I’m so glad that sporticidal Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, got to enjoy his second-term victory speech two weeks ago entirely free of spoilers. “Nobody talks about crisis at Fifa any more or rebuilding it from scratch,” he announced from the stage. “Nobody talks about scandals or corruption – we talk about football. We can say that we’ve turned the situation around. This organisation has gone from being toxic, almost criminal, to being what it should be – an organisation that develops football and is now synonymous with transparency, integrity.”
Mmm. Following the detention of the former Uefa boss Michel Platini on Tuesday, this now joins the ever-lengthening list of things Infantino is wrong about. Or does it? Platini is in some way the most disheartening of all the Fifa round-ups. We had so long come to expect certain behaviours of professional leeches such as Jack Warner, whose only true talent brought joy to no one but their bank managers. That the corruption machine could be even alleged to have devoured perhaps France’s greatest player is a much more tragic state of affairs. Platini has been released without charge and denies all accusations. As he put it: “I feel totally foreign to any of these matters.”
Even so, it must be said the story of Platini’s detention and 15-hour questioning didn’t make the crack it would have back in the day. The spring of 2015 feels rather longer ago than it might. Four years back, a Fifa conference in Zurich was enlivened by the arrest of many senior figures from world football’s governing body. Just after 6am, one late May morning, they were led from the Baur au Lac hotel under bedsheets in a raid on behalf of the US authorities. The coverage was wall-to-wall.
“They were expected to uphold the rules that keep soccer honest. Instead they corrupted the business of worldwide soccer to serve their interests and enrich themselves,” declaimed the US attorney general Loretta Lynch at a New York press conference. “They did this over and over, year after year, tournament after tournament.” Separately, Swiss federal prosecutors announced criminal proceedings in connection with the award of the 2018 World Cup to Russia and the 2022 tournament to Qatar.
Much of the information on which the US was basing its case had been obtained via its plea-bargaining informant Chuck Blazer, the Fifa ExCo member and Concacaf general secretary who rode between vast expense-account dinners on one of his fleet of mobility scooters, ran up a $29m Amex bill and owned a second apartment in his building which was solely for the use of his cats. The building, incidentally, was Trump Tower in New York, which was owned by the man described at the time as “Apprentice star and real estate mogul Donald Trump”.
Yes, rather a lot has changed in rather a lot of places since the Fifa spring of 2015, and in many ways this political turmoil – by no means limited to the US – has been to Fifa’s benefit.
Whatever Infantino might claim, it is hard to escape the sense that world football’s governing body has not got cleaner in any meaningful way. It’s just that everything else has got significantly dirtier. It’s hard not to be thrown into sympathetic relief by the Trump presidency, or the Brexit chaos, or the rise of elected autocracy, or mounting evidence of attempts to influence elections by foreign state actors, or any number of other still-raging news bin fires. A few greedy men being led out of a hotel under their own dirty linen now feels something of a period piece.
Back then, many significant figures were outraged at what they claimed to see in the initial Fifa indictments and allegations. But read retrospectively, Vladimir Putin’s statement on Sepp Blatter’s departure is not short on dramatic irony. “It’s another clear attempt by the USA to spread its jurisdiction to other states,” declared the Russian president. “It’s a clear attempt not to allow Mr Blatter to be re-elected as president of Fifa … And we know about the pressure put on him to prevent the 2018 World Cup from taking place in Russia.” Indeed, we know more now, with the process by which Qatar won the 2022 tournament (for which Platini voted) being a key line of inquiry for the French investigators.
And yet, even the type of elections in which the Russian president was then alleged to be meddling now seem rather quaint given what came after. Putin was said to have offered Platini a Picasso in exchange – an allegation Platini has always denied. But in a world of pee tapes and poisonings and cybersecurity attacks, none of this feels quite the full-spectrum scandal it once was.
The World Cup is still happening in Qatar in 2022, and though Infantino has not succeeded in his plan to further ruin the tournament by boosting it to 48 teams, he will get his way on this front for 2026. Meanwhile he was elected unopposed this month, despite being dogged by various financial and patronage-related allegations from the very start of his presidency. He has denied them all, and so far successfully. So perhaps his speech a fortnight ago was right after all. You don’t hear much talk about crisis and corruption at Fifa any more, even if it so often feels as if there may be more to discuss.
Other discussions are louder – and that will be just the way the old gang like it.