João Havelange, the Brazilian president from 1974 to 1998 who oversaw Fifa’s and football’s transformation into packaged, sponsored, global television content, and started major development programmes too, died on 15 August 2016. He was 100. The official Fifa announcement was brief, really, for so gigantic a figure in its history, although it did pay tribute to his globalising of the game. There was a potted history of his remarkable life, career and achievements: a lawyer born in Brazil to Belgian immigrant parents, an Olympic swimmer, chairman from 1958 of the Brazilian sports federation including the CBF, where he organised Brazil’s innate football brilliance into triple World Cup winning magnificence. Gianni Infantino offered a corporate thank you quote:
‘During [Havelange’s] 24 years as Fifa president football became truly global, reaching new territories and bringing the game to all corners of the world. Something the whole football community should be grateful for. I extend my condolences to his family.’
Yet none of the obituaries in the media for so dominant a global sports figure could hail his achievements without enmeshing them with his tainted record of proven corruption. There were always allegations, back in Brazil in his business dealings which reportedly included arms trading, and about his 1974 Fifa election triumph, when he paid several delegates’ travel costs, and his lobbyist, Elias Zaccour, took care of some African FAs’ debts. But Havelange reached the age of ninety-six before his entrenched bribe-taking at Fifa in Zurich was established as fact, in unforgiving global exposure.
Shortly after Havelange’s passing, I happened to talk to Patrick Nally, the English pioneer of sports marketing, who worked with Havelange, and Dassler, from 1974, at the beginning of it all. He said he had been reflecting on Havelange’s tainted legacy, and he thought it terribly sad. He knew Havelange and believed he had great virtues:
‘He was intelligent, a sports person, competitive, he had businesses in Brazil, he was sophisticated,’ Nally said. ‘He saw the importance of football in Brazil and big opportunities for it internationally. It was a good vision, with development plans. I think that was genuine. He wasn’t seizing an opportunity to make millions–he didn’t know how to make money from football, they didn’t have money then and they couldn’t see the massive increase in television rights coming.’
Nally believes Havelange was corrupted from the start by Dassler, a manipulator of the ‘dark arts’. And that this corruption of Fifa, from early in the Havelange era, set the template for the system of bribes paid by marketing-rights companies more widely, including the endemic corruption in the Americas.
‘João Havelange died on my birthday,’ Nally said. ‘He made it to one hundred. I was thinking of him and his legacy, and how it came about. Horst Dassler was most responsible.’
In the early 1970s, Nally had begun selling sports events for sponsors to brand in the UK, and Dassler sought him out to work with Fifa after Havelange’s 1974 presidential victory. Havelange had promised much more dedicated football development and coaching programmes to Africa and the poorer countries’ FAs, but TV rights were peanuts then and Fifa had no money to implement his election pledges. Nally worked closely with Dassler and his staff in the Adidas international relations operation, and with Blatter, who, remarkably, spent six months working and being trained at Adidas after he joined Fifa in 1975. Eventually they signed up Coca-Cola to sponsor the global development programmes, and Adidas took their name round the world supplying kit and balls.
Nally said that he and Dassler moved on together to package the rights to the next World Cup, in 1978 in Argentina, then for Spain, in 1982, for which greater money was needed because Havelange had promised it would be expanded to twenty-four teams. In 1978, when Nally was developing the package for the Spain 1982 World Cup, the corrupting of Havelange began, he told me.
‘Horst Dassler asked for a sum of money to be put into the budget for Dr Havelange,’ Nally said. This was for Havelange personally, from the rights which would be bought from Fifa, and sold.
‘I argued, I said that was wrong, that the money for Havelange should be paid by Fifa. But Horst Dassler said no, I was being too Anglo-Saxon. He said Havelange “needs to respect us and stay with us”. He said that if we made it easy, they would take it all away from us. Horst wanted to be the paymaster, so the federations would owe him, and that way he kept control. That was the sea change, the start of it, 1978. That became the template for ISL, and that was the model for Traffic, all working on the principle of kickbacks. Traffic was the Brazilian ISL equivalent.’
Nally and Dassler’s partnership ended in 1982, after the proposed deal for Nally to buy him out was cancelled, with Dassler instead going in with Dentsu, the Japanese marketing company, in co-ownership of ISL. Nally said that Dassler’s ‘dark arts’ were to ‘back the right person in a federation, and make sure he stays loyal’, which could be done in different ways.
‘He would say that everybody was buyable, but people want different things: it might be money, some might be grateful for a sexual favour, some if there was something for their wife. He was a very, very shrewd guy.’ Dassler would be at dinners and events, Nally says, knowing all the influential people, and he was ‘very shrewd’ at knowing how to control them.
‘Writing payments into agreements became an integral part of his strategy,’ Nally said. ‘If he is the paymaster, it becomes less likely that the individuals would do things out of his control. Kickbacks were created to keep power, rather than have people paid salaries. Once that became the culture, it was very difficult to change it.’
It is true that as football was transformed from the 1970s into a more lucrative globally packaged business, the officials who ran the federations were mostly still expected to adhere to the old amateur spirit of being involved purely for the love of it. That culture can be seen to have stretched down the decades even into the modern scandals, where significant figures were still not being paid salaries. Although there is outrage at the scale of the wage packages paid to some executives in football, including Blatter once his was published by Fifa, you can argue that the lack of payment actually made people more susceptible to scandal, because everybody needs to earn a living. It was surely not sustainable for Franz Beckenbauer, handsomely rewarded throughout his life, to spend a great deal of his time working on Germany’s hosting of the 2006 World Cup, for free. But he had said he would, true to the enduring pure expectations of national sporting figures; hence the outrage in Germany when it turned out he was well paid after all. Jeff Webb, as the president of Concacaf, is also reported to have not taken a salary, and to have been warned that by doing so at that time, in 2012, people might take it not as a sign of his pure dedication to football, but that he must be a crook, making his money in other ways.
Nally believes this jarring of the commercial forces seeking to exploit football then, and the amateur façade clung to at Fifa, was a crucial factor in Havelange’s and Fifa’s systemic corruption. Havelange acceded as some apparent father figure from the country of the beautiful game, and Nally argues it turned out to be a ‘tragedy’ that the president was not paid an official salary, hence was more likely, Nally argues, to pocket money illicitly. Dassler became busily involved with Havelange immediately after his election to the presidency, in trying to package the development programmes with a sponsor, then the rights to the World Cup. And he very quickly began to pay kickbacks, too, according to Nally’s account.
‘By 1978 and then 1982, João Havelange was totally in his pocket,’ he said.
Once the bribery started, it would become soaked into the culture, on into new generations of confederation heads and marketing companies, as ultimately the ISL court document and US indictment chronicled.
‘I saw Havelange not long before he died, and I told him I was sorry for him, for his legacy,’ Nally told me. ‘He was sad, a broken man. From a strong, proud Brazilian, a stiff-backed swimmer’–Havelange famously still swam every morning, into his old age–‘he was broken.’
Contemplating the history of Fifa since its watershed, its commercialisation, globalisation of TV rights and sponsorships was probably inevitable. From 1970 the World Cup was, after all, on colour television around the world, spending on sports equipment and brands was growing, and so was the appetite of sponsors to buy the game’s image to sweeten their products. Yet from the perspective of forty years, during which Havelange was president with Blatter as his secretary general, then Blatter the president from 1998, corruption in various forms was endemic. So often, it is represented as a non-European, African, developing-world plague. Much of the suspicion of Fifa has focused on the GOAL project and other development money and the assumption, not borne out by too much actual evidence and giving too little credit for the committed work often done in developing countries, that a lot of is filched.
Fifa even made that case officially, in their submissions to the Zug prosecutions, arguing that corruption was a way of life in Africa and South America; that, ‘bribery payments belong to the usual salary of the majority of the population’. Platini said similar in his breezy interview with me at Uefa’s house of football by the banks of Lake Geneva, in clean and neutral, tax-lite Switzerland, about people in the Fifa executive committee, that ‘they didn’t share our philosophy, our morality, our policies because they are coming from another world, another morality.’
Yet the truth is that the corruption of Fifa was secured in Europe, in Zurich, Switzerland. Horst Dassler, the owner of Adidas, a great and pioneering German boot and kit company, the acme of sporting glamour to us as kids, selling the tracksuit and shoes with Beckenbauer’s name on them, forged the system of corrupting sports governing body presidents. Havelange, undoubtedly, was served up with bribes by ISL through the 1990s, and from well before that by Dassler, according to Nally.
I asked the modern-day, Stock Exchange-listed Adidas company, still headquartered at Herzogenaurach in Germany, for their response to the stories about Dassler, and they do not deny it. A company spokesman confirmed that in Dassler’s time: ‘Adidas did run an international relations department, and they did seek to influence the politics of sports governing bodies, principally by having very close relationships.’
The spokesman said the company cannot confirm or deny the widely suspected and reported episodes of alleged bribery, or the detail of any ‘dark arts’, but it has now commissioned full research of its archives by the German society for company history based in Frankfurt, the Gesellschaft für Unternehmensgeschichte e.V. This is intended to establish more solidly what did happen during the Horst Dassler era, a culture which has wormed its tentacles so far and long down into the history of Fifa and football. The spokesman was at pains to stress that after Horst Dassler died in 1987, his sisters sold Adidas in 1990, and that the company now has no connection with that culture of the 1970s and 1980s.
‘Times have really changed,’ the spokesman said. ‘The company is listed on the Stock Exchange since 1995, with no major shareholders. The leadership of the company has changed, and there have been very great changes to compliance procedures in companies over the last fifteen or twenty years. Here we are talking about a history, which goes back thirty or forty years, and we have commissioned this archive research to establish the facts.’
It is, though, notable that Fifa’s major sale of the 2002 and 2006 World Cup rights to ISL was concluded by Havelange just before he stepped down in 1998, and that no similar allegations, of taking kickbacks on the sale of TV rights, have been made against Blatter. Nor has his name appeared on the US indictment or any other legal or ethics committee proceedings, accusing him of this practice. Blatter was paid a salary, which we now know to have been very handsome, and as he has repeatedly stated, he appears not to have indulged in this crude corruption, as his predecessor and many of his executive committee members did. The question asked of Blatter many times, though, is whether he knew about the corruption of others and tolerated it, because if they were happy it perpetuated his position in charge. He has always said that he did not.
This history of his organisation, though, shows that the rottenness did set in from the top, in transactions and relationships between Germany and Switzerland: at the heart of Europe. Yet still, there remains a complacent and suspect tendency among Europeans to blame corruption on parts of the world which feel strange and faraway, foreign, where the ‘morality is different’.