Six months after the earthquake of Fifa’s World Cup votes for Russia and Qatar, at the end of May 2011, Sepp Blatter was facing a challenge in the presidential election to his quest of sailing on for four more years. The challenger was his billionaire former supporter from Qatar, Mohamed bin Hammam. I was sent by the Guardian to a grey, drizzly Zurich to cover the congress and election–and the mad, volatile dramas which would unfold at an organisation which seemed to have lost its anchor.
Nobody really understood quite how the alliance between Blatter and bin Hammam, his long-term fixer, had disintegrated to the point of this challenge, the ultimate falling-out in a political culture based on personal loyalties. The bond between the two men had been sealed in the almost forgotten past of 1998, when bin Hammam, an obscure figure in Europe then but already an AFC representative on the executive committee, had been at Blatter’s side on the private jet tour to beat Johansson to the Havelange succession. In an email to Jack Warner, which Warner subsequently leaked, Jérôme Valcke had casually predicted that bin Hammam had no chance of winning the necessary votes, and was standing only to ‘show how much he hates SB [Sepp Blatter]’. Why he hated him, bin Hammam, the softly spoken kind of construction billionaire and Fifa intriguer, never said explicitly. But it was clear enough that he believed Blatter had given indications, through the years of bin Hammam supporting him, that he would step down and allow bin Hammam to succeed. Michel Platini, cutting an increasingly weary, often grumpy figure as Uefa president by the banks of Lake Geneva, seemed to have the same belief, that he was on a promise which Blatter was increasingly unlikely to fulfil. Bin Hammam had worked unceasingly on the steady elevation of his profile and influence, travelling the world cutting ribbons of GOAL projects whose money dispensary he chaired. He ascended to the AFC presidency in 2002 and, as would later emerge, generously entertained and privately donated money to a crowd of African FA presidents.
He had introduced himself to the English media, inviting several journalists, including me, to a round table with him in London in October 2008. Peter Hargitay, the Hungarian-Swiss media relations consultant hired by Blatter for Fifa six years earlier, was working for bin Hammam on his profile raising, and organised the event. It was at Claridge’s Hotel, another in the list of plush, discreet, painfully expensive hotels routinely accommodating football’s high-ups in the different world they inhabit. My only experiences of such places–the Dolder Grand, up on a hill in Zurich with a fleet of black Mercedes purring at the front, the Baur au Lac; in London the Dorchester and Claridge’s–have been in connection with the regulars of these places who run the people’s game. In London I’d always find myself late, on the tube, half running through streets crowded with ambling tourists, then arriving at the front of these palaces to be greeted by the calm authority of a doorman in a top hat, allowing access through a revolving door.
At Claridge’s, we walked on carpets of impossible depth, through hallways lined with gilt-edged mirrors, to an upstairs room where bin Hammam was charm and humility personified. He had a wide and gleaming smile, a gentle manner, and his message was only that he wanted more international cooperation in football, and more recognition for Asia. Hargitay had billed bin Hammam as ‘one of world football’s relevant personalities, a member of the Fifa executive committee and chairman of the GOAL programme, as well as several Fifa committees’. Looking back, of course, it was a stage in bin Hammam’s campaign to advance towards the pinnacle which Blatter had first claimed with his significant help.
He had had discussions with Platini, a long-term ally and deputy chairman of the GOAL projects, but Platini, having in 2007 become president of Uefa, also with Blatter’s backing, had decided not to run for Fifa president so soon, and not against Blatter. Bin Hammam began to give strong hints, then finally declared himself as a candidate in March 2011, aggressively late, as Blatter did in 1998. There was talk of the English FA supporting him, as the anyone-but-Blatter candidate.
The aftershocks of the December vote had rumbled on in the succeeding months, with suspicion relentlessly focusing on how Qatar managed to win over sufficient members of the executive committee for a World Cup in a tiny desert state in the sweltering summer. The official Qatar bid team furiously resented the assumption that corruption had to have been involved, believing it sprang recognisably from a prejudiced view of wealthy Arabs. They justifiably pointed to the lack of stories emerging about Russia’s victory, in the same vote of the same Fifa men, after a campaign commanded by Vladimir Putin, whose country was described in US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks as a ‘virtual mafia state’. Russian officials categorically denied wrongdoing, too, with the sports minister and Fifa executive committee member, Vitaly Mutko, pointing out that the World Cup had never been held before in the former communist east of Europe.
On 10 May 2011, the British parliamentary committee for culture, media and sport held an inquiry into the World Cup vote, which featured some more explosive claims. British law enables anybody to say anything in parliament, free from the libel law protecting people from suffering damaging claims against them, which cannot be proven. Under this parliamentary privilege, the committee published a letter from the Sunday Times journalists Jonathan Calvert and Claire Newell, featuring allegations the paper had not printed, and heard from the FA chairman, Lord Triesman, about his experiences as head of England’s 2018 bid before his loose talk cost him his position.
The letter included claims that in 2004 the bid by Morocco, challenging South Africa for the right to host the 2010 World Cup, had paid bribes to executive committee members, including $1m to Jack Warner. The paper also said that its undercover reporters had been told by Zen-Ruffinen and two African Fifa officials that the current African members of the executive committee were being offered bribes by Qatar, including, one said, for ‘projects’. The Qatar bid had described these allegations as ‘entirely false’, the paper said. The African executive committee members all denied throughout that they had taken or solicited bribes for their votes.
‘It was a difficult story for the Sunday Times to publish as none of the three people who made the allegations against Qatar was ever likely to be willing to appear as a witness,’ Calvert and Newell wrote.
Another story sent in by the Sunday Times, which the committee also published with parliamentary privilege, was more specific and explosively damaging to Qatar. The journalists said that a ‘whistleblower who had worked with the Qatar bid’–she was later to be identified as the former head of international media relations, an Arab-American woman, Phaedra Almajid–claimed Qatar had paid bribes to the three African executive committee members. The Sunday Times said that they had previously published the ‘whistleblower’s claims’ in December, ‘in an article which did not name the bidder or the members involved’.
In their written submissions, the paper revealed that the bidder was Qatar, and the committee published the story. The letter said that the whistleblower claimed that Qatar paid $1.5m to two of the Fifa executive committee members with a vote, Issa Hayatou, the CAF president, of Cameroon, and Jacques Anouma, of the Ivory Coast. The letter said that a similar deal had been made with Amos Adamu, before he was banned by Fifa after the Sunday Times recorded him making the requests for money to build artificial football pitches in Nigeria.
The paper told the committee, ‘The whistleblower said that the cash was to go to the three members’ football federations but there would be no questions asked about how the money was used. “It was said in such a way that ‘we are giving it to you.’ It was going to their federation. Basically, if they took it into their pocket, we don’t give a jack.”’
From having been claims which could not be published, this was now a story the whole world could run, again and again, with protection from being sued. The Sunday Times told the committee they were dismayed that Fifa had not taken seriously and ‘effectively swept under the carpet’, the recorded comments that the World Cup bidding process paid bribes to the African delegates and that, in particular, Qatar paid bribes.
The Qatar bid again reacted furiously, staggered that in a democracy parliament could be used effectively as a publishing vehicle for allegations which could not be proved sufficiently to be made outside the Palace of Westminster. The Qatar FA responded by saying they ‘categorically deny’ the Sunday Times’ and ‘whistleblower’s’ claims.
‘As the Sunday Times states, these accusations “were and remain” unproven. They will remain unproven, because they are false,’ it said in a statement.
Triesman’s account was more wide-ranging, not focused on Qatar, but on the Fifa executive committee members themselves, Jack Warner, Nicolás Leoz, Ricardo Teixeira and Worawi Makudi, whom he claimed made corrupt demands of the England bid in return for their votes. The former FA chairman had come prepared to tell these stories, fully aware, as a member of the House of Lords, that privilege protected him from being sued.
He claimed that Jack Warner had asked him and the chairman of the Premier League, Sir Dave Richards, for the FA to build ‘an education facility’ in Trinidad. Triesman said that Warner had asked that the money to build such an academy should ‘be channelled’ through him. In a Westminster committee room suddenly hushed with the excitement of stories being told publicly which might otherwise only be whispered, Triesman moved on to Leoz. He said that at a meeting on 3 November 2009, while England were lobbying for his vote, Leoz had personally asked Triesman for a knighthood, as recognition for his services to world football. Triesman said it was put to him that, as a former minister in the British Foreign Office in Tony Blair’s Labour government, Triesman must know how such things were organised.
Of Teixeira, the president of the Brazil FA, Triesman said he had a meeting with him on 14 November 2009 in Qatar, when the English FA was bidding for Teixeira’s vote. Triesman said he told Teixeira he was grateful for the support of Brazil’s then president Lula, for England’s bid. He claimed that Teixeira then said to him: ‘Lula is nothing, you come and tell me what you have for me.’ Triesman said he found this ‘a surprising way of putting it and, in its way, a shocking way of putting it, because of how it was likely to be interpreted.’
Finally, Triesman, sitting on a cushioned wooden chair in front of the semi-circle of committee members, relayed his story about Makudi, the president of the Thailand FA. The English FA and 2018 bid team were, without question, discussing with Makudi the prospect of the England team playing a friendly against Thailand, in Thailand. Triesman claimed that Makudi had been insisting that if the match were played, the money from the TV rights would go to Makudi personally, rather than to the Thai FA.
Makudi would deny this claim so vehemently that he mounted a sustained effort through the English courts to sue Triesman, despite parliamentary privilege, setting precedents in English law. His lawyers argued that statements Triesman made afterwards, in which he was trying to be painfully sure not to repeat his account outside of parliament, but in which he referred to what he had said to the committee, now meant that parliamentary privilege did not protect him. The English Court of Appeal ultimately found against Makudi, maintaining Triesman’s protection. However, the former FA chairman’s story given in parliament was not corroborated by other members of the England bid team, nor by an inquiry the FA commissioned a lawyer, James Dingemans QC, to undertake. In fact what Dingemans found reflected worse on the English FA than Triesman’s account: they appeared to be preparing to grant a more generous than usual deal over the TV rights for the match–to the Thai FA, not Makudi personally–while they were bidding for Makudi’s vote to host the 2018 World Cup.
Parliamentary privilege, allowing all these stories to be immediately broadcast and reported, blew new heat into the widespread belief that members of Fifa’s executive committee were corrupt, and had used the World Cup bidding process to ask for favours or cash. The committee hearing was just three weeks before the Fifa congress at which Blatter was facing bin Hammam for election of the president. The atmosphere, as Fifa and the national FA delegates gathered in Zurich, was on the border between febrile and hysterical. In this environment, Blatter was viewed by much of the British and European media, certainly, as the incumbent who had sanctioned, and benefited from, a rotten culture, and the challenge to him was very welcome. As the opponent, bin Hammam was viewed as somehow fresh and modern; his own record, long history with Blatter and motives were not subjected to the same scrutiny.
Looking back, knowing what we would find out about bin Hammam, it is clear that in everything he said to support his candidacy there was not much to reveal any higher motivation than personal ambition. Principally, he confirmed that he believed Blatter had pledged to step down in 2006, then again in 2011, as bin Hammam was painstakingly, and expensively, building up his electability at Fifa.
‘I was a supporter of Blatter and I have never regretted anything about that–he has contributed a lot for the development of the game,’ bin Hammam had pronounced. ‘But he has been there a long time in that position. There must be the question: Mr President–when is it enough?… Mr Blatter came wanting eight years, two mandates, then twelve years and three mandates, and now four mandates and actually nothing is changing in the last three or four years.’
When you recall now bin Hammam’s professed idea of change, and his attitude to the corruption allegations rocking the foundations at the House of Fifa, he does not look like a reformer. His view, and appeal to the national associations, was similar to Blatter’s: that in fact Fifa was being assailed by unfair criticism, and the president should repel it. His pitch to the world’s FAs was similar to that made by the English FA to Fifa’s executive committee before the BBC’s Panorama programme: I am one of you. At the congress itself, Blatter would talk of ‘devils’ besetting Fifa, in a mammoth performance to keep a tidal wave of pressure from overwhelming him.
‘I am not saying I am the Godfather of football,’ bin Hammam said to one interviewer, in an unfortunate phrase, ‘but I don’t see anything moving, anything changing. Most of what we are seeing and hearing is criticism from outside towards Fifa and most of the time I don’t think it’s fair. This is what is driving me.’
Of Amos Adamu and Reynald Temarii, bin Hammam sent the signal to the world that he defended them:
‘My opinion is that my two colleagues have been trapped,’ he told the Press Association. ‘Frankly speaking, I would like to give them the benefit of the doubt. Neither of them has asked for money for themselves, both has asked [sic] for the help of those promoters for their confederations, their countries; they personally were not going to benefit financially.’
Of the criticisms being levelled at Fifa’s culture, the doubts over the integrity of those responsible for governing world football, bin Hammam said dismissively: ‘Fifa is always under the focus for anything; people will attack Fifa a thousand times more than any organisation.’
Nevertheless, his candidacy made use of a familiar word, as a promise, which looks almost laughably empty now: transparency. At the time, it was irresistible drama; Blatter, emperor of Fifa grown bloated and suspect, facing a genuine challenge, from a lesser known figure who carried himself in public with a certain charm.
The action, beyond what we could have imagined, began as soon as we all arrived in Zurich. Three days before the election at which he would stake his claim before the world, bin Hammam suddenly withdrew. For an organisation scrambling to hoist up its credibility, the circumstances were quite resoundingly seedy. Jack Warner, the Concacaf president so long accused of serially corrupt activities, was at the heart of it. The two men had, according to Fifa itself, been exposed allegedly paying cash to delegates at a Caribbean Football Union meeting on 10 and 11 May, which had been called to give bin Hammam a platform to set out his credentials as a candidate for Fifa president. It is difficult to recall now who the whistleblower–one of them–was without laughing, and still wondering about his motive: Chuck Blazer. Warner’s partner for years in the Concacaf and Fifa trough was now, extraordinarily, reporting him for involvement in corrupt activity.
The allegation, compiled in a report by an attorney, John Collins, instructed by Blazer, was that bin Hammam had taken cash to the meeting, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Trinidad, and $40,000 had been given to each to the CFU delegates, all of whose FAs had a vote in the presidential election. Warner had called the meeting, the Collins report alleged, and had been involved in the cash being handed out. A photograph of the money itself emerged and was reported worldwide: an actual brown envelope, with piles of dollars in it, apparently given on behalf of Mohamed bin Hammam as a casual bribe for a vote in a Fifa presidential election. After all the years of denial.
Fifa’s ethics committee, first formed in 2006, which took proceedings on the initiative of the president’s office at that time, was investigating, but Blatter, too, was sucked in. Bin Hammam claimed Warner’s account was that he had told Blatter in advance that the cash would be handed out, and Blatter had raised no objection.
On the Saturday evening, 28 May 2011, Mohamed bin Hammam, who had spent a lifetime working, glad-handing, spending his way towards the presidency of Fifa, abruptly announced he was standing down from the election. He was facing the ethics committee hearing the following day, but claimed it was nothing to do with the allegations of cash being handed out, and that he would be cleared of any wrongdoing. It was because, he said, he had suddenly realised, unconnected to the scandal enveloping him and Warner, he should not be engaging in a contest after all:
‘I cannot allow the game that I love to be dragged more and more in the mud because of competition between two individuals,’ bin Hammam explained. ‘The game itself and the people who love it around the world must come first. It is for this reason that I announce my withdrawal from the presidential election.’
Giving this literally unbelievable explanation, bin Hammam then actually said:
‘I look forward to working closely with my colleagues to restore Fifa’s reputation to what it should be–a protector of the game that has credibility through honesty, transparency and accountability.’
In fact, the opposite would happen: the events in the Trinidad hotel would prompt the crumbling of many of his colleagues’ reputations, the concerted investigation by US authorities who had seen their dollars become the currency of Fifa corruption, and the fall of the House of Fifa.
Warner, whom bin Hammam thanked as a friend and colleague for ‘his unlimited support’, was facing a rapidly assembled ethics committee inquiry into the handing out of the cash. With characteristic fury, late in the night, Warner promised the Trinidadian press that he would in retaliation unleash a ‘tsunami’ of damning detail against Blatter–which sounded promising.
With a crowd of other journalists I went down to the Baur au Lac hotel where bin Hammam and other Fifa executive committee men were put up when they were in Zurich, transported there by limousine from their first-class flights and fast-track airport departures. Bin Hammam was there, still casting an air of serenity around him, but now he was not talking or explaining. All he did was smile, walk into the lobby, press his hands to his chest, and tell us: ‘I am heartbroken.’
The following day, 29 May 2011, after the hearings separately of bin Hammam, Warner and Blatter, Fifa held a press conference in its headquarters at the bunker on the hill. Valcke introduced the deputy chairman of the ethics committee, a Namibian judge, Petrus Damaseb. He told us in a solemn voice that the ethics committee had decided to ‘provisionally ban’ both bin Hammam and Jack Warner from any football-related activities, due to the evidence signalling that they had apparently been involved in corruption activities. So, very neatly, Blatter was in the clear, now unchallenged by any alternative candidate, free to cruise through a non-election, the only name on the ballot paper, for four more years.
It seemed far too convenient for Blatter to be valid: how, I wondered, had he managed to trigger an ejector seat under his first opponent in nine years, just four days before the election?
Warner unleashed the first waves in his promised tsunami then, claiming that Blatter had given $1 million in cash to Concacaf, and laptops and computers to thirteen Caribbean associations, implying that it was in return for their votes. He also leaked a conversational email Valcke had sent him months earlier. That was the one in which Valcke pondered about bin Hammam standing even though he had no chance, wondering if it was to show how much he ‘hated’ Blatter–or, Valcke mused, was it because bin Hammam ‘thinks he can buy Fifa, like Qatar bought the World Cup?’
That was truly incendiary, from the secretary general of the organisation which had up to then rejected all allegations of corruption in the bidding process. Valcke was forced to explain himself, at the beginning of a press conference called at Fifa House so that he and Blatter could reassure the world. We filed into the main building from an annexe outside in the gardens, to take our places in the conference room. You walk into the forbidding, black Fifa House, and it opens into a huge, vaulting, granite and marble lobby, with a reception desk dwarfed to the side. The effect is not to welcome visitors warmly into the home of the people’s game; this entry chamber is a statement of corporate presence and power. We were guided to the left, up some stairs, to a large room set up like a lecture theatre, a platform in front, faced by banks of pull-down seats.
When the president and secretary general of Fifa arrived to face the media, Valcke opened with a clarification of his leaked Qatar allegation, to get it out of the way. ‘What I wanted to say,’ he told us, ‘is that the winning bid used their financial strength to lobby for support. I have at no time made, or was intending to make, any reference to any purchase of votes or similar unethical behaviour.’
And no more, really, has ever been said about the casual assertion of the Fifa secretary general about the bidding process, that Qatar ‘bought the World Cup’.
Blatter explained that the $1m to Concacaf alleged by Warner hadn’t been any sort of bung at all in return for votes; it was for two extra GOAL projects. That amounted to Blatter admitting that he had it in his presidential gift to hand the money out to regions, shortly before he was standing for election, but it was presented as evidence of Fifa’s probity. Blatter and Valcke were flailing at the rising tide of corruption allegations–if true, the Warner–bin Hammam vote-buying accusations surely unveiled a disturbing culture, not some isolated aberration. So they decided to show us all how straight Fifa was, by releasing a summary of the report James Dingemans QC had compiled into the allegations Triesman had made.
‘We were happy that there are no elements of this report which would prompt any proceedings,’ Blatter beamed. Valcke said the report showed the four Fifa executive committee members named by Triesman to have been ‘completely clean’.
A sense settled in that room that we were trapped in a granite headquarters of delusion and bluster. The only candidate to oppose Blatter on the ballot paper had been shot out of the race with an obscure and unconvincing story about cash in a hotel in Trinidad, which, if true, denoted corruption, yet we were being told that their processes were flawless and clean. Blatter did promise reforms to Fifa’s governance and compliance at the congress, and held up a thin brochure for the cameras.
‘This is our ethics code,’ he said archly. ‘I am not sure everybody in the Fifa family has read it.’
Asked what he was going to do about this crisis, Blatter famously asked, in a voice which had a quiver in it:
‘Crisis? What is a crisis? Football is not in a crisis. We are only in some difficulties, and the difficulties will be solved within the football family.’
My colleague at the Guardian, Matt Scott, was furiously challenging Blatter to answer more questions, without waiting for the microphone. That meant, apparently, that his protests were only just audible as agitated squeaks on the live stream, which Fifa’s representatives kept product-placing, on fifa.com. Trying to hush him, and under unimaginable pressure, Blatter admonished:
‘Listen, gentlemen. I accepted to have a press conference with you alone here. I respect you. Please respect me, and please respect the procedure of the press conference… Don’t intervene. We are not in a bazaar here, we are in Fifa House and we are in front of a very important congress–so please.’
At the end, as Blatter left, somebody in front scoffed at the whole performance, and Blatter produced this enduringly marvellous rebuke: ‘Yes, you can laugh,’ he retorted. ‘That’s also an attitude. Elegance is also an attitude. Respect is also an attitude.’
And then he was gone. Back in the annexe, helpful and attentive Fifa staff helped the cadre of journalists with wifi or other niggles, there were coffee and pastries, to help keep the media fuelled as they wrote reports condemning Fifa, lacerating its president. Somebody googled and reckoned they had found that ‘Elegance is an attitude’ had been a long-ago advertising slogan of Longines. They concluded that, faced with so daunting a challenge, Sepp Blatter’s subconscious had come up with a line from one of his former lives.
Later, I had a look at the extracts of the FA’s Dingemans report, which Blatter and Valcke had smugly told us ticked the organisation as ‘completely clean’. It told a different story, in fact, and it did not look great for the English FA either. Dingemans had found that Sir Dave Richards, the Premier League chairman, supported Triesman’s recollection that at a meeting in the Wyndham Grand Hotel, a plush affair, naturally, in London’s redeveloped Chelsea Harbour, Jack Warner had indeed asked the FA to build an education block in Trinidad and Tobago. Richards did not, however, recall Warner asking for the money to be channelled through him, as Triesman had said.
Nobody else involved with the England bid confirmed that Nicolás Leoz asked for a knighthood, as Triesman claimed. However, Andy Anson did recall that people who worked for Leoz, including a Conmebol staffer, Alberto Almirall, did show them a book full of honours bestowed on their boss, and ‘hinted that it would be nice if England were to recognise Dr Leoz in some way and it would be nice if he would get to meet the Queen’.
Almirall had, the report said, sent an email to a consultant to the England bid, Les Dickens, listing a clutch of countries which had honoured Leoz, including a Légion d’honneur from France, and said: ‘Confidentially, I know that he would love to have a decoration from the British Crown or government.’ Into 2010, Dingemans found that the England bid team were actually looking at ways they could satisfy this yearning.
‘Internal discussions… were taking place within England 2018 about what honour might properly be given to Dr Leoz.’
They had learned that Leoz had vigorously promoted the development of disability football, and been previously honoured for it.
‘It is apparent that there was some discussion about creating a FA Disability Cup, and some consideration about whether that might be named after Dr Leoz.’ The report continued, however: ‘there were different views in England 2018 about whether the proposal was a good idea and the matter was not pursued.’
Triesman’s allegation against Teixeira was not corroborated by anybody in the bid team, and left dangling. Considering Teixeira’s propensity for real, multi-million-dollar corruption, it was a fairly thin incident, and open to an innocent interpretation, that Teixeira had only been saying it was his opinion of the World Cup bids which counted, not his country’s president.
The Makudi allegation, which was to prove so painful for Triesman, who had to fund his own costs to defend the repeated legal actions, was difficult both for him and the FA. Dingemans found that nobody in the bid team agreed that Makudi was looking to have the television rights to the friendly himself. However, the report stated that ‘often’, when playing a friendly match overseas, the FA retains the UK and worldwide rights, leaving the host FA only the rights in their own country, which would have been Thailand. In this case, by a letter dated 24 November 2010, just a week before the vote, a senior official in the FA’s England team structure wrote to Makudi about the TV rights.
‘It is apparent there were proposals being discussed whereby the Football Association of Thailand retained not only domestic TV rights, but also rest of the world TV rights except for the UK,’ the report concluded.
So, the FA had been discussing giving an honour to Nicolás Leoz, the Paraguayan president of Conmebol, whose vote they wanted, following the suggestions of his own staff. They had given Warner short shrift on the academy suggestion, and the Teixeira comment was inconclusive. But the English FA was discussing a more generous than usual TV rights arrangement with the Thai FA, a week before the World Cup 2018 decision at which they wanted the vote of its president. After England lost, and Makudi was found not to have voted for England, the FA cancelled the discussions about the friendly, which strongly suggests a match with the England team was being used as a sweetener for the World Cup vote. Three years later, when further allegations and unceasing pressure had led the ethics committee to mount an investigation into the World Cup bidding process, it would conclude:
‘According to the report, three of the four Fifa executive committee members made improper requests for support or favours towards the England 2018 bid team and/or the FA during the bidding process. With regard to at least two of these Committee members, England 2018 accommodated, or at least attempted to satisfy, the improper requests made by these executive committee members, thereby jeopardising the integrity of the bidding process.’
And yet, at the time, Valcke told the world’s media, exhibiting the report for emphasis, that it showed they were all ‘completely clean’. It was clear that was nonsense just by actually reading the extracts of the report Valcke had made available. I laid out some of the detail in an article for the Guardian the following day, and my colleagues wrote as the headline: ‘Sepp Blatter and Fifa reach for the whitewash over FA’s report’.
That night, the congress formally opened, with a gala event in the concrete bowl of the Zurich Hallenstadion, an arena which is home to the city’s ice hockey team, the ZSC Lions. The highlight was Grace Jones, billed as ‘one of the most iconic figures of the 1980s’, still on remarkably arresting form, sitting on Leoz’s knee in the front row and asking the ageing delegates: ‘Are you ready to party?’ There was a ‘medley of Swiss and international artists’ on the programme, between speeches about corruption including from the president of Switzerland, Micheline Calmy-Rey. She clearly felt she had to tell the assembly: ‘Where there are concerns about corruption and transparency, it is necessary to listen and reform your governance.’
She was followed by a juggler, Alan Sulc, and a seven-piece breakdancing group, Flying Steps, and the congress, hosted by Melanie Winiger, described as a former Miss Switzerland, was formally open.
The following day, of the election itself, there was a rumbling grey sky, and mizzle outside the Hallenstadion. As the black Mercedes limousines unloaded their FA presidents, there was a demonstration, too. They were young people, shouting something about Blatter, so I asked one of them about it. He said they were the young Green Party of Switzerland, and were protesting Fifa’s privileged, tax-free status in the country, which applied to non-profit amateur sports associations, when Fifa made $4bn and its senior figures helped themselves to huge money. I asked him what they were chanting, and he said it was: ‘Sepp Blatter: Fuck Off.’
The congress itself was not preparing to do the same. Before the main event, the English FA chairman who had succeeded Triesman, David Bernstein, formerly the chairman of Manchester City, had decided to have his say. He walked to the podium in the capacious arena, the representatives of the then 208 worldwide football associations spread out in front of him. Bernstein called for the election to be postponed, given the envelopes of cash which had apparently disqualified bin Hammam, and asked that time be given for another candidate to be mustered.
‘We are subject to universal criticism from governments, sponsors, media and the wider public,’ Bernstein told them. ‘A coronation without an opponent provides a flawed mandate. I ask for a postponement for an additional candidate or candidates to stand in an open and fair process.’
He then had a very long walk back, across the floor of the arena, picking his way around the tables and chairs, wading through an icy silence. The ferocity of the response was quite shocking at the time. There were prepared speeches, from the Haiti, Congo and Fiji delegates, condemning Bernstein, and lavishing praise on Blatter. The Benin FA president, Moucharafou Anjorin, made a rallying call to the hall: ‘We must be proud to belong to Fifa,’ he shouted. ‘We must massively express our support to President Blatter. Please applaud!’ And they actually, mostly, did.
The English media took some hits from speakers including Costakis Koutsokoumnis, the Cyprus FA president, then from Julio Grondona himself, who had a day earlier said he would have voted England for 2018 if the government had given the Falkland Islands back to Argentina. He also said he voted for Qatar to host the 2022 World Cup, because to vote for the USA would have been like voting for hated England.
‘We always have attacks from England,’ Grondona, the chairman of the finance committee, said, on the podium of Fifa at the sixty-first congress. ‘Mostly with lies, and the support of a journalism which is more busy lying than telling the truth. Please leave the Fifa family alone!’
This demonstration was such an extreme outburst of non-transparency, political sycophancy and diversion tactics it was funny, of course. But it was chilling, too, disturbing–and, if you love football, extremely depressing. Towards Grondona, who became the president of the Argentina FA in 1979, and was an associate of the murderous generals who ruled the country and disappeared opponents while ruthlessly laying on a World Cup, I felt an instinctive repulsion. Listening to him, there was the inescapable impression that Grondona gave off an air of fascism.
Bernstein lost his vote for a postponement almost completely: 172 votes to 17. Talking to him now, for this book, he said he felt ‘brilliant’ about doing it, that he had protested and stood up against a Blatter coronation. But when you reflect on his futile stance, it was also a signal of how absent the FA, football’s original founding governing body, was from any international influence at Fifa. The FA, which the founders of Fifa had almost begged to join in 1904, which flounced out twice in the 1920s, was led back in by Rous after the war and played a central, constructive, generally respected role after that. It is astonishing to think that a classic English FA administrator and ex-schoolmaster had been the president of this organisation for thirteen years until as recently as 1974. Now, the English FA was nowhere, and Fifa seemed like a totalitarian world of patronage and dependence, in which journalists were denounced as liars for writing the truth about a corruption scandal.
Blatter talked about the ‘devils’ and ‘threats’ swarming around Fifa, and he sank into a muddled, extended maritime vision, in which he was the captain of Fifa’s ‘bateau’, steering it to calmer waters. ‘Not only is the pyramid shaking,’ he said, ‘but our ship has drawn some water.’ At that congress, he did promise reforms, the one which said the World Cup hosts would be selected by the congress of FAs from now on, not the executive committee; that there would be a governance committee, and the ethics committee strengthened. Looking back, you can see that he had actually taken some proper advice, and some of these decent reforms did happen.
They went through the whole demonstration of showcasing their democracy. Valcke, now wearing the hat of electoral returning officer, one in his multiplicity of roles fixing for Blatter, explained the procedure proudly and long-windedly, that the delegates would all go to a booth and vote in secret. Then he began to call them out in alphabetical order, beginning with Afghanistan. It took almost three hours to reach Zimbabwe, and all the voting FA delegates were filmed and live-streamed for fifa.com, filing dutifully into the booths, deciding where to mark a cross on a ballot paper with only one candidate.
Still, they did not have to vote for Blatter, and it turned out that, again, seventeen had not. Of 203 votes cast, 186 were for Blatter. This was 92 per cent, at a time of unprecedented scandal, when two more of the executive committee, the presidents of two confederations, the AFC and Concacaf, including a candidate for president, had just been suspended for handing cash to delegates, apparently as bribes for votes. As the music rolled and Blatter was handed a bouquet, promising to steer Fifa’s ‘ship’ to ‘clear, transparent waters’, I remember him throwing out names of people who might serve on his reform committee. ‘Placido Domingo!’ he cried. ‘Henry Kissinger!’ Then I am sure he said: ‘We will have a woman!’
He sounded like the captain of a ship who had been marooned in the ocean on it alone, clinging to whatever he could say, pleading to be allowed back. The delegates, their job done, having re-elected the president who kept the money coming, filed out for the limousines and the hotels. It all, still, seemed too neat, that bin Hammam had been ousted so completely, with a neatly packaged scandal of $40,000 bills, at just the right time. And yet, as the detail emerged in inquiries and hearings, it turned out, remarkably, to be all true. Here was bin Hammam, all these years after the first allegations of him paying money to delegates in the service of Blatter in 1998, which Blatter vehemently denied, apparently caught doing so to grease his own presidential challenge. Blatter emerged storm-lashed and windswept, still the skipper of the bateau at the age of seventy-five, sailing on for four more years. But in truth, this affair of the $100 bills in Trinidad had holed his liner below the waterline, rendered it too leaky for even his remarkable wiles to fix, and cast him off, without the means to reach the next port before its traumatic sinking would begin.