The stepping down of the Emperor of Football

If there can be corruption in cricket why should football be an exception? Actually, problem is much more complicated

I must confess that although I love watching football on the telly, I never paid much attention to the Fifa management as long as I could see Messi and Ronaldo in action and could catch retro images of Franz Beckenbauer, Diego Maradona and the legendary Stanley Matthews of Stoke City and Blackpool who was my football hero during my university days in London. All I knew about Fifa was that it had its headquarters in Zurich in exquisite surroundings and that they had representatives from all countries regardless of whether they were democracies or not. Suddenly, like a bolt from the blue, the BBC and CNN were full of Fifa and its president, Sepp Blatter, and the scandal that had rocked international football’s governing body and shocked football fans around the globe.

We got to see how much money Blatter had left in the kitty for the organisation, his future plans, his attempt for a fifth term as president of the group, the sudden unwelcome appearance of a challenger from the Middle East, and that too, a bloomin’ prince, the challenger’s unexpected withdrawal from the competition, and the sensational news about alleged corruption in the organisation. At first we were given the impression that Blatter was blissfully ignorant of the fact that some of his lads had been caught with their fingers in the till. He just wanted to be crowned the Emperor of Football for the fifth time. That is why his sudden abrupt stepping down in the face of the FBI investigation raised a lot of eyebrows. The latest news that has come down the pike is that Blatter is the focus of the graft inquiry by the FBI.

His popularity, especially among African football playing nations, has never been in doubt. Nor has his friendship with the great Vladimir Putin. My immediate reaction, however, was if there can be corruption in cricket why should football be an exception? Actually, the problem is much more complicated and far worse than the match fixing scandals which have taken place in cricket. The stakes are much higher. Some reporters have been doing a lot of digging and each time a lot of worms have crawled out from under each stone. In fact, every day that passes, some major financial indiscretion is brought to light. The latest is the sudden appearance of Mr Blazer of-the-hidden-wire. It was bad enough that Nicholas Leoz, a one-time committee member of Fifa from South Africa, is supposed to be in jail in Paraguay for what came to be known as the Fifagate scandal. The FBI certainly has got it right this time. Another writer expressed an opinion that the current president of Fifa has behaved like a Middle East dictator whose councillors are authoritarian, driven by greed and quick to ignore human rights abuses. A classic example is their selection of Qatar as the next venue for the world cup after Russia.



Fifa has operated as a small government with its own rules and regulations. Its cabinet acts independently of governments and a Fifa official, when he traipses around the globe, stays at top hotels and eats at restaurants where no dish costs less than $50 a plate. It’s far better than working for the Belgian diplomatic service. When I narrated what had been happening in Zurich to a local businessman who never watches TV and only looks at the idiot box if Madhuri Dixit or Katrina Kaif are dancing for him, he made on the Fifa issue the kind of comment that many Pakistani businessmen would make: “They did something that we all would do if we got the opportunity. The problem is… the idiots got caught”.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 7^th, 2015.

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