Fifa: It became smelly when gladiators came in

Let us bring football to these pages, for a change at least.

After all, football is making news these days with the ongoing imbroglio around the world soccer governing body, Fifa.

The world body held its elections last week but not outside the shadow of a swoop on officials by America’s Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) on allegations of corruption.

Joseph Sepp Blatter won the elections despite an onslaught by mainly Western media and football officials who did not like his continued stay at the helm of the apex football body.

After winning, he cut a figure of defiance and was applauded by his supporters, mainly from developing countries who stood by him. Then he dropped the bombshell this week.

Sepp Blatter is standing down from the Fifa presidency because of the controversy and the revelations of corruption, bribery, money laundering and what-ill-not, which do not do the image of the beautiful game any good.

And there are more revelations, more muck, bound to come out.

An ill wind

The revelations were a sad day for football. But perhaps its most glorious, too. Many people would have applauded the stepping down of Sepp Blatter and the promise of cleaning the brand of world football that may have been run like a cartel or mafia.

Certainly, Blatter is not considered a very good guy, although his supporters are in a definite number, whether he got the same friendship by means fair or foul. But if the face of Fifa is CAF, in Africa; and Zifa, locally, it is such an ugly one that requires serious and urgent facelift.

CAF is manned by a guy called Issa Hayatou, a hideous, unpleasant and corrupt fellow who has made Africa’s football a preserve for West and North Africa.

He has stayed on the throne of African football for as long as we can remember and he has no intention of calling it a day.

Allegations of corruption and his bigotry are a matter of public African football knowledge.

Locally, we have one Cuthbert Dube who nobody outside of his sidekicks seems to like.

Not that he is any naturally bad a fellow but because his failure as an administrator should have put paid to his sorry tenure.

He sticks on, though, like some venal tick on our national game that he has ill-served and, worst of all, has not had the graces to follow. Campaigns and pleadings to see the sorry back of this man have all but failed and everybody wonders why he doggedly stays on where he is clearly an undesirable person. Of course, it may have to do with the dubious moneys that Big Bad Blatter has been dishing out.

It has to be and that is for the irrepressible Robson Sharuko to tell us. Yes, it is about the money.

And it is ugly, that is why the ridding of Big Bad Blatter should have a knock-on effect on the Cuthbads and Assail Hayatous of this world.

Enter the Americans

Well, Americans are used to playing the hero.

They have done that in wars and geopolitics. They have just done so in football and, boy, they are receiving all the praises from across Britain and Europe!

The gladiators; the heroes.

But then that is where for some of us it goes horribly wrong. You see, Americans are not a great footballing nation – football as we understand it.

They cannot be too interested in football matters, at least the way Europeans are passionate about “their” sport.

However, the Americans and the Europeans all converge on the point that football and the World Cup should not be taken, first to Russia and Qatar for the 2018 and ’22 editions and, generally after to the rest of the world, which trajectory Blatter has been taking. For the two blocs, the case becomes less about football and more about politics – the geopolitics of the old Cold War. At the climax of the Fifa scandal, American and European officials unashamedly called for the revocation of the hosting of WC by Russia and Qatar. Here is one example of what is at stake:

Rupert Myers of the UK Telegraph is against both countries’ hosting of the WC and he does so in a racist fashion.

He complains of anything from “desolate graves of Qatar’s exploited construction workers, hundreds more low-paid, imported labourers” to the fact “that flogging is used in Qatar as a punishment for alcohol consumption and illicit sexual relations”. On Russia, he says: “It is unlikely that Vladimir Putin will unashamedly make the opening ceremony to Russia’s 2018 World Cup a celebration of the annexation of Crimea, or an interpretative dance sequence commemorating the supply of surface-to-air military equipment that resulted in the deaths of 298 people when MH17 was shot down. But the event has clearly been purchased for the further glorification of a president more deserving of the attention of the International Court of Justice than the world’s sporting community.”

Need we say more?

But Myers is not finished.

He declares: “To hell with diplomatic repercussions; every tournament awarded by Fifa must now be re-allocated or boycotted. To do otherwise would be to endorse or condone near-total corruption.”

Europeans have been mulling breaking away from Fifa.

A lot of ink has been expended in similar diatribes.

Safe with Sepp

You begin to think that world football is safer with Blatter, for all his warts. If the racist Anglo-Saxons were allowed free rein in the game, they would administer it in an apartheid manner no doubt. The WC would not leave America and Europe and the lesser peoples would not have a say, less a sample of the game.

That is how they like it and it is for the precise reason why one would stick with Blatter.

He is a better devil.

The politics is just nauseating.

South Africa’s sports minister, Fikile Mbalula noted that, “… it’s for the British and Americans to fight their battles. We’re not part of the vested interests and we’ll never be part of the vested interests. We have fought colonialism and defeated it and we still fight imperialism and we will fight it whenever it manifests itself.”

Even some cool heads in Europe are questioning the role of the US in all this. One commentator on BBC: “Barack Obama’s presidency has been marked by his determination to pull US troops out of foreign conflicts, to admit past mistakes and to say it is not for us to pick and choose which world leaders we like. But is America creating a new legal imperialism?

“Let us just imagine for a minute that instead of Qatar having won the 2022 bid, it had been the US. How would America respond if Russia announced it was to investigate how the World Cup was awarded to the US? Maybe old Vladimir Putin had a point when he said after the FIFA arrests last week — what business is this of America?”

Football is none of US’ business. And this is why this whole episode stinks.