Football is the game, FIFA is the shame

Don’t you just love America for going after FIFA? Even if only for that.

Take the press conference given by the Department of Justice. Whereas I would usually cringe at the way they make a spectacle of what should be a bland presser announcing an indictment, this time I enjoyed every minute of it. To think that they actually prefer baseball.

Americans just have a knack for it. “The World Cup of fraud” – that is how the Head of the Investigation Division termed it. There, you have the headlines ready to go to print. 

Here they were trying to explain in the best of terms the picture that ensued following years of investigation. The people at FIFA, tasked with upholding the rules to protect and promote the game, have instead corrupted it to serve their interests, turning football (ok, Americans keep saying ‘soccer’, but we can turn a blind eye to that, just this time) into “a criminal enterprise”, as the US Attorney General described it. 

Earlier, as people in the US were still fast asleep, a solitary FIFA Director of Communications gave his own press conference. Conspicuously alone, sitting at a grand podium that usually accommodates a gang of self-important, vain officials, I almost felt a degree of empathy for him. Almost.

He had none of the flowery language that would be used across the ocean. His were mostly one-word answers. The ‘line-to-take’ was that FIFA is actually the damaged party in all this. He must have repeated it half a dozen times, almost as many times as the instances he stressed that Sepp Blatter is not involved in the investigation.

Good old Sepp has been working at FIFA since 1975, first as technical director, then general secretary for seven years, until being elected president in 1998. Today he is vying for his fifth four-year term. That would take him to the grand total of more than four decades, half of which he spent actually heading the organisation. 

But he’s “not involved”. Even though a host of his current and former Vice-Presidents and Executive Committee members are currently under investigation. Accountable? What’s that?

Few would have thought the 65th FIFA Congress would turn out to be this exciting. We all predicted another circus that would smoothly re-elect Blatter. Not that he is going to budge. His lame speech in the only public appearance he made in the past two days proves it. Welcoming the delegates to the Congress he refused – once more – to take the blame. “I cannot monitor everyone all of the time”, he told us. He did acknowledge, however, that “more bad news may follow”.

The buck must stop with Blatter. Something tells me it soon will.

His only way out is to stay in. Yet, even if today he scrapes another election victory, staying in might not be enough this time round.

Whether his replacement is the antidote for the game is another matter (on its own, it is definitely not), but until then we’ll continue to savour the moment.