The stink’s in Europe too

Gold, silver, bronze. With world football’s three most powerful administrators now on the podium of alleged infamy, FIFA has ceased to exist in any moral or bureaucratic sense and needs to be taken over by the Swiss government like a corrupt bank.

There are no grounds for thinking elections, a change of leadership or “reform” from within can change a culture embedded over decades. To call it a tide of scandal is misleading. FIFA has not been struck by evidence suddenly called into being. The crooked city-state presided over by Sepp Blatter has its foundations on a swamp that dates back to 1974 and the start of Joao Havelange’s reign. For 40 years or so, FIFA has gorged itself on the world’s favourite sport.

The catharsis, proclaimed many times before, is really here. And with Michel Platini’s ban, they can all stop whispering that this is a problem of Blatter’s cronies in the developing world. The Europeans tried to pretend that global “patronage” was at the root of the malaise. Lesser African, Asian and South American states were keeping Blatter in power: Guaranteeing him their votes in return for money and influence.

Now, with Platini offering a risible explanation for FIFA’s nine-year delay in paying him £1.35 million (S$2.89 million) for “consultancy” work, football’s crisis of governance is being felt in the heart of Europe, at a body that manages the Champions League, the world’s greatest club competition, and will stage the next international tournament, Euro 2016, in Platini’s homeland.

Besides European probity (he denies wrongdoing), another theory to have taken a hit is that Platini is a “football man” whose dream is to save the game from charlatans. On his own divine path to Blatter’s job, Platini presented himself as the soul of football, a majestic former player with the brains and the charisma to outflank career bureaucrats at FIFA House. Until, that is, we learnt that he took two million Swiss francs (S$2.9 million) from FIFA shortly after electing not to challenge Blatter for the presidency the last time around.

Perhaps, most importantly, we can now dispense with the notion that the head never knew what the body was doing. Blatter’s shtick has been to play the wronged grandfather whose family has betrayed him.

Employing a Messianic language beyond the merely Orwellian, Blatter even tried to pose as FIFA’s chief reformer, the only viable saviour of an organisation that has demeaned the game it was meant to protect during his 17 years in charge.

The twinkle in his eye has long since departed, though he still promises vindication. But lest anyone extend one shred of credit to FIFA’s ethics committee for carrying out work that should have started decades ago, it ought to be remembered that this process really started with investigative journalism, the FBI and Swiss prosecutors, who realised they could no longer ignore American allegations of corruption in Blatter’s Vatican.

A mass exodus of global corporate sponsors has also given the guardians of FIFA’s morals a hurry-up.

There are no solutions from within an organisation that had to be forced to confront its own venality, and which despatched the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar in a bidding process that stank to heaven.

The (English) Football Association, which continues to back Platini’s candidacy for the FIFA presidency, subject to outcomes, now makes the astonishing suggestion that the FIFA executive committee should meet in an extraordinary session to discuss the mess. Like Greg Dyke’s embarrassing endorsement of Platini, the FA’s belief that a FIFA executive meeting is what is needed points to a complete misunderstanding of the scale and depth of the scandal. It assumes, too, that a group of solid citizens can be assembled at FIFA HQ to take the next step.

Too late for that. The final proof these problems are endemic is the interim appointments made after Blatter and Platini (UEFA) were provisionally suspended, along with Jerome Valcke, the FIFA general secretary — the three men on the podium (all protest their innocence).

FIFA is now in the hands of a man, Issa Hayatou, censured by the International Olympic Committee for receiving money he claims was for his Confederation of African Football. Meanwhile UEFA are defying FIFA, backing Platini and refusing to appoint as their caretaker Spain’s Angel Maria Villar Llona, who tried to block the original Garcia investigation into the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bids.

To football fans, FIFA must resemble that scene in Martin Scorsese’s Casino, where the takings are bundled up in a counting room and sent off to mobster stakeholders.

And now Platini’s unhealthy relationship with Blatter and FIFA has placed Europe centre stage in a scandal it liked to depict as World Cup-related and therefore confined to a different Swiss lake.

All across Europe now, teams and players are fighting their way into Euro 2016 at the end of an entertaining qualifying campaign. For what? So UEFA’s leaders can play pork-barrel politics?

The IOC president, Thomas Bach, whose organisation was almost destroyed by the Salt Lake City affair, was closer to the mark when declaring “enough is enough” and calling on FIFA to appoint an “external presidential candidate of high integrity”. Since Eliot Ness is no longer with us, Bach must mean a former United Nations secretary general, or someone of that calibre.

But a first step is for Swiss prosecutors to occupy FIFA House, declare it a crime scene and suspend it for a lot longer than 90 days. THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

About the author: Paul Hayward is the Telegraph’s chief sports writer