When is a gift not a gift? In football,
that’s simple: when it’s a watch.
Luxury timepieces are collectibles
for many of the rich and well-heeled
in the upper echelons of football,
but also for the self-entitled and the
unbelievably naive. And within these
ranks now count the latest hapless
and hopeless recruit, Reinhard Grindel.
Football’s grandees need no
wristwatches to note hours, minutes
and seconds; they count time only in
computations of years until the next
election stitch-up.
When it comes to examining the
fuzzy line between gift and bribe, look
back no further than Mohamed Bin
Hammam. As The Sunday Times
revealed, the Qatari supported his
decade-long reign over the Asian
Football Confederation with agenerous distribution of largesse far
beyond his nearest and dearest.
The fact that Bin Hammam was
focused more on his own FIFA
presidential ambitions than Qatar’s
2022 campaign is neither here nor
there; the point is the manner in which
he compromised voting officials across
Asia and Africa.
Gifts such as luxury watches work
both ways: as indications of unseen
adhesion and/or as encouragements
of personal and political loyalty. They
are be-ribboned with trouble and
treachery for giver or receiver.
In 2013, Bayern Munich’s CEO
Karl-Heinz Rummenigge was fined
€249,000 for bringing two watches,
said to be worth £84,000, into
Germany after a trip to Qatar.
A year later, senior directors of FIFAwere forced to hand in watches gifted
by the Brazilian football confederation
at the 2014 World Cup – but not all of
them were accounted for, and Michel
Platini, then the UEFA president, has
volunteered various different tales of
how he disposed of his.
Another high-flying FIFA vice-
president was Jeff Webb, the
former CONCACAF president who
surrendered 11 high-value watches
towards a $10m bail bond which
secured him house arrest while
assisting the FBI and awaiting his
FIFAGate sentence.
After all that recent history, any
normal individual in football might be
expected to run a mile from anything
which ticks. Not so. Which brings us
back to Grindel.
He parachuted himself into theKeir
RADNEDGE
THE INSIDERleadership of the German Football
Association (DFB) in the spring of
2016 when the German game was
reeling from the fall-out from the
Sommermarchen scandal, which
concerned €6.7m that began as a loan
to the bid committee from the then
adidas boss Robert Louis-Dreyfus
and ended up in the hands of the
aforementioned Bin Hammam.
The outcomes was Swiss and
German judicial and tax investigations
into Franz Beckenbauer and senior
DFB officials Theo Zwanziger, Wolfgang
Niersbach and Horst R Schmidt.
Zwanziger and Niersbach were
president and future president of
the DFB. They, plus Beckenbauer,
are all past members of the executive
committees of both FIFA and UEFA.
This is the dustbin of history into
which Grindel also promises to tumble,
though UEFA may allow him to
continue picking up his €500,
in international honorariums so as
to maintain its numbers on the FIFA
Council at a delicate time.
Back in 2016 the bid cash scandalWatches are
football’s
corruption
currency
Stepping down...
Departing German
FA president
Reinhard GrindelTHE WORLD THIS MONTH
Gifts such as luxury watches work
both ways: as indications of unseen
adhesion and/or as encouragements
of personal and political loyalty