THE GOLDEN COCOON OF FIFA´S RULING BODY / THE NEW YORK TIMES ( RECOMMENDED READING )

July 17, 2011


The Golden Cocoon of FIFA’s Ruling Body

By DOREEN CARVAJAL

PARIS — The titans of international soccer are used to pampering. Motorcades. Police escorts. Five-star hotels. Lavish dinners. Cash allowances of $500 a day, plus $250 for their wives or girlfriends.


The 24 members of the Executive Committee of FIFA — the association that governs the global game and organizes the World Cup — form an elite all-male club, reaping, along with their various perks, annual salaries and bonuses of up to $300,000. For that, they are asked to do little more than show up for a few private meetings each year to discuss rules, sanctions and legal issues and, most important, to vote on which country will host the quadrennial championship.


Now this elite is under pressure like never before, with one of its own, Mohamed bin Hammam of Qatar, accused of having paid bribes to other lower-level association members in an effort to unseat FIFA’s longtime president, Joseph Blatter.


At the same time, questions still swirl over how Russia and Qatar were chosen as hosts of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, respectively.


But the top of FIFA is such a golden cocoon that few experts believe that the organization’s much ballyhooed internal ethics inquiry of the Bin Hammam affair, scheduled for Friday and Saturday in Zurich, will lead to any fundamental changes.


“It is not democratic and governed by transparency,” said Gunter Gebauer, a sports philosophy professor at the Free University of Berlin. “It’s a male culture of giving and receiving and making favors and taking favors. It’s a culture which in some respects is the same as a gang.”


Indeed, as Bin Hammam faces his ethics hearing, he is one of nine committee members who have been tarnished with bribe allegations in the last two years, most concerning World Cup votes.


At FIFA, there seems to be a thin line between a culture of mutual coddling and outright corruption that dates back many years. Those cultural rituals startled Graham Taylor, a former British soccer player who later managed England’s national team, when he served briefly on an 18-member FIFA technical advisory committee in the early 1990s. During the course of a committee meeting in Switzerland, he was struck by an unusually open ritual when members started gathering in line.


“We stayed in a five-star hotel in Zurich,” Taylor recalled. “We had a five-star welcome dinner and then a five-star lunch after our meeting the following day.


“We queued up like good little boys and collected our cash,” Taylor continued. “One man in the line told me to claim my flight, although it had already been paid for by my football association. He said, ‘Claim everything and then open up a Swiss bank account. Over the years, the money will accumulate.”’


Despite the clouds gathering over the organization, some insiders in the FIFA family insist that it is making strides to clean house. Chuck Blazer, an American on the executive committee who was the whistle-blower in the Bin Hammam bribery affair, said that the work of the ethics committee demonstrated that it was independent and had “real teeth” because it had confronted Bin Hammam and another powerful FIFA executive, Jack Warner.


Bidding nations complain that FIFA’s ethics standards are so ambiguous that some committee members fail to distinguish between cutting deals and bribery. In particular, they cited FIFA’s “legacy” program, which encouraged bidding nations to fund soccer development projects. Australia, for example, contributed about $300,000 to Trinidad and Tobago’s under-20 team to travel to Cyprus. That trip was linked to Warner, who quit after his suspension in connection with the Bin Hammam bribery allegations.

“It was a big mistake when they talked about bids requiring a legacy and how legacy started to be defined,” Blazer said. “People got waylaid by dealing with this issue.”


Although Blazer has been cast as the whistle-blower, on Sunday he faced criticism for his agency, Sportvertising, collecting a 10 percent fee from selling television rights and making sponsorship deals for Concacaf, the regional soccer federation covering North America, Central America and the Caribbean, of which he is the general secretary. That amount reached into millions of dollars, according to Andrew Jennings, a Scottish freelance investigative journalist who has worked numerous times with the BBC. Blazer said the contract was part of his “overall compensation package” and a successful formula to “provide incentive and results” because previously, the confederation had no income.


During his campaign to win the 2018 World Cup for England, David Triesman said he witnessed bribery firsthand and is baffled because FIFA has been unwilling to investigate more of its executive committee members and his allegations.


“I don’t see how this is tenable in the modern age, because we live in a very transparent world,” Triesman, the ex-chairman of England’s Football Association, said in an interview. “For a relatively small governing council, there has been enough criticism that you would think that they would ask, ‘Have we got this right?”’


Earlier, he testified to a British parliamentary committee for culture and sports that four FIFA executive committee members had pressed for various opportunities, including one blunt invitation: “You come and tell me what you have for me.”


According to Triesman, demands included $2.5 million for a Trinidad school academy — with money channeled directly through Warner — and the television rights for a friendly match between England and Thailand.


Two weeks ago, the British parliamentary committee issued its final report, declaring that it was appalled by the corruption allegations, warning: “FIFA has given every impression of wishing to sweep all allegations of misconduct under the carpet.”


Since its founding in 1904 in Paris, FIFA has evolved into an extremely rich organization with $1.2 billion in revenue last year from the sales of television and marketing rights all over the world. With enormous reserves of almost $1.3 billion, it has also benefited from a tax exemption for Swiss sports organizations, a bountiful perk that is beginning to raise political heat in the cantons — Switzerland’s equivalent of provinces — in light of the various corruption scandals.


“They get the same advantages as a yodeling association, but they are so much bigger,” said Roland Büchel, a member of the Swiss Parliament. “I cannot live with that if they don’t behave.”


Given the tax exemptions, Büchel said he was particularly disturbed by an item in FIFA’s latest annual report, released in June, for unspecified “short-term employee benefits.” A total of $32.6 million, 55 percent above the previous year, was paid to key management personnel, including executive committee members.


How exactly that money was divided is secret, as is even basic information like the amounts of top executive salaries. It is yet another example of the lack of transparency at FIFA, which worked with a nonprofit, One World Trust, in 2007 to evaluate its accountability standards, but then did not adopt many of the recommendations.

“There is a strong clash between what the organization is claiming to provide and the way that it functions,” said Michael Hammer, executive director of One World Trust, a London research organization that develops decision-making and governing standards.


Hammer said FIFA money was “used as a stick and carrot to influence the way the organization makes decisions.” Starting with the executive committee salaries — first doled out by Blatter in 1998 upon his election — “people had incentives to work with the president to make sure they didn’t lose their income,” he said.


The luxuries and pampering create an atmosphere in which the elite FIFA family members start to think of themselves in an exalted manner, according to insiders, experts and people involved with bidding nations.


Some executive committee members traveled to bidding nations, laying out demands for development projects, recalled Bonita Mersiades, a former head of corporate affairs for the Australian World Cup bid: “This is the great euphemism for money. You never really know what happens to it.”


Members travel like diplomats, avoiding customs checks and roaring along in motorcades with police escorts. Potential World Cup host nations ply the men with presents: deluxe pearl cufflinks, Burberry handbags, cases of fine wine.


“They are placed in the plushest hotels that are transformed into what they call ‘FIFA clubs,”’ said Alan Tomlinson, a professor and director of research at the Center for Sport Research at the University of Brighton in England. “It’s a bit like a modern version of an old medieval castle, patrolled by the armed guards outside. When I watched FIFA committee members coming in and out of the clubs, they looked very uncomfortable about moving in a normal world.”


Since Bin Hammam was suspended from the executive committee, he has avoided interviews, declining to comment with a simple note: “I am not in a position to talk.” But he issued a public declaration on his personal blog recently that complained about leaks and a biased investigation.


His hope, he wrote, is that any decision about him will rest within the FIFA family — the ethics committee — and “not based on the wishes of people outside.”