"Football is not a matter of life and death, it is more important than that."
The ugly Game
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Heidi Blake and Jonathan Calvert, Simon and Schuster, London 2015. ISBN: 978-1471149344
The ugly Game (The Qatari Plot to Buy the World Cup)
The publishers of this book could never have anticipated how good their timing was. Within weeks of publication, we have seen senior figures in FIFA arrested and Sepp Blatter promising to go. One has to acknowledge that the excellent work of Blake and Calvert and the Sunday Times played a significant role is the fall of FIFA.
Let’s get the negative out of the way first. When the book tells me what FIFA’s investigator, Chris Eaton, was thinking when he was watching tapes in his office and gives an alleged verbatim dialogue between Jenny Be and Michelle Chai (two of Bin Hammam’s staff) one wonders – how the authors could possibly know as they were not present! (The authors’ footnotes states: “These quotes and interpretations are based on extensive conversations with confidential sources within Mohamed bin Hammam’s inner circle of aides and advisors”.)
That said, I found the book entirely credible. Even if they authors have at times overstated their case, the weight of evidence of corruption in football’s governing body is overwhelming.
Writing of the process to decide where the 2018 and 2022 World Cups would be hosted, the authors assert: “The whole contest had been rigged top to bottom by bribery and skulduggery”.
They continue: “This contest wasn’t about which country had the best stadiums and team training facilities, or which would put on the most joyous jamboree for the fans. In the end, it wasn’t really about choosing the right place to hold the world’s most beloved sporting tournament at all. It all seemed to shakedown to which of the bidders could offer the biggest boost to the fortunes of FIFA’s voters”.
Much of the argument centres on the systematic campaign of the Qatari, Bin Hammam, to “buy votes” for Qatar and then his ill-fated campaign to oust Blatter. The scale of financial inducements offered to members of the FIFA Executive Committee to persuade them to vote for Qatar is staggering.
Inevitably the book passes judgement at many points on the “arch pragmatist”, Sepp Blatter. Blatter must be praised for the way that he has taken FIFA to a new level, in terms of generating revenue which has been distributed around the needy countries of the world to the benefit of football. (Whether the distribution was linked to his personal re-election campaigns, is a valid question.)
However, Blatter is condemned for the lack of transparency in FIFA – surprisingly facilitated by the lax way in which the Swiss authorities monitor not-for-profit organizations, incorporated under Swiss law. Blatter is damned by his refusal to have the initial Sunday Times allegations investigated properly.
There seem only three possibilities:
1 Blatter was involved in the corruption;
2 Blatter knew what was happening and failed to stop it;
3 Blatter did not know what was happening in the organization he presided over.
He was therefore at best inept and incompetent and at worst corrupt. I suspect that the FBI and Swiss investigations over the coming months will give us answers
A gripping and important book which has had more impact on the future structure of world football than the authors could have imagined.