Only sponsors can hit FIFA where it really hurts

Even Franz Kafka could not have scripted the metamorphosis that men of supposed honour and probity undergo when they slip into their FIFA robes. Truth-seekers turn, within the ghastly citadel that is FIFA House, into enemies of the truth.

It says much about the gravy train to which Football Association chairman Greg Dyke has grown accustomed that a £16,000 (S$32,500) Parmigiani watch left in his Rio hotel room is regarded as but a trifling trinket.

It is equally telling that Hans-Joachim Eckert, a diligent prosecutor, distils the iniquities of the 2018/2022 World Cup bid process into 42 pages of glib exoneration for almost everybody concerned. Better, apparently, to absolve an entire star chamber of crooks and charlatans than to deprive FIFA’s executive committee of a free gold-encrusted iPad at its next congress in Zurich’s Baur au Lac Hotel.

FIFA is such a contemptible body, so institutionally diseased, that its cynical gutting of Michael Garcia’s corruption report can only be seen as desperate nest‑feathering. For its faceless administrators will go to any lengths to perpetuate the racket that allows them to be treated like heads of state.

The travesty is that none of them, for fear of losing their exorbitant per diems or their courtesy limousines, can be persuaded to do the right thing by blowing the top off the whole hideous enterprise.

History teaches us that it needs only one insider to “go rogue” for sport’s bastions of cronyism to come crashing down.

When Marc Hodler decided in 1998 to act as whistle-blower on vote-rigging around the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had no option but to re-invent itself.

The world of FIFA’s band of self-serving apparatchiks is one of zero scrutiny, zero accountability, where a purported “non-profit” organisation can keep a billion-dollar cash reserve and where outrageous tax exemptions go unchecked by the Swiss government.

By antagonising New York attorney Garcia, it has made a potentially powerful enemy. Garcia’s decision to accuse Eckert of “materially incomplete and erroneous representations” of his work gives only a vestige of hope that the truth will ultimately be exposed.

One route open to Garcia is to assist the FBI. He is married to a federal agent and was a former FBI investigator himself, so it is little surprise his 430-page investigation is one to which the FBI has already requested access as it sifts through the dealings of FIFA executives.

The FBI is understood to be intensifying, rather than downscaling, its inquiries into how the Russia and Qatar World Cups came into existence and could yet bring charges against FIFA.

There are signs its grubby antics are alienating the companies that have spent far too long offering support. This month, Emirates chose to end its sponsorship deal, with Samsung widely believed to be following suit. Would that the same could be said of a US firm such as Coca-Cola, which to date has not offered a single ethical objection to FIFA’s culture of bribery and chicanery.

It is tempting to cross fingers that Emirates’ principled stance might be a tipping point in the fall of FIFA and yet, predictably, another Gulf state airline is ready to step into the breach. A company, would you credit it, by the name of Qatar Airways.

The only other means of nobbling FIFA would be to assemble a coalition of the willing, preferably including England, to stage a World Cup boycott in 2018 and 2022. Naturally, this is a prospect improbable to the point of dreams, given the degree to which the Football Association depends on the revenues from qualifying and merchandising to survive.

The power to cleanse the FIFA swamp thus rests with the sponsors.

Propitiously enough, the round of bidding for commercial rights to the 2018 and 2022 World Cups is soon to begin, and it is up to the suits at top-tier backers Coca-Cola and Sony to have the courage to withdraw from the charade. Their capacity for making a difference is self-evident when even FIFA marketing director Thierry Weil acknowledged that “without the support of our sponsors, the World Cup would not be possible”.

At some point, these corporate behemoths are duty-bound to separate their romantic notions of the football itself from the filthy edifice of corruption that underpins it.

Visa has shown that it is not devoid of moral fibre, cutting off links with Russian banks over US sanctions. It, like its minted counterparts, has an ethical obligation to hit sport’s most loathed dictatorship where it hurts.

Money, after all, is the only language that FIFA’s wretched parasites understand.

Oliver Brown is the chief sports feature writer at the Daily Telegraph.