Good on the Football Association for refusing to choose between a devil and a dirt-bag, it sends FIFA a message. Likewise Craig Foster’s 13-point Fossie Report on cleaning up FIFA.
I’m not sure FIFA will be implementing them all, but it sends it a message.
Blatter will say anything to get re-elected – he’s even pretending to get the messages.
Got that? Vote 1 Sepp to save FIFA from descending into an unaccountable pit of evil. Seriously.
I’ve had it here with sending FIFA messages, I don’t think it’s listening. I’ve had it to here with FIFA making a great game look bad and its supporters impotent.
Ideas like Fossie’s – limited tenure for FIFA office-bearers, denying the 24-member executive committee a vote on World Cup hosting rights and giving it to the 208 national representatives, and stringent new rules governing World Cup bids – are all well and good.
But how are they ever going to be effective without the combined resources of Scotland Yard, Interpol and the CIA policing them?
Excuse the wearied tone but enforcement is the problem and it’s not because cops and spooks wouldn’t like to rip into FIFA – there’d be plenty of football supporters in their ranks itching to lay into the scoundrels but their hands are tied
FIFA didn’t set itself up in Zurich for the climate – it’s there to avail itself of the gnomes’ hospitality. Under Swiss law FIFA is registered as – wait for it – a tax-exempt non-profit community sports organisation.
As such it is also exempt from litigation – FIFA can’t be sued, its documentation can’t be subpoenaed or its decisions examined in court. That FIFA has just reported a $600 million or so profit over the last World Cup cycle is beside the point.
FIFA is forever making new rules for itself to live by but they’re just wallpaper – the problem is its capacity for ignoring them and the disaffected having no avenue for redress.
No matter how out of whack with reality a FIFA decision is, it’s as good as irreversible courtesy of the Swiss passport – even complaints from within FIFA itself about a lack of due process against other parts of FIFA are whistling in the wind.
FIFA never has to worry about being taught a lesson in the courts and forced to clean up the mess it’s made with an unconscionable decision; it is quite literally a law unto itself. It never learns a thing. There is no need.
Stripping the voting rights away from ExCo might well send ExCo a stern message as would drafting all sorts of new rules, but short of relocating FIFA into a real-world legal jurisdiction they’re still unenforceable and a bad decision later, around we go again for another lap of the futilities.
That could all be sorted tomorrow by relocating FIFA’s headquarters to Berlin or London or Paris or Timbuktu – just about anywhere outside of Switzerland.
We could write to FIFA about that bright idea but it can be pretty tight-fisted. It’s probably got enough stationery printed with the Zurich PO box on it to last well into the next millennium. Its reluctance to move into a real world of law and order would be palpable.
That’s that, I suppose? FIFA might as well be on the dark side of the moon so far as the broader football community impacting upon it. There is nothing anyone can do. Sigh.
There is something we can do but it’s not wrestling with FIFA or presenting it with good ideas that will never be implemented because they might actually work.
The Swiss sports minister went on the record last December with his concerns.
“It’s clear that Switzerland is obliged to do something to fight corruption as we have lots of international federations with headquarters in Switzerland and we want to set an example in solving this problem. But resolving this issue won’t be easy, as we have the federations with their rules, national and international laws and global problems.…Recent developments [show a] need for swift action because Switzerland must become a model in fighting corruption in sport.”
He’s not alone there – the other seven billion of us would love Switzerland to stop repackaging neutrality as amorality and screwing sport. Switzerland doesn’t even need to reinvent itself as the international superhero of sports corruption fighting – just ceasing to be its enabler would do.
Switzerland is a democracy with an economy and a workforce that pays less taxes than it would if its economy wasn’t quite so awash with sports’ money disappearing up the opaque drainpipes they’ve built to attract it.
Not just football’s money, either.
Being the biggest kid on the block football has the most to lose because it has the biggest bank to rob. Other sports – there are 50 or so with international headquarters in Switzerland – have their blazer brigades’ decision-making sequestered behind Swiss firewalls and stonewalls.
Despite the Swiss sports minister’s professed need for swift action, the dilly-dallying continues. Meanwhile the money continues to pour in. Dear oh dear, what shall we do? The longer the Swiss struggle with their consciences the richer they get.
The Swiss sports minister might think differently with the Swiss trade, tourism, finance and social security ministers on his back about burgeoning unemployment, the imminent demise of Swiss manufacturing and their party copping a hiding at the next election unless their beautiful country stops cynically exploiting the rest of the world’s naïve preoccupations with sport and does something to quell the international backlash.
The Swiss make all sorts of good stuff – terrific stuff, to be honest. It’s a badge manufacturers wear with pride; “Swiss Made”. They emblazon it on the packaging and the blades – you hardly even need to carry a list of brand names.
Swiss made; good stuff brought to you by vandals who broke sport. Not with a ten-foot pole – not their chocolate, their knives, watches, electronic gear and particularly not the rip-off cheese with the holes.
I think that should be our message for FIFA – the Football United Against Swiss Sport Hypocrisies Occasioning Law Evasion product boycott.
No more Nestle, Lindt, Tobler, Victorinox, Logitech, TAG or Rolex or any of that other overpriced garbage their ugly methane-producing planet-killing cows and crumby sweatshops churn out – not until the Swiss show sport some respect and close their bleedin’ loopholes.
I know, those Belgian truffles could kill a brown dog. Get over it. Do it for football.
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