FIFA messing on Messi’s parade

Football is, and can be, a very beautiful game. If there were any doubt in this regard, last Saturday’s final of the UEFA Champions League, proved emphatically that this is the case. It is not often that any major final is so blessed, but the players of Barcelona F.C., a club incidentally owned by thousands of shareholders, in contrast to the modern trend of ownership by moneybag moguls, treated millions the world over, to a treat seldom served on such auspicious occasions.{{more}} Several World Cup finals have come and gone, European and South American championships, but not one of them have lived up to its billing.

But football has its dark side as well, a side which casts dark shadows over even the most illuminating of performances by those who matter most and for whom the game is played-footballers and spectators. Less than 24 hours after Barcelona’s spectacular display, and just as their players were preparing to bask in the Catalan sunshine and the admiration of adoring fans, those dark clouds of FIFA officialdom rained on the parade of the ‘Lionel King’, as Barcelona’s Argentinian star Lionel Messi has been dubbed.

The torrents, long threatening to burst forward, were contained in allegations of corruption and bribery at the highest levels of the governing body of world sport, FIFA. It resulted in a meeting of the organisation’s Ethics Committee (though there are quite a number of persons who wonder if FIFA has any ethics left). At the conclusion, it was announced that FIFA’s controversial President, Sepp Blatter, had been cleared of allegations made against him, but two of his former staunch lieutenants, Mohammed bin Hammam of Qatar and the mercurial Austin ‘Jack’ Warner of Trinidad and Tobago, both Vice Presidents, had been suspended and are to face formal investigations on bribery charges.

The crux of the matter is that Warner had organised a meeting of the football associations which make up the Caribbean Football Union (CFU), his power-base, at the Hyatt hotel in Port of Spain, on May 10 and 11, at which bin Hammam was present. Warner is accused of arranging for bin Hammam, who was to have contested against Blatter for the FIFA Presidency on June 1, to give each CFU affiliate US $40,000, with the understanding that they would support bin Hammam’s candidacy. Apparently, there has been a falling-out of bedfellows and some set-ups too, for previous allies are now pitted against each other, with a series of accusations and counter-accusations.

Warner’s beans were apparently spilled by a former sidekick, Chuck Blazer, General Secretary of the US Soccer Federation. In turn, both bin Hammam and Warner have turned on long-time mentor, Blatter. The whole sordid affair has brought the game, and FIFA in particular, into disrepute, and has created its biggest-ever crisis as it moves towards its Congress. Whatever the gory details, the picture that emerges is of a den of intrigue and corruption, officials and votes being bought and sold, including the lucrative awarding of rights to host the prestigious World Cup itself. Bin Hammam is being accused, by no less than the FIFA Gen. Sec. of “buying” the rights for Qatar to stage the 2022 finals. Warner himself is no stranger to corruption charges, having been found guilty of misdemeanours concerning tickets for the 2006 World Cup finals.

He is threatening a veritable “tsunami” if prosecuted, and has already fired a salvo against his erstwhile partner Sepp Blatter, openly accusing him of bribery as well. For us in the Caribbean, the whole sordid matter ought to be of grave concern, since it makes out Caribbean people, through their football associations, as objects to be bought and sold for a mess of pottage. We did not fight bitterly to throw off the shackles of slavery to willingly become international commodities and pawns in the 20th and 21st centuries. Worse, Warner is not just a football boss, he is the No. 2 man in the Government of a Caribbean nation, a senior and most influential politician. Innocent he might be, legally, until proven guilty, but the smear cast on our integrity as a people will be hard to erase. Yes, corruption exists all around, but small countries like ours do not have much else on which to stake global claims of excellence but our human resources.

CFU, CONCACAF, and the Caribbean, not just ‘Jack’ Warner, are on trial. As for our own SVG, we await information from the local Football Federation, as to whether we are in complicity.

(To be continued)

Renwick Rose is a community activist and social commentator.