- Here’s the bleedin’ obvious. In football, not all countries are equal.
- The two approaches to football: ignore financial rules or bring on the youth team
By Tony Attwood
It is more than likely that in days to come, this is going to be the moment when historians agree that Fifa lost it. Indeed, the headline, “The scandals that caused Fifa to lose touch with football reality” has already appeared on TCE exchange and that “sums it all up” as they used to say in a more positive time.
In a neat variation, the Guardian goes with “All the presidents’ meddling” as a headline in its article about the Balogun scandal and talks of “how Fifa can break football”.
Now such articles don’t blame politicians like Trump, as the piece says, “The real issue is Gianni Infantino and Fifa, the live note in a genuinely jaw-dropping sporting scandal.”
And of course what we know is that corruption, once established, simply spreads. As for example, we now have the news in the Argentine press that, “the FBI is investigating the financial operations of the Argentine Football Federation in the United States. Bank fraud is suspected.”
Egypt was one of the first countries to claim that the whole World Cup tournament was “rigged”. Then the Argentine newspaper “La Nacion” , reported that the FBI were alleging that the Argentine Federation was “guilty of money laundering and bank fraud,” via its operations in the United States.
In the world we now live in, we don’t need any evidence to show that football is fixed; the amount of money sloshing around in the game is so big that we have no choice but to believe that there is something fishy going on somewhere, even if we can’t see it in the games we watch. And for that Fifa, Uefa, the FA and indeed (given the ongoing ManC case with the Premier League) all appear to have things to hide. People no longer take as the starting point the notion that those in charge of football are doing a good job. Now the starting point is the reverse.
So mention words like “integrity” in relation to football, and people start to laugh. It doesn’t matter if you are talking about PGMO or Fifa or Uefa or Manchester City. And it doesn’t matter if there is no evidence. We have moved from a world in which we are willing to accept that everything is fine within football and by and large the authorities are doing a good job, to a world in which such a thought is laughable.
Now there are fixers everywhere, gambling has become all-important and nation states with infinite wealth are involved. And indeed, if you remember your European history, you might recall Nicolae Ceaușescu of Romania. He held such absolute power that he thought he could get away with anything, and was eventually convicted of economic sabotage. Beware people with lots of power.
So to be clear, I am not presenting evidence of corruption but saying that a combination of vast sums of money, suggestions of corruption and decision-making within organisations that demand the right to make decisions because they are always right, generally leads to an explosion.
Of course the media don’t report this because the media is making a fortune out of football as it exists now, although they will report the collapse of the empire with a lot of shaking of the collective heads, and a wondering why no one saw that things were going wrong. But the signs are there.
The problem isn’t that football is fixed by gambling firms or syndicates; it is that we are reaching the point where the level of public cynicism is becoming so great that many people have stopped believing in football. Certainly, in the run-up to Arsenal winning the league, there was a huge level of talk of the league being fixed in Arsenal’s favour. And the evidence was “it’s obvious, it’s gotta be”.
And whether that was true or not, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we believe it is not fixed. But more and more people are starting to lose that belief, as football becomes more isolated from us regular supporters and more in the hands of people like Fifa, Uefa, PGMO, the president of the USA; the chances of it not being fixed decline more and more. They have made us more and more cynical, and that move by the President of the USA to overturn a red card took us another major step along that road.
