By Tony Attwood
Lewis, the previous owner of Tottenham Hotspur,was fined, as you may recall, £4m after pleading guilty to insider trading in the United States. Now the President has pardoned him although it appears none of that money has gone back to the state. I am not at all sure if his criminal records is to be expunged.
Of course, Trump, as president, has the power to pardon whomever he wants as part of his presidency, and most of the 237 people he has pardoned have some business or personal link with him. It does seem to me as an absolute outsider (ie neither an American citizen nor a supporter of Tottenham H) that the president knows a lot of crooks, but I can’t really say if that is so. Wiki tells us that, “A significant number,” of the people who have been given reprieves, “had been convicted of fraud or public corruption.”
And indeed, the record of Tottenham Hotspur owners will forever have a note next to Joe Lewis’ name that he was convicted and then pardoned by Trump. Reviewers in the future can make of that what they like.
What some commentators have noted, however, is that Trup’s pardons include “an unprecedented degree of favouritism.” In fact, the Washington Post in February 2021 ran the article The cottage industry behind Trump’s pardons: How the rich and well-connected got ahead at the expense of others The title pretty much tells it all, but the article is there if you want to read it.
Of course, others have criticised Trump’s clemency, particularly noting the point that clemency became a standard for people “directly connected to the president’s campaign.” As the chairs of the two House of Representatives committees overseeing the issue said, “No other president has exercised the clemency power for such a patently personal and self-serving purpose.
Now of course, this is an American politics issue, and not a football matter, so it has no place here. Except that the United States has a growing interest in football, as we saw with the award of the Club World Cup to Chelsea and the fact that there has been the idea floated of playing Premier League games in the United States. And that some of the World Cup finals will be played there.
But we are not going to suggest there is anything amiss with Fifa are we?
Well, football itself is of course, no stranger to corruption with talk of match-fixing, bribery, bungs, and the selection of players for internationals in exchange for money rather than because of their ability. There have also been numerous reports of misconduct by officials, and all that comes before we get anywhere close to considering the doings of Uef a and Fifa across the years.
And in fact if we pause and ponder the issue of PGMO and refereeing. I make no allegations of corruption at all, but I do note that the same referees keep overseeing the same clubs’ games, rather than being limited to twice in a season for each club. And there are those strange results where some refs seem to see very, very few home wins, while others see lots of them. As I say, no allegations here, but just some oddity.
But there are rumblings going on all the time, which have been going on for years. If you want some background, you might start here – a report from ten years ago.
Or there was the scandal in England involving Sam Allardyce and others in 2016 when he was England manager and was filmed telling people how to bypass FA and Fifa rules on third-party player ownership – these being cases where a company owns part of a player’s economic rights – something banned years before by the FA.
But if you are a regular reader here, you will also know that there is another scandal that is currently running, and which the media utterly refuse to engage in – and that is the way that children and younger players are treated by clubs. We’ve covered that often, and I know that many reports have gone to the FA and League about the behaviour of clubs towards children.
And I was about to write that “nothing happens” – but that would be wrong. Apparently (and of course I am just a blogger, not an investigative reporter) some of those who raise such matters find themselves being threatened by the legal teams of clubs or other bodies that if they don’t drop the case at once, they will be sued for libel and slander.
But when we recall that Allerdyce negotiated a fee of £400,000 to become the “ambassador” for a none-existant firm which led to him leaving his job with England after just a couple of months “by mutual agreement” we can get an idea of what is going on behind the scenes at the highest level of football (and you can’t get higher than the appointment of the Engalnd manager, at least not in this country).
Indeed, I have to add that Allerdyce was cleared of any legal wrongdoing on the grounds that he didn’t actually break any rules. Which again tells you a lot about football.
There have been others. The assistant manager of Barnsley was filmed taking a bung, and was convicted of accepting bribes in December 2019. Or the 2015 Fifa corruption case whcih covered racketeering, fraud, and money laundering. Or the corruption case against the VP of the Spanish refereeing committee which I think is still ongoing.
In short, there seems to be quite a lot of it about, but the media aren’t very interested.
