GELFAND’S WORLD-The man has a name like a Bond villain. Sepp Blatter. And he already has bone crunching control over something that billions of people care about. Who on this side of the Atlantic would imagine giving power over worldwide soccer to Sepp Blatter?. You can almost imagine him sitting in an arm chair, stroking a persian cat, and ordering the deaths of thousands of migrant workers. The scenario only misses the mark due to intent, not to the death toll itself. We'll consider the remarks of a writer named Brian Phillips on this topic (below). But first we have to look into the mass arrest that took the sports world by storm a few days ago.
In brief, a high living New Yorker named Chuck Blazer got himself into trouble because he didn't bother to file tax returns. He turned out to be an official of Concacaf -- the Caribbean, North American and Central American soccer federation. He lived lavishly (like having two apartments in the Trump Tower with combined rents in the tens of thousands) but he didn't trouble himself to mention his large income to the government. The IRS and FBI eventually got involved, and figured out pretty quickly that international soccer was involved. For one thing, Concacaf is one of the half dozen federations that together make up FIFA, the international soccer federation.
Blazer was talked into cooperating with the FBI and the IRS, and the case expanded into what is now a 164 page indictment.
Let me save you the trouble of reading it. Basically, just about every major soccer tournament that you can think of that happened in the Western Hemisphere, and at least one in Africa, were the subject of bribes that were solicited by high ranking officials in these confederations and by officials of FIFA itself.
The indictment refers to bribes, either paid or solicited, to the tune of $150 million.
You might wonder what the bribes were about. Here's what. If you were a media company that wanted to sell television rights to broadcasters, or the right to manufacture and sell soccer balls and jerseys to fans under license, then you needed the contract to market the goods. And in that case, you were going to be hit up for a little monetary help by the heads of soccer federations from different Caribbean and South American countries.
The evidence goes beyond the Americas. If you were the Republic of South Africa and trying to win the right to hold the 2010 World Cup, then you were going to be hit up for bribes. That's because it takes a vote by the FIFA executive committee to award the World Cup to any particular country.
The news stories indicate that a ten million dollar bribe for South African World Cup votes went to somebody high-up in Trinidad and Tobago, who then spread a little around to his henchmen.
So one morning last week, the Swiss police entered a hotel where the annual FIFA meeting was to take place. As the story goes, it seemed easier to wait until the indicted were all together and thereby easier to round up. The FIFA meeting served the purpose nicely.
A few of the indicted men were not arrested because they didn't come to the meeting. It is possible that some won't ever be arrested.
There are a few questions that have been raised about the whole affair. For one thing, why should the U.S. get involved? We play in the World Cup and in Concacaf, but we're not considered a power along the lines of European countries, nor are we considered anywhere near the quality of the top South American and African countries.
To get the answer of why the U.S. took action, you have to know something about what was in the indictment. To save you the trouble of reading it, I'll tell you.
The indictment lays out its case carefully. The Concacaf is just one of several soccer confederations, all of which do business together and do business as part of the overall organization FIFA. This is important, because as the indictment (and various writers) say, a lot of the flow of money went through American banks in New York and Miami, and the actual victims are FIFA, the confederations, the soccer playing countries, and corporations which wanted to do business with international soccer.
That's because when a high ranking official extracts a large bribe (and these bribes were huge), that is money that wouldn't go to the home confederation or to FIFA. Not only that, but when you spuriously award a broadcasting contract to some company on the basis of bribery, you are reducing the ability of other companies to bargain effectively for those same rights. It would be like somebody high up in the NFL taking a bribe to give NBC the rights to broadcast pro football at a reduced rate, without NBC having to compete against CBS or Fox.
The indictment looks pretty solid to this non-lawyer. It details specific payments by whom and to whom, along with times and places. It carefully names banks within the United States that these corrupt practices made use of. It names banks within the United States that sent money overseas or received it from overseas. And in each case, the indictment carefully lays out the kinds of legal violations these acts of money laundering were created to support. The words bribery and kickbacks occur in numerous places in the indictment.
In other words, the United States takes misuse of its financial system seriously, particularly when our banking system is used as the conduit for bribery and money laundering. The indictment uses the term racketeering.
When you read the indictment and the dozens of news articles in online newspapers from Europe, Britain, the Caribbean, and both North and South America, you begin to get the idea that most people and countries are supportive. Most normal people who follow soccer were well aware of FIFA's deeply engrained, ongoing corruption. They were sick of it and they are cheering the arrests. One country in South America has already removed the name of an indicted man from a road. That's right, he had already had a road named after him, and now they have taken it away.
There is a more serious side to all of this that goes beyond a few indictments. It is the future of international soccer -- will it continue with a few ceremonial fig leaves, or will there be substantial reform? The answer is not at all clear, for a couple of reasons.
FIFA has as its ultimate legislative body a congress of all 200+ member countries, and each has a vote for president. Sepp Blatter has been ingratiating himself with a lot of small countries that don't have large populations or thriving soccer, but they have a vote, and they voted for him and gave him a brand new term this week. Meanwhile, the Europeans, the Brits, and the U.S. are not at all happy with Blatter, as he represents the old, corrupt ways. They want a change.
It gets worse. Within the FIFA congress, there is an executive committee, and it is that group that has the power to award future World Cups. Considering the chronic endemic corruption, you can see the possible problem. The Brits have a particular animus because they were contenders for the 2018 World Cup, and the FIFA executive committee gave it to Russia. Curious thing, this award. Isn't Russia the country that held the last Winter Olympics and almost immediately thereafter invaded and conquered Crimea? Isn't this the country that is rousing itself in a new cold war? Does the executive committee of FIFA have no sense?
Or there is the award for the 2022 World Cup. If you didn't know already, perhaps you should take a seat, because it's . . . Qatar. Clearly this is a system that isn't working very well.
Yeah, that Qatar. The country that is importing foreign workers to build its stadia and World Cup venues, a country where foreign workers have to give up their passports when they go to work, so they are effectively held (often against their will) within the country. It's a country that is breaking records for worker deaths in the building of this World Cup. Estimates go that at the current death rate, there may be as many as 4000 deaths of foreign workers by the time the cup is ready to be played.
That's Brian Phillips' message in a grantland.com article:
"So I’ll put this as simply as possible. FIFA corruption matters because FIFA’s actions keep killing people. There is a clear line connecting the absurd antics of the aristo-doofs in Zurich and the 4,000 migrant workers whom the International Trade Union Confederation estimates will die on construction projects in Qatar before the 2022 World Cup. There is a clear line connecting FIFA officials to the murders of whistle-blowers in South Africa, to the bulldozing of schools and poor neighborhoods (so tourists won’t have to see any unpleasantness), to widespread accusations of the misuse and theft of public funds, to the clearing out of Brazilian favelas, to the violent suppression of dissent by governments that weren’t phenomenally good at tolerating dissent in the first place. This is why you should care about FIFA corruption: not because it’s the equivalent of NCAA-type malfeasance (which is bad enough), but because it’s spreading human misery and death on an international scale"
There's lots more in the international press. Andrew Jennings has been writing books and articles for years, and he's pleased that some action is finally being taken.
One South American source quotes former players as calling the now-indicted old guard with a term that the editors have diplomatically translated as "bastards." Ask me about it if you run into me.
The real question is what's to be done. Possibly even "what can be done?" The FIFA executive committee gave Russia and Qatar the next two World Cups. The FIFA congress gave a fifth term to Sepp Blatter. What can the world do?
The new reform movement, such as it is, began with a call for countries such as England to boycott the next World Cup. This would be a little reminiscent of the western countries boycotting the Moscow Olympics because they invaded a foreign country. Then it was Afghanistan, now it is Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
But the boycott idea was quickly extended. Suppose, many bloggers write, that the European, British, South and North American teams were not only to boycott the 2018 World Cup, but to run a substitute cup of their own. It would be a real world cup except in name. The broadcast money would go to the new system along with the soccer strength. It's hard to imagine that the smaller nations would want to stay with a World Cup that represented nothing but Russia and Qatar. Back in 1980, The USSR was a major Olympic power. For soccer in the Russia of 2018, not so much. A substitute World Cup without Russia or soccer nonentities would still be a World Cup.
In other words, if everyone who is anyone went on strike against FIFA corruption, it could be cured. And if calling their bluff is what it takes, so be it. The next cup could be held in Europe or shared with the Brits, and there would be no requirement whatsoever to build any new billion dollar stadia. There have been recent World Cup finals in Berlin, Rome, Paris, Madrid, and London. Let them play a bunch of opening games in England, and they can flip a coin for where the final is played.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 13 Issue 45
Pub: Jun 2, 2015
