A year ago, Fifa’s ethics committee was steadfastly on the same side as its president,Sepp Blatter, with committee chairman Hans Joachim Eckert refusing to make public its own investigation into the bidding for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups public despite the investigator, Michael Garcia, recommending it do so.
Eckert did release a 42-page summary of the report but it was widely criticised and Fifa stated it was "neither legally binding nor appealable”. Garcia resigned the next day as Fifa ethics investigator, saying he had lost confidence in Eckert’s independence.
File picture of Michel Platini (R) and Sepp Blatter. Reuters
On Monday, the same ethics committee chaired by Eckert chose to ban Blatter and Uefa President Michel Platini for eight years each from all football related activities over Blatter’s payment of two million Swiss francs (around $2.01 million) to Platini in 2010-2011. The men claim the money was unpaid salary owed to Platini for his work as Blatter’s advisor from 1998 to 2002. However, the committee decided the payment was a breach of their fiduciary duties and violated Fifa rules on conflict of interest and offering or receiving gifts.
This time around, those accusing the committee of bias were Blatter and Platini. Never one to a miss an opportunity to indulge in hyperbole, Blatter compared the proceedings to the Spanish inquisition in a letter he sent to all 209 Fifa members last week.
“The way in which the investigatory chamber of the ethics committee has communicated on the current proceedings, demanded the maximum penalty and reinforced public prejudgment has reached a tendentious and dangerous dimension. These proceedings remind of the inquisition.”
Platini meanwhile said the decision “has been rigged to tarnish my name by bodies I know well and who for me are bereft of all credibility or legitimacy.”
Both men are, or were, the two most powerful men in world football, so naturally they couldn’t conceive they would be disciplined over a payment for which no written contract exists. After all, neither man had been called to account for their actions before. Unsurprisingly, both men continue to insist on their innocence and will likely appeal the ban to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
But whatever the result of the appeal, the timing of the decision sends a loud and clear message: Fifa is feeling the heat from the investigations by US and Swiss government officials and now no one is safe.
Faced with the choice of closing ranks and standing behind an embattled president, the organisation chose instead to protect itself and send a clearly diminished Blatter out into the wilderness alongside his one-time protégé. Criminal investigations are also proceeding against Blatter — Swiss authorities have said they could take as long as five years — but should they decide to charge Blatter with any wrong-doing, Fifa can proudly claim he is no longer part of the organisation and can point to having punished him first.
Never mind that the payment was made four years ago and was approved of by Fifa, at least tacitly, when the financial accounts for the year were ratified. It was only after the Swiss began to investigate the alleged “disloyal payment” that Fifa’s gears creaked into motion.
It is ironic that Platini, once Blatter’s protégé and until a few weeks ago still seen as the man most likely to succeed him, should be the unwitting instrument of Blatter’s falls. Platini’s ban also opens up a power vacuum both in Fifa and Uefa, and whomever fills it, and how he does it, will signal the extent to which Fifa can reform itself. The bans for Blatter and Platini could be a transformative moment in global sports administration, but it could also end up being merely a temporary glitch as the organisation seeks to deflect attention until the storm blows over.
As Transparency International pointed out in a recent report, the “lack of transparency and accountability is unfortunately not limited to Fifa’s headquarters. Fifa does not systematically require transparency and accountability from its members, the national football associations (FAs) and the regional confederations. Any reform of Fifa will have to make that a priority.”
But doing that would require the same group of people who have benefitted from the existing system to give it up.
It might be easier to try and convince a pride of lions to turn vegetarian.
For the 79-year-old Blatter, the ban means there will be no grand farewell, no laudatory speeches, no last opportunity to rail against his opponents. Instead, it provides an ignominious end to a Fifa career that has spanned four decades, including the last 17 years as president.
Blatter still enjoys plenty of support within Fifa for spreading the game beyond Europe and South America and transforming a once financially strapped organisation into a global powerhouse with billions of dollars in revenue.
But the myriad investigations proved too hot for even Fifa’s political maestro to handle. In the end, Fifa appears to have decided it couldn’t save itself and Blatter. Whether that is enough remains to be seen.
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