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Winning a World Cup bid is difficult enough without the endemic corruption in football, so the fact that a $462,000 Football Federation Australia donation has allegedly been stolen is hardly stunning news.
It’s even less of a surprise that the man who allegedly stole it is Trinidad and Tobago’s outgoing security minister Jack Warner.
Warner’s alleged career-long history of corruption includes copping a FIFA-imposed fine for re-selling World Cup tickets on the black market, allegedly requesting payment for World Cup votes, reputedly pocketing donations made to a Haiti earthquake relief fund and allegedly concealing ownership of the very land upon which the FFA’s near-half million dollar cheque was supposed to improve.
Those who have attempted to expose Warner – including the tireless Lasana Liburd – have typically been subjected to a bombardment of legal harassment by Warner and his cronies.
It’s hard to believe not one FFA executive had read investigative journalist Andrew Jennings’ damning 2006 book Foul! The Secret World of FIFA Bribes, Vote Rigging and Ticket Scandals before Australia composed its doomed World Cup bid.
A quick check of the index reveals the Warner family earned no less than 52 separate references in an exposé devoted entirely to FIFA’s seemingly endemic corruption.
We’ll soon learn more about who knew what inside the walls of FFA headquarters, as the sacked former head of corporate affairs Bonita Mersiades is set to release a book called ‘The Bid’ on the fiasco.
How damaging that is to FFA’s reputation remains to be seen, and we’ll see in time what Mersiades reveals.
That the FFA was willing to pay development grants to far-flung destinations was never in dispute. As far back as 2010, renowned football journalist Matthew Hall was highlighting as much.
However, the fact the concerns of genuine football types like Mersiades and Hall fell on deaf ears doesn’t just highlight that often we only hear what we want to hear, it also says much about our relative immaturity as a football nation.
When the Fairfax investigative journalists Nick McKenzie and Richard Baker first raised their suspicions about the potential waste, if not outright misuse, of taxpayer funds on the World Cup bid, plenty of fans shouted them down as anti-football saboteurs.
Little wonder so many of the football journalists at mainstream metropolitan newspapers seem unwilling or unable to delve deeper into the underbelly of football politics.
Most of the time such journalists are caught in a bind – aware that without cordial relationships with the powers that be, access to key figures and the stories which stem from them could be revoked at any moment.
Yet, even if trained sports journalists find it easier to leave the political coverage to those with expertise in the field, it’s indicative of how toothless the Australian sports media can be when one considers that the eminently mediocre Holger Osieck is still in a job.
Osieck would have been turfed out long ago in any other country, so underwhelming has everything about his tenure in charge of the Socceroos been, yet for some reason the German seems to intimidate all those around him into keeping quiet.
Now the news the FFA has almost certainly been fleeced of $462,000 which would have been better served going towards grassroots football means it’s time for David Gallop to start earning his own considerable pay cheque.
The A-League season just gone was undoubtedly the best in the competition’s history.
But for all the celebratory backslapping going on in the corridors of power, the FFA still has some explaining to do.
Why has almost half a million dollars disappeared? Who suspected that Warner was a crook? And why is the national team going backwards?
Over to you, Mr Gallop.