Changing FIFA's ways starts at grassroots

As the world was rising up to slam FIFA for turning a blind eye to corruption in its midst, Football Federation Victoria brought us back to what it’s all about with a brief story on its website charting a team’s giant-killing progress in the Mirabella Cup.

Thank goodness for some light relief from the off-pitch issues, I thought.

Football doesn’t muck around with unpopular leaderships – it’s got layers of them. FIFA and FFA’s image problems are well known but even on the local front FFV’s fans all seem to be inside FFV. If the rank-and-file’s opinions count for anything, the game’s governors have all been drawn from some morally deficient priesthood.

It makes no sense, football’s governance looking so light on for talent and integrity; it’s a great game with billions of admirers and hundreds of millions of participants who represent cross-sections of their societies, and yet…

Why do so few football governors have the trust and respect of the football communities they supposedly represent? Why don’t popular and trusted people never have the right stuff to run football?

Moreover, what is this right stuff that’s so essential to being able to run football? Is there a secret handshake involved or herbs and spices?

What are football insiders privy to that soccer knave aren’t, and why do insiders maintain that administrative principles from other sports aren’t transferable to football?

Exactly what is it about football club administration that isn’t self-evident?

The aforementioned Mirabella Cup giant-killers did well. If the A-League is our first division, this team hails from perhaps the sixth division with a large asterisk – its league opposition isn’t national or even statewide but from neighbouring suburbs.

The FFV article links to a bigger story that appeared in a Melbourne suburban newspaper about how the club has gone from strength to strength this season now it no longer pays its players.

“We decided, in order to develop a level of stability and strength within the club and the playing group, we needed to remove money as an enticing factor in selecting a squad… the morale levels have never been this high.”

The club’s adventures in amateurism this season aren’t all that surprising; what is surprising is its novelty.

The cost of entry into professional football is so high even before the player payments kick in it seems barely plausible a team playing in front of a thousand spectators could manage it, let alone the 300 this club calls a good crowd.

What the club must have endured having registered professionals or even semi-professionals on its books? Reams of paperwork, contracts, lawyers and player agents and insurances and fees and levies to the federations and the PFA plus all the extra scrutiny from the football and government authorities a clubs has to cop when it opts for professionalism over amateurism.

It’s a good effort for such a modest outfit, crossing all those Ts last season, and it must have or FFV wouldn’t be highlighting it as a good-news story. Had it not, FFV’s investigators would be into it with the ferocity they reserve for the most heinous of crimes against football.

Under-the-table payments that take more scheming than just filling out the wrong paperwork; it simply can’t be done without crossing a fistful of legal, constitutional and moral lines.

To keep payments to “amateurs” hidden from opponents and federations necessarily involves deceiving the club’s own members and officials entering into the land of lies and denial, which is a dangerous place for club officials to be when the books have already been doctored once to account for illegal player payments and there is nothing else standing between the club and other frauds but those same officials’ unimpeachable honesty and propensity to be forthright with the truth.

Naturally given the gravity of the threat they present to the game’s fabric, the football penalties for paying players illegally are draconian even before the civil and criminal laws kick in to help deter others from cooking the books and corrupting defenseless community organisations.

For such a serious crime against football though, there are still lots of anecdotes around the grassroots about under-the-table payments. Maybe they are just scurrilous rumours concocted by supporters to damage their enemies’ reputations?

Either way, it’s a terrible look for football as the impression it leaves even if one doesn’t believe clubs are corrupt, is of a lot of clubs claiming other clubs are corrupt.

There doesn’t even have to be a skerrick of truth in the stories that illegal player payments are rife at low-level grassroots clubs.

If enough club officials merely believed it was endemic they might cease to see under-the-table payments as corruption on the grounds everyone else was doing it too and begin to think of it as legitimate football administration model.

In that environment a naïve club official could find themselves running with the pack without their being fully cognisant of the crime’s magnitude on football’s statutes.

That’d be a fair old skeleton to have in one’s closet if one ever decided to embark on a career in football politics – one’s effectiveness would be compromised from day one.

Football politics is a closed shop to those outside club hierarchies. The politicians are appointed by club officials and are accountable to club officials.

Those who grew up wanting to be a FIFA knob need a club behind them or they can’t get to first base. Clubs are the training ground for the game’s governors; it is where they pick up first-hand knowledge of how football works; that all-important right stuff.

Under those circumstances you wouldn’t want the governors in training at clubs engaging in dodgy practices or the whole rotten cycle could become self-sustaining; old compromised governors keeping the door open for new compromised governors with the right stuff and who would understand the sensitivity of the situation were rorting of players’ amateur status so widespread that it might cause some to question whether some clubs weren’t in fact profit-taking businesses masquerading as amateur sports clubs.

Keep that paradigm running a generation or two – the malicious rumours say it’s been going on for three or four – and corrupt club officials having it a bit both ways by paying in cash and hiding in the shady areas between professionalism and amateurism might feel at home at FIFA as the principles are the same; football can be a business or it can be sport or it can be – whatever suits the argument at the time.

FIFA reports hundreds of million of dollars in profits yet it is registered in Switzerland as a tax-exempt non-profit community sports organisation to which anti-corruption laws do not apply. It’s non-profit status is justified on the grounds it cuts red tape, saves everyone a few bob and liberates it from the shackles of accountability that normally apply around buckets of other people’s money.

On paper the state federations, constituted as they are of club representatives who often have backgrounds in club administration themselves, might be deeply reluctant to crack down on illegal player payments if they were harbouring anxieties about their own clubs’ behaviour and their roles in it that might jeopardize their political careers it were to come to light.

Fortunately there is no evidence of FFV soft-pedalling in regard to illegal player payment investigations and the club corruption that underpins it – none whatsoever.

A good thing too – a state federation being seen to ignore evidence under its nose about under-the-table payments would be a terrible look when the game is undergoing a government-initiated independent review.

Football revenues are phenomenal; Victorian clubs collect from juniors alone nearly $20 million over and above FFV’s registration fees. A governing body turning a blind eye to not just sporting scandals in its midst but ones involving cash-in-hand tax-evasion would go over like a lead balloon.

The Crawford Report’s advice to get club powerbrokers out of the halls of governance probably carries more weight these days, but that’s not to say change is nigh.

Whatever the Smith Review says, history says club officials are so protective of “the game” they would sooner see it go down in flames than have outsiders who don’t have the right stuff interfering in their delicate non-profit operations.

The club powerbrokers will have the support of those on clubs’ payroll too – if amateur clubs can even have “payrolls”, although the hundred million dollars or so “amateur” grassroots football clubs around Australia are collecting from participants annually suggest they probably do – and there must be enough of those for governments to think they are speaking for “the game” and not some morally deficient priesthood leeching off it.

Keen as some in the football community are to see FIFA and FFA reformed there will enormous resistance from “the game” to interference in the workings of grassroots clubs.

Draw one’s own conclusions about who in the near future voices strong objections to greater scrutiny and controls on grassroots clubs and why.