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| Uefa’s new broom more reminiscent of Fifa’s new dawn than a revolution | Uefa’s new broom more reminiscent of Fifa’s new dawn than a revolution |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| Once more to Fifa, the Chinatown of sports governance, where you always end up just having to forget it. Dark and terrible things happen, but you have to move on unsatisfactorily. There is no resolution. The only thing you gain is cynicism. | Once more to Fifa, the Chinatown of sports governance, where you always end up just having to forget it. Dark and terrible things happen, but you have to move on unsatisfactorily. There is no resolution. The only thing you gain is cynicism. |
| We begin with the organisation’s ethics committee, a body so relentlessly self-satirising that it would make a North Korean democracy committee look the less preposterous institution. | We begin with the organisation’s ethics committee, a body so relentlessly self-satirising that it would make a North Korean democracy committee look the less preposterous institution. |
| The ethics committee is presided over by Hans-Joachim Eckert, a German judge whose greatest ethical hits thus far include provoking his own chief investigator into resigning in protest at Eckert’s misrepresentation of his report into the bidding and selection process for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. He did, however, partially redeem himself by bringing official proceedings against the former Fifa president Sepp Blatter and the former Uefa president and Fifa vice-president Michel Platini, and then banning them from football for eight years (later reduced to six and then four after appeals). Yet in keeping with his tireless commitment to progress abortion, Eckert has now undone all that by deciding that Platini should be allowed to address Uefa’s congress this very Wednesday in Athens. | |
| Why? I note from Hans-Joachim’s Wikipedia entry that he is a passionate mushroom picker, in which case we must ask if some sort of psychotropic fungus has not found its way into the Eckert basket in recent days. To what else can we possibly attribute his apparently unforced decision to give the disgraced Platini such a platform? Certainly not to Eckert’s own justification – that allowing Platini to take the stage is “a gesture of humanity”. | Why? I note from Hans-Joachim’s Wikipedia entry that he is a passionate mushroom picker, in which case we must ask if some sort of psychotropic fungus has not found its way into the Eckert basket in recent days. To what else can we possibly attribute his apparently unforced decision to give the disgraced Platini such a platform? Certainly not to Eckert’s own justification – that allowing Platini to take the stage is “a gesture of humanity”. |
| Let’s see that shroomery in action. “Uefa formally asked the adjudicatory chamber of the independent ethics committee for an exception for Mr Platini to be able to make a short farewell address to its congress in Athens,” declared the committee in a statement. “The chairman of the adjudicatory chamber, Mr Hans‑Joachim Eckert, granted this exception as a gesture of humanity.” | |
| If you are one of those people who wonders in what other arena someone who had just been banned from said arena would be permitted to address its leading lights, you should probably just relax. I’m sure the General Medical Council are for ever striking off doctors but gifting them a keynote address at the Royal Society of Medicine’s annual conference, while financial fraudsters are promptly invited back to lecture Wall Street (on second thoughts, the latter probably does happen). Even so, there will be those who look at Eckert’s decision-making and wonder whether dice might do a better job. | |
| Still, as so often in the world of Fifa, there is almost always another bigwig behaving in a sufficiently more questionable way to distract from yourself. And in this case, it has to be the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino. I don’t want to go out on a limb here, but I can’t help feeling Gianni’s days as a blandly smiling cipher are rapidly drawing to a close. As you’d expect with someone a mere six months into their new job – and a mere two months after he declared Fifa’s image crisis to be over – Infantino has already been interviewed by Eckert’s ethics committee. He was cleared of any violations, with little things like his refusal to even sign an employment contract – he is a lawyer – and a number of private jet flights regarded as par for the course. | |
| Thus he is in Athens to welcome the election of a new Uefa president, the Slovenian FA president Aleksander Ceferin. Like Infantino, Ceferin has risen without trace, yet has beaten Michael van Praag of the Netherlands, whose outspoken criticism of Blatter over the past few years may be regarded as a blot on his company copybook. Infantino has dismissed reports his staff lobbied for Ceferin, meaning it is entirely coincidental that his campaign was launched shortly after Infantino led a delegation to Slovenia to open a new national football centre. | |
| Even so, I think my favourite coincidental connection in all of this is the one between Ceferin and Tomaz Vesel, another Slovenian whom Fifa just appointed to independently audit its annual income, and Infantino’s salary and bonuses. Would you believe that Ceferin and Vesel play on the same Slovenian football team? I know – what are the chances? | |
| Whatever you do, don’t go putting two and two together to make four. When a connection is this blatant, in this sort of plain sight, it can only be unimpeachable. As Infantino himself put it: there is no conflict or cronyism here. “Everyone plays football, everyone loves football,” he explained in terms that would defo get him off the hook in a formal compliance setting – or certainly a compliance setting presided over by one of the men in question. As the Fifa boss continued: “It’s good that people [who] love football work in football as well.” | Whatever you do, don’t go putting two and two together to make four. When a connection is this blatant, in this sort of plain sight, it can only be unimpeachable. As Infantino himself put it: there is no conflict or cronyism here. “Everyone plays football, everyone loves football,” he explained in terms that would defo get him off the hook in a formal compliance setting – or certainly a compliance setting presided over by one of the men in question. As the Fifa boss continued: “It’s good that people [who] love football work in football as well.” |
| Well quite. The family that plays together stays together – it was ever thus with the Fifa family. As Infantino was stressing just before the vote: “I just hope the one who will be elected will work in a positive way with me as well. A strong Fifa needs a strong Uefa.” And if it all sounds an unnaturally close relationship and as outrageously suspicious as it ever was … well, forget it. It’s Chinatown. | Well quite. The family that plays together stays together – it was ever thus with the Fifa family. As Infantino was stressing just before the vote: “I just hope the one who will be elected will work in a positive way with me as well. A strong Fifa needs a strong Uefa.” And if it all sounds an unnaturally close relationship and as outrageously suspicious as it ever was … well, forget it. It’s Chinatown. |