A river of sleaze

 
Jesse Fink Roar Guru

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Agents, player managers, promoters, snake oil salesmen, call them what you will. Be done with the lot of them.

I’ve heard so many stories this week about the ugly side of the football business I’m tempted to hand in the laptop and become an Amish farmer. But it’s not just agents. It’s coaches. Journalists. Chairmen.

Muck galore all the way to the top of the dungheap, FIFA. And I haven’t even been anywhere near the FIFA Congress in Sydney this week. But the sleaze is just part of the game’s “rich pageant” and it’s here to stay. Football incubates corruption and deception, that’s for sure, but when the full story of the Indian Premier League is told, for instance, cricket will make football’s sordidness look as whitebread as an episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show. We ain’t seen nothing yet.

So to the Iraq game, which is back on, but was always going to be.

My former Fox colleague and sometime café buddy Simon Hill has written an excellent piece on the shenanigans leading up to Sunday and I had my own chance to catch up with Simon on Wednesday. He’d just been to a press conference on the Tuesday by Sepp Blatter and was convinced there was more to the story that met the eye. Back to the sleaze again. Gag the man!

Undoubtedly the core of this issue is former Uday Hussein crony Hussein Saeed, who’d temporarily lost his job as president of the Iraq Football Association until his pal, Blatter, stepped in and demanded his reinstatement. At times like this I wish Andrew Jennings was in town to ask the hard questions, but being banned from any FIFA event anywhere in the world, he has as much chance of pegging down Blatter as I do dating Sophie Marceau. Sigh.

Just know this: FIFA likes to parade itself as some paragon of virtue, raising the spectre of “government interference” in the sport from time to time to crack down on recalcitrant (read uncompliant) FAs and paint itself as the good guy. But the reality is the bandying about of the words “government interference” usually has more to do with whether Blatter’s support base is being compromised.

An Iraq-style situation was averted two years ago in Cambodia when Khek Ravy, the president of the Cambodian Football Federation, was asked to vacate his post by the Hun Sen regime to make way for its own man, military goon Sao Sokha. Ravy was a committed supporter of Blatter. FIFA stepped in and Ravy kept his job, albeit as vice-president under Sokha.

Subsequent “elections” for the CFF were held and completely rigged – with the authorities’ tacit blessing. “It’s better that things were worked out beforehand and things are a formality. This way there’s more or less a consensus and there’s no animosity”, Rene Adad, former Philippine Football Federation president and an AFC observer, was quoted by my friend and journalist Charles McDermid in a story for the Phnom Penh Post.

Nothing should surprise anyone in football.

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