global sporting event.
Fifa made a booming $3.9bn in its 2007–10 cycle, including $2.4bn from the TV rights to the World Cup in South Africa, and cleared $1bn for the marketing rights from Valcke’s streamlined six blue-chip partners. Of this, $794m, 22 per cent of the total income in Zurich, went to the member FAs in development cash. Blatter, in his presidential foreword to these financial statements, highlighted $550,000 given to every FA around the world in an ‘extraordinary’ payment from the Financial Assistance Programme, and $5m to each confederation. He had no worries about his own position, as he looked forward to standing again, contrary to hints he may have given, particularly to Mohamed bin Hammam, who believed he had a commitment from Blatter to succeed him in 2011. Beaming about the World Cup in South Africa which underlined, he said, ‘the immense social and cultural power of our game’, the development cash, and the long-term contracts with ‘multinational companies [which] still seek to identify with football’, Blatter added: ‘All of this fills me with great optimism and confidence for the period that lies ahead.’
Six months after Madiba and his wife Graça Machel waved to the world from the Soccer City stadium at the emotional closing ceremony in Johannesburg, Blatter was opening a can of worms for Fifa. It was contained in an envelope in Zurich, which he withdrew, seeming to hold it at a distance from himself, before declaring with a rictus grin: ‘And the host of the 2022 World Cup will be… Qatar.’
The World Cup had grown so enormous as a global event, with the prestige and feelgood glow it bestowed on its hosts–even if it was very expensive and the actual legacy was often ‘intangible’–that governments were more centrally involved in the bidding than ever. Bill Clinton was at the vote in Zurich, accompanying the USA bid to host the 2022 World Cup, and was said to have been furious when it lost to Qatar, in the final round, fourteen votes to eight. David Cameron, then British prime minister, went to lend his peculiar, Old Etonian breed of glad-handing to England’s bid to host the 2018 tournament, with Prince William and David Beckham, cringingly dubbed the ‘three lions’. Their efforts did not nudge England’s vote above one; Blatter told me:
‘There was no sympathy for England. There was no chance for England. I think because they have the best football, they are dominating club football, taking all the best players; there was no sympathy, not in Africa, nowhere.’
Throughout the process, Fifa’s executive committee members had been flattered, visited, entertained, indulged, beseeched for their vote. The questions asked in the aftermath, in a more sustained way than ever before, given European and US bewilderment at the Qatar decision, was whether any of them were paid.
England had bid to host the 2006 tournament, losing in the second round with only two votes, but that experience of unsuccessfully engaging with Fifa’s executive committee did not deter the FA, and the government, from seeking the reflected sheen of glory again. The bid, to mount a marketing campaign and travel around the world seeking the votes of Jack Warner, Nicolás Leoz, Ricardo Teixeira, Thailand’s FA president Worawi Makudi, and all their colleagues, would cost £21m. Of that, £3m was public money, paid over by the twelve local authorities in which the proposed host stadiums would be based. Just as the global financial crisis hit, and the British government began to severely cut its funding to them, the local councils, whose job was to maintain public services for the impoverished populations of Manchester, Liverpool, Sunderland, Newcastle and elsewhere, were each persuaded to put in £250,000.
Headed by the former Manchester United commercial director Andy Anson, an engaging and optimistic character, the theme of England’s bid was to showcase the country’s deep football heritage, and the ready, refurbished stadiums and flourishing clubs of the Premier League era. The England bid rejected warnings that this was a waste of effort and a great deal of money, because the world thought English football had enough to be going on with, and Fifa’s culture had long been suspected of corruption, or at least of favours. Instead, the FA proceeded as if their bid could win the executive committee over, by showcasing the evident qualities of a World Cup in England. They quickly found they were being asked, particularly by Warner, for services, benefits, which had nothing to do with the merits of a World Cup. One member of the England bid team confirmed to me, looking back, that Warner was relentlessly showering them with demands and requests, but that it was part of the strategy to seek his vote and those of the other Concacaf executive committee members.
High-profile public benefits for Warner, covered in the media at the time, included in the summer of 2009 the FA’s England bid helping to host a training camp for Warner’s Trinidad and Tobago U20 team. The England bid actually sponsored a gala dinner at the annual congress of the Caribbean Football Union, in February 2010 at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Trinidad, suggested by Warner using his leverage, which cost $55,000 (£45,000). In September 2010, David Beckham flew to Trinidad as an ambassador for England’s 2018 bid, to launch a six-day football festival run by his academy. The Trinidad journalist Lasana Liburd, who has critically investigated and covered questions over Warner’s activities for years, asked the England bid team at the press conference how much the festival was costing, but said he was given no answer.
These efforts for Warner were not greatly questioned at the time, but Warner himself shamelessly played the indignant victim when the British press did question gifts, of Mulberry handbags worth £230 each, presented by the bid to the wives of executive committee members, including Warner. The bags were comfortably within the limits Fifa allowed for gifts, whose giving and receiving had become embedded into the culture over the years. Members of the bid team say they had to think carefully about gifts, that they had to give them, and wanted items which would be interpreted neither as too meagre nor too lavish, so came up with the Mulberry bags, for a dinner in London. But after criticism was made of them, Warner, whose wife had accepted hers, sent it back, with a furious letter to the FA chairman, Lord David Triesman. It was a typically flowery and exaggerated protest, with Warner proclaiming his dignity and honour:
‘Had [my wife] or I known then that the acceptance of what we all felt was a kind gesture would have resulted in the tainting of her character and mine together with the untold embarrassment to which we are still being subjected, none of us would have attended the dinner, nor would she have accepted what we thought was a gift in honour of her birthday,’ Warner wrote. ‘I have faced and continue to face all kinds of indignities from all manner of persons, but when these insults touch my wife, it represents an all time low.’
Then he attacked Triesman, accusing him of failing to defend the Warners adequately: ‘Equally disappointing is the deafening silence from you and the FA and which seems to support these allegations. No one has sought to correct this betrayal in a way that would unequivocally remove any doubt or question not only in the global village at large but among my few peers where honour is valued and character is cherished.’
Warner then brazenly said: ‘there is nothing that your FA can offer me to get my vote’, saying that if England did get it, it would be ‘because Concacaf and I sincerely believe that England is deserving of the honour’.
After this characteristic outburst at his integrity being impugned, in private Warner continued to relentlessly ask for favours. The England bid always said that they dealt with the culture of gifts and favours by clearing any proposed activities with Valcke in Zurich, to ensure they complied with the rules.
In the initial phase of the bid, England had employed as a consultant Peter Hargitay, a press and public affairs operator who had worked for Blatter within Fifa. Hargitay knew Warner well, and was also close to Mohamed bin Hammam. Triesman, when he was appointed FA chairman, was not keen on retaining Hargitay, and after the contracted six months’ initial work, which had an option on both sides to continue, Hargitay was asked to reapply, which he says he refused to do. Shortly afterwards, he was hired to work as a consultant, also to use his contacts and knowledge of Fifa, and do media relations, for Australia’s bid to host the 2022 tournament. Led by Frank Lowy, the Czech-born billionaire owner of the Westfield retail empire and chairman of the Australia FA (FFA), the bid would cost $43m of Australian government money, but ultimately gain only one vote. That was widely assumed to have been cast by Franz Beckenbauer, who now occupied a seat on Fifa’s executive committee.
Triesman himself was forced to resign in May 2010 as the chairman of the bid, and of the FA itself, after he was taped in a restaurant by a friend, Melissa Jacobs, sounding off about Fifa. His gossip, published by the Mail on Sunday, included that Spain and Russia were plotting to bribe referees, which outraged both countries’ bids and led to the FA having to issue hasty apologies.
Triesman said he was only commenting on ‘speculation circulating about conspiracies around the world’, and he complained: ‘Entrapment, especially by a friend, is an unpleasant experience both for my family and me but it leaves me with no alternative but to resign.’
Geoff Thompson, the FA’s former chairman, who had risen up the amateur FA ranks of administration and was actually on the Fifa executive committee, took over as the chairman of the bid. Thompson had been secretary of the Sheffield FA, for whom he rewrote the statutes–the rulebook–and he had done the same for Durham and Birmingham, before returning to Sheffield with the proviso that they make him the county’s representative to the FA council. Thompson was a faithful server on Uefa and Fifa committees, quietly spoken, never quoted in the press in on-the-record interviews, largely unknown by English football supporters throughout his chairmanship. He went about the role as if serving Fifa in another age, perhaps that of Rous or Drewery, doing a dogged job of the necessary paperwork in his allocated committees, while never truly building the English FA an influence or removing the perception that he was a decent enough man out of his depth among the cast of characters at Fifa’s heart.
For all the investigations and inquiries into the events and circumstances leading to a majority of the executive committee voting for Russia and Qatar, and the limited evidence of wrongdoing which they have uncovered, it is striking to recall how little emerged before the vote itself. The most powerful intervention was made by the Sunday Times, another undercover sting, in which reporters posed as lobbyists for the USA’s bid to host the 2022 tournament. Among the large number of football officials and aspirant middlemen they recorded, they had secretly filmed two members of the executive committee, Amos Adamu of Nigeria, and Reynald Temarii, the president of the Oceania Football Confederation, asking for development money.
Published on 17 October 2010, just six weeks before the vote, Adamu had been recorded asking for $800,000 to build four artificial pitches in Nigeria. He had asked for the money to be paid to him directly, rather than to the Nigerian football federation, and suggested, according to the newspaper, a relative’s European trading company as a conduit. Adamu had, however, previously emailed the reporters reminding them that it was ‘against Fifa code of ethics to solicit, directly or indirectly’ anything that would influence the vote. Yet the paper did record him pledging to vote for the USA bid for the 2018 tournament, for which the country was at that point still bidding, and the second round of the 2022 vote.
Temarii had told the reporters he was looking for £1.5m to build an academy at Oceania’s Auckland headquarters, and that when World Cup bid officials came to talk to him about casting his precious executive committee vote, he would usually ask them: ‘OK, what will be the impact of your bid in my region?’ He said: ‘This is the basic approach when I talk with someone who wishes to get my vote.’
In the recorded meeting, and subsequently, Oceania clarified with the reporters, whom they believed were lobbyists for the USA bid, that any cash offers for development were not directly linked to how Temarii would vote. The Sunday Times wrote:
‘His officials had become suspicious by the end of the meeting. Temarii said he would vote for the USA second [sic] because of the television revenues and in the latter part of the meeting said the financial assistance could not be linked to his vote.’
Following an investigation into this sting, a month later, Fifa’s ethics committee banned Adamu from football for three years for breaches of the official code of conduct, including the rules against bribery. Temarii was suspended for a year, not found to have been soliciting bribes, but for breaching rules on loyalty and confidentiality as a Fifa official. Four other senior Fifa officials were caught in the sting, saying that bribes were being offered to executive committee members for their votes, and they were all banned, too. The ethics committee chairman, the former Swiss international striker Claudio Sulser, criticised the Sunday Times coverage, however, as ‘sensationalist’, telling a press conference in Zurich:
‘What I cannot tolerate is the fact that they changed the sentences, they changed the way they presented the truth. If footage is taken out of context that’s twisting the facts. They showed footage that lasted four minutes; we have looked at audio and video footage of several hours.’
The paper stood by its coverage. Adamu and Temarii said they were innocent of any wrongdoing, and would appeal. Adamu said that he was: ‘Profoundly disappointed with the ethics committee’s findings and had honestly believed I would be exonerated of any charges by now.’
Temarii, from Tahiti, was himself a former professional footballer, who had played in France for FC Nantes in the 1980s and captained the national team. After retirement, he had worked for the government of French Polynesia as the minister for youth and sport, before becoming president of the OFC. He appears to have been dedicated all his career to developing football, and sport, in these distant and struggling islands of his birth. Now his career and life were suddenly blighted. According to one senior member of England’s 2018 bid, Andy Anson sympathised with Temarii and gave him a good character reference to the ethics committee proceedings. Anson was clear that in all his dealings with Temarii–the English FA had a signed agreement in 2006 to do development work with Oceania, and the England bid had been discussing renewing it on improved terms–Temarii had never asked for anything personally, and was motivated only by securing better facilities for football in his region.
A week after the first exposé, the Sunday Times revealed that it had covertly filmed Michel Zen-Ruffinen, too, who was giving his insights into the executive committee eight years after losing his battle with Blatter. Zen-Ruffinen was recorded saying that some members of the committee would want money for their votes, one was ‘the guy you can have with the ladies and not with money’, and that another, not named by the paper at the time but understood now to be Jack Warner, was ‘the biggest gangster you will find on earth’.
Zen-Ruffinen, who was back practising as a lawyer in Basel, offered to work for the bogus lobbyists for £210,000, making introductions. When splashed by the Sunday Times, Zen-Ruffinen was revealed to have threatened the paper with an injunction to prevent the publication. He said he had been making ‘exaggerated’ comments to ‘awaken’ the lobbyists’ interest, that he was only offering to make introductions for them, and was ‘totally against’ bribery. He was said to have been outraged that such stings, in which reporters masqueraded in different identities and published covert recordings of the meetings they were able to attract, were permitted by law in England.
So, Fifa dealt with this crisis by banning Adamu and suspending Temarii, one-twelfth of its highest decision-making body, the executive committee, and to simply press on with the vote on the hosts for the World Cups of 2018 and 2022. Jérôme Valcke said that the prompt action by the ethics committee had ‘showed how important it is for us to keep things under control’.
Yet the wider culture of Fifa uncovered by this affair was not addressed. After the vote, when further revelations were made about how bids, including England’s, had been conducted, it was clear that the process was used by some on the executive committee as an opportunity to profit from their voting power. The Adamu and Temarii stings have passed into memory as the two men soliciting money for themselves personally, which was not proved. In fact, both were talking in terms of cash for development. Often overlooked in the perception of Fifa, and these kinds of requests, as riddled with corruption, are the huge disparities in football, still, between the rich world and developing countries. For all the good work done in development with the $2bn flowing in projects after the GOAL programme was introduced in 1999, there were also individual agreements for development, like the ones England had with other confederations, including Temarii’s Oceania. Some delegates from African FAs, Oceania and elsewhere have come habitually, and to see it as their duty, to seek development opportunities from the hugely wealthy football regions which can afford to do it.
But deciding which country should best host the next World Cup should be a strategic decision made by Fifa itself, for sound, considered reasons, discussed collectively. Rous recommended back in 1964 that the executive committee take the decision, rather than the congress, precisely because he perceived that the national FAs in the congress were deciding on what he termed, diplomatically, ‘not wholly relevant issues’. Yet the teams bidding to host tournaments forty-six years later, with the World Cup burgeoned into a global, multi-billion-dollar prestige reflector for countries aggressively eager to have it, were finding some executive committee members had their hands out. This was not necessarily for crude personal bribes, as the Temarii example showed, but however unfortunate and well-intentioned he protested he was, he clearly saw the World Cup vote as a major opportunity to seek development money.
Stepping back from the detail, which came later, in the fallout, you could argue that the 2018 and 2022 World Cups went ultimately to the two countries which wanted them most. Neither is a true democracy, and both were prepared to spend essentially unlimited fortunes on winning the bid, then on building the necessary infrastructure. Qatar’s official bid, led by Hassan Al Thawadi, a young lawyer educated in the US and England–first at college in Scunthorpe, of all places, then in Sheffield–had a budget of £100m. Backed fully by the Emir, they based their marketing pitch for the virtues of a World Cup in Qatar on picturing it as a sumptuously resourced catalyst for joy, unity and peace in the Middle East, a corrective to the wars, hostilities and terrorism dominating the world’s perception of the region. They had the money to build however many new stadiums and all the linked infrastructure necessary, as part of the Qatar 2030 strategic plan, launched in 2008, to develop the country, broaden its cultural profile and diversify the economy from reliance on oil and gas. To weave the idea of a World Cup in a tiny, mostly undeveloped state in the Gulf into a vision of football, they enlisted some football legends, well paid as ever, to be ambassadors, including Zinedine Zidane, Ronald de Boer and Pep Guardiola, who had had a final lucrative stop in Qatar at the end of his playing career. Al Thawadi’s official bid team had travelled the world, including to Angola for the 2010 CAF congress, at which they paid for exclusive access to the African FAs and three executive committee members by generously sponsoring the event. Mohamed bin Hammam was one of the twenty-two remaining executive committee members voting, and his role, not officially part of the bid, was unclear. Major rumours emerged of an alleged pact between the Qatari bid and its Asian supporters, and the Spain bid to host the 2018 tournament, to vote for each other, but Fifa held an internal inquiry which stated it had not established the evidence for such collusion, which would have been in breach of the rules.
Of Russia, even now, little detail is known, except that President Vladimir Putin wanted the 2018 tournament, and that the oligarch Roman Abramovich, Chelsea’s owner, was actively involved. Abramovich was one of the handful of men who became overnight billionaires in notorious sweetheart auctions of state industries in the 1990s after the end of communist ownership, in return for support given to the then president, Boris Yeltsin. Vitaly Mutko, the Russian sports minister throughout the time his department was implicated by the World Anti-Doping Agency in an alleged Russian state doping programme of athletes, uncovered just before the 2016 Olympics, which he denied, was leading the bid, and was a member of the Fifa executive committee itself. The 2014 winter Olympics in Sochi, which Putin had also wanted as a proclamation of Russia’s global presence and power, were hosted on a vast, purpose-built site, and the total cost, in a country of wincing inequalities, with a majority of the population still sunk in poverty, was a truly astonishing $51bn.
The men who would make the decision, to whom such geo-political power and vast money had to bend at the knee, still with their reputations and positions intact at that crucial point, included Chuck Blazer, Jack Warner, Ricardo Teixeira, Nicolás Leoz and Julio Grondona, all of whom would be accused within five years of massive alleged fraud and corruption by the US authorities. Mohamed bin Hammam, who within two years would be banned by Fifa for life for multiple violations of its ethics code, was assumed to have been a key influence at the time and serenely accepted the congratulations afterwards. Chung Mong-joon, later banned for six years by Fifa for allegedly linking a proposed lavish development fund to the South Korea bid to host the 2022 World Cup, which he denies, was a voter. As was Worawi Makudi, convicted in 2015 of forgery in his re-election campaign for the presidency of the Thailand FA. Adamu and Temarii were absent already, but their conduct and attitude towards the bidding process was not treated by Fifa as a signal that perhaps there was a problem at its core.
Blatter and Platini, of course, were voters. Platini’s vote for Qatar, changing his mind from supporting the 2022 tournament being held in the USA, still infuriates Blatter, who finally revealed in 2016 that he had wanted Russia in 2018, then the USA, and had worked to secure a consensus in the executive committee. Platini later admitted that he changed his mind following a lunch at the Elysée Palace in Paris in November 2010 with his country’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the son of Qatar’s Emir, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, who peacefully succeeded his father in 2013. At the lunch, Platini has acknowledged that Sarkozy made it clear he wanted him to vote for Qatar to host the 2022 tournament, and he also was seeking to persuade the Qataris to buy Paris Saint-Germain, the flagship Ligue 1 club then in financial difficulties. There were also very significant trade deals with Qatar which Sarkozy was endeavouring to secure for his country’s economy, during the financial crisis which afflicted Europe and the west, when the Gulf countries’ wealth increased in significance.
Platini has maintained that Sarkozy did not explicitly ask him to vote for Qatar, but accepted that he knew what the president of France wanted. The then Uefa president also said he did not change his mind due to that influence from the president of his country, but decided a World Cup across the Gulf, in winter, would be ‘beautiful’. The vote was, in fact, for a World Cup only in Qatar, in the summer. After the vote, Qatar Sports Investments, a sovereign wealth fund, did buy Paris Saint-Germain, the club Sarkozy supports. QSI, and the Qatar Tourism Authority as a €200m a year sponsor, have since poured in fortunes to fuel star player purchases, PSG’s capture of the Ligue 1 championship and routine participation in the European Champions League.
Qatari money for France did not stop at PSG, though; three weeks after buying Sarkozy’s club, it furnished the whole of France’s Ligue 1 with new riches. The broadcaster beIN Sports, part of Qatar-owned Al Jazeera, did a joint deal for the league’s TV rights, paying a hugely increased €607m a year from 2012 to 2016. That was renewed in 2014, increasing to €726m a season from 2016 to 2020. The Qatari chairman both of PSG and QSI, Nasser al-Khelaifi, is also the chairman and chief executive of beIN Sports.
Most significantly for Sarkozy, the Qataris also completed major trade deals with France. These included Qatar Airways ordering fifty A320 neo-family planes made by Airbus at its base in Toulouse. The list price of one Airbus in 2010 was put by one industry journal at $375m. At that price, the total income from that one trade deal with Qatar to the French economy was $18.75bn.
Platini’s son, Laurent, a lawyer, was given an executive role at a kit company, Burrda, owned by the Qatar Investment Authority, but Platini denied it had any connection to his having voted for Qatar. Blatter absolutely believes that Platini was influenced by political pressure, and says Platini told him so. He, the undisputed expert of Fifa and executive committee politics, is also convinced that Platini’s vote, taking four European votes with him, was the crucial deciding factor giving Qatar its fateful majority.
The technical reports written by Fifa’s representative, Harold Mayne-Nicholls, from Chile, had highlighted as risks the heat in Qatar, and that the tournament would effectively all take place in Qatar’s only major city, Doha. Mayne-Nicholls was himself later banned from football for seven years, reduced on appeal to three years, by Fifa’s ethics committee, which found he had sought favours for relatives, reported to have involved asking for internships and work experience positions in Qatar’s Aspire Academy system for his son, nephew and brother-in-law. Mayne-Nicholls, who was well-respected and considering standing as a Fifa presidential candidate when the initial complaint was suddenly made, launched an appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
Just two days before the vote, true rottenness in the heart of Fifa was alleged with more conviction than ever before, in a programme researched and presented for the BBC’s Panorama by Andrew Jennings. It was the culmination of years investigating Fifa, during which Jennings had long alleged that ISL had paid bribes to senior people when the company was buying up the World Cup TV rights in the 1990s. Now Jennings had documents, and figures, apparently from the ISL liquidation and Swiss court proceedings which followed. Panorama claimed that Teixeira, then still the president, since 1989, of the Brazil football federation (the CBF), had been paid a staggering $9.5m. Leoz, Jennings alleged, had been paid $730,000 personally, in five separate payments, including three lots of $200,000, between 1997 and 1998. Leoz later claimed he gave the money to a school in Paraguay, years later. The other name on Jennings’ list was Issa Hayatou, secretary general of the Cameroon Football Association and president of CAF itself since 1987. He was found to have been paid 100,000 French francs, with the German word Barzahlung next to his name, meaning a cash payment. Hayatou has always claimed the money was not for him, but for an anniversary celebration of CAF. Panorama also had evidence of another alleged ticket scandal involving Jack Warner.
After the 2 December 2010 decision of the executive committee, when only Hayatou added his vote to Geoff Thompson’s as England’s return for £21m spent, English FA officials would profess outrage at Fifa, imply that several members of the executive committee were untrustworthy for not fulfilling promises of votes and protest that the vote must have been corrupt. Yet before the vote, the FA had tried to have the Panorama programme pulled, writing an obsequious letter to the executive committee members themselves, to distance the FA and bid from the BBC’s allegations. The letter, read now in the light of all that has happened at Fifa, and all that is known about the recipients, does not get any less shameful than it was at the time:
‘It has been a difficult time for Fifa and as a member of the football family we naturally feel solidarity with you and your colleagues,’ the FA’s letter said (my italics).
Pleading with Leoz, Teixeira, Grondona, Warner and all the others to bestow a vote on England, the letter, signed by Thompson and the former Arsenal major shareholder David Dein, who had been recruited to lobby for the bid, said the BBC’s programme was ‘raking over allegations’ and:
‘We hope England’s bid will not be judged negatively due to the activities of individual media organisations, regardless of one’s view of their conduct. We hope you appreciate that we have no control over the British media.’
On the night the programme aired, a statement from the bid, sent by text, derided the Panorama allegations of serious, long-term corruption by four voting members of the executive committee, claiming three took bribes from ISL, as ‘an embarrassment to the BBC’.
My colleague at the Guardian Owen Gibson always recalls as his abiding memory of the vote the sight of Chuck Blazer, sprawled on a chaise longue in the lobby of the Baur au Lac hotel the night before, like an overindulged emperor run to decadence, receiving the tributes of his subjects. Blazer was an abiding sight, as ever, in the row of executive committee members as they watched the final presentations, listened to world stars and world leaders, heard the promises of a development legacy from most countries including England, then went off to vote.
Blatter himself is bitterly convinced that the US authorities only began their investigations, and set out to bring Fifa down, because their bid lost out in the dire voting process of that winter’s day in Zurich. The Department of Justice will not confirm when exactly the inquiries began or what prompted them, but it is not clear that they did actively spring from that 2022 hosting disappointment. The fall of Fifa which followed has a clear chronology. It began substantially six months after Blatter drew the name out of that envelope, and forced himself to say, with a jaw-straining smile: ‘Qatar.’ The voting process has been intensively investigated, with some illuminating results, and a criminal investigation continues by the Swiss prosecuting authority, searching for evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
The real trouble for Fifa, and Blatter, sprang from what happened next: the challenge to Blatter’s presidency by Mohamed bin Hammam, in the election for the president due to be held in June 2011, and piles of dollar bills being handed out, on Jack Warner’s orders, in a hotel room in Trinidad.