FIFA’s
disgrace has
been decades
in the making
Stanley Rous is remembered popularly
within the game as the traditional,
archetypal English football official: an
outstanding referee and FA general-
secretary, then a naively well-meaning
FIFA president overthrown by a
streetwise pragmatist. Mere history?
Not at all. Rous was one of the
architects of FIFA’s present
dysfunctional governing system.
Over the past decade, world
football’s parent body has tumbled into
disgrace through its inability to control
the confederations.
CONMEBOL and CONCACAF were
ravaged by money-grabbing crooks,
while Oceania voted itself two corrupt,
successive presidents. Asia’s bank
accounts were commandeered by
its own supremo and the chaotically
muddled African confederation has
recently had to call in FIFA to run the
show and negotiate its TV deals.
It was FIFA’s first non-European
president, Brazilian Joao Havelange,
who injected a bacillus of greed that
years later saw the most senior officials
still awarding each other breathtakingpay and pensions.
The confederations, however, are not
members of FIFA, despite populating
the FIFA Council and providing the
decision-making men and women
while receiving a minimum $12million
each in annual hand-outs.
FIFA has no disciplinary power over
the confederations. The best it can do
is kick individual officials out of the
game for whatever corrupt acts
emerge. But it is always far too late, as
by then the miscreants have retired
comfortably on their ill-gotten gains.
This is a nonsense which Gianni
Infantino – a member of the reformKeir
RADNEDGE
THE INSIDERcommission, remember – needs to
address urgently.
So how did it come to this? Easy- through a botched reform back in the
early 1950s. Those were the days before
the easy money of sponsor and TV gold,
a time when a top job in the world game
meant personal prestige rather than
bulging offshore bank accounts.
Back then, FIFA was a Eurocentric
organisation. For instance, the Congress
at the 1950 World Cup in Rio de Janeiro
was the first staged outside Europe.
True, South America had possessed
its own confederation since 1916 but
that had been created out of necessity
in a different era of travel and
communication.
In Rio, ageing French president Jules
Rimet and his Belgian vice-president
Rodolphe Seeldrayers paid lip service
to the concept of FIFA expansion. But
they had no idea what that really meant.
For them, Africa and Asia represented
a mere handful of football-backward
minnows. They did not foresee the
imminent wind of change which gave
independence to dozens of new nationsand changed the balance of football
power along the way.
But there were three men who
did possess greater vision. One was
Rous, another was Italian federation
general-secretary Ottorino Barassi
and the third was the Swiss federation
president Ernst Thommen.
Rous was the most respected for
bringing the British home nations back
into FIFA, for securing them a FIFA
vice-presidency and for resolving
FIFA’s post-war financial problems with
the proceeds from a representative
match. Thommen, meanwhile, was
the man behind the highly successful
Swiss football pools organisation and
had the ear of Rimet and Seeldrayers.
It was Thommen who brought in his
associate Kurt Gassmann as general-
secretary after the retirement of
worn-down Ivo Schricker in 1951. It
was Thommen who brought in Hans
Bangerter – who would later become
UEFA general-secretary – as assistant.
And it was Thommen who led the
successful search for a new FIFA HQ
overlooking Zurich.
Rous, Barassi and Thommen
recognised the need for a new
structure. Indeed, they and Europe’s
nations began discussing it around
FIFA Congress at the 1952 Winter
Olympics in Helsinki. They acceptedFIFA boss...
Gianni InfantinoIn the early 1950s, a top job in the world
game meant personal prestige rather
than bulging offshore bank accounts
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