Please, FBI, investigate the 1966 World Cup – if only to shut up Greg Dyke

Marina Hyde in The Guardian


 

‘There is a huge section of fans – and, clearly, administrators – with absolutely no idea how much England is detested within world football, nor any idea as to why.’ Illustration: Andrzej Krauze

You know when World Cups started being corrupt? 1970. And anything up to and including 1962. Between those dates, there was a brief and ineffably beautiful interregnum in the chicanery, which thereafter was never allowed to happen again. Why? Well, there was a global sense, really, that the sainted custodians of both tournament and trophy during that time were simply too exquisitely mannered, too morally faultless, too humble, too generous-spirited, too brilliant at football ever to be permitted to shame the rest of the world in this manner again.

Did you enjoy that story? If so, you may be Greg Dyke, or have suffered a recent head trauma. Either way, please seek help immediately.

The Fifa scandal erupted a mere 10 days ago, and it took barely two of those for England to make it all about itself. Ooh, you’ve no idea how they treated us during the bid process. Ooh, the main thing about this is that we should be given one of the disputed World Cups. The scale of the FBI takedown of Fifa is vast. England is like a diner in one of the ground-floor restaurants of the Towering Inferno building, wondering how what’s going on upstairs is going to affect its drinks order. Odd how they underplay the fact that England’s bid team gave the wives of the executive committee – their wives! – Mulberry handbags. This isn’t being “above” bribery. It’s being unable to get out of the group stages of bribery.

Already, culture secretary John Whittingdale has announced that England is ready to host the 2022 World Cup, should Qatar be stripped of it. Newsflash, buddy: at their current rate of acquisition of English landmarks, Qatar will already own all our major stadiums and half our infrastructure by 2022, so that’ll be just the sort of pyrrhic two-fingers in which we specialise. Yes, Qatar, you’ll know we’ve really beaten you when England lose to Paraguay in the opening match of the tournament at Liverpool’s Qatar Airways stadium (when you go down the tunnel on to the pitch there’s a spine-tingling sign that reads “THIS IS DOHA”.)

I say “we”, but there is no longer a “we” as far as the Fifa exposé goes. We had a good innings, being all in it together. People who don’t even care for football were remarking how watchable footballing arrests were. The utter insufferability of Sepp Blatter was something we could all get behind, while his victory last Friday was an election result on which we could all agree, so soon after our own one, on which we couldn’t.

But the point-missing parochialism was always in the post, and its arrival marks the end of the cross-party, cross-club, cross-everything love-in that has characterised the Fifa story.

From phone-ins to frontbenches, you now cannot move for Little Englanders telescoping world football down to their concerns. At their notional helm is FA chairman Greg Dyke, who did such a bang-up job dealing with the Hutton inquiry that he’s decided to come and bring that same grasp of nuance to what he presumably imagines to be his moment on the global stage. I suppose the best you can say is that there’s less left to damage with English football than there was with the BBC. But really, there hasn’t been a managerial double whammy like it since André Villas-Boas swept from Chelsea to Tottenham.

Historically, there have been few statements less guaranteed to fill you with confidence than “this is a matter for the FA”. Unless you count something like “this is a matter for the Jockey Club”, whose two-legged overlords were traditionally intellectually outclassed by their four-legged underlings. The competition to be the worst-run British sporting body is always hard fought, but the FA has won the title more than any of the others.

And they look to have another in the bag with their reflexive prejudging of corruption allegations, ill-advised speculation about the FBI investigation, and jingoistic bleats about how unfair it all is. It’s just a marginally more self-regarding version of throwing cafeteria furniture across a city square in a Sun-issue Tommy hat. They are naturally supported by said newspaper, whose Pooterish idea that Sepp Blatter was paying attention to what was in their leader column saw it declare in 2010: “Today the Sun makes this plea to Mr Blatter and Fifa. Don’t be put off by the BBC rehashing ancient history. Despite BBC muck-raking, the Sun trusts Fifa to put football first.”

Even our football-loving prime minister is just another Englishman whose criticism of Fifa is based solely on self-interest, as opposed to principle, and whose pettiness only serves to underscore the global perception that our position on everything is based on sour grapes. Back in 2010, he too criticised the British media for daring to investigate Fifa, while the bid team called it “unpatriotic”. Cameron has spent the past week falsifying his anti-Blatter history while failing to disguise his belief that nicking the 2018 World Cup hosting rights would be the perfect money-shot to his prime ministership.

England ready to host 2022 World Cup in place of Qatar, culture secretary says



Consider these powers the perfect spiritual leaders for a tribe whose analogue is probably those Americans who genuinely hadn’t a clue they were even disliked before 9/11. There is a huge section of fans – and, clearly, administrators – with absolutely no idea how much England is detested within world football, nor any idea as to why. And no interest in getting one.

Ideally, each and every one of them would be forced to attend a six-week residential course in which a series of instructors prepared detailed presentations on the matter, which concluded with the rhetorical inquiry: “Do you now understand why everyone thinks we’re just absolutely massive arses?”

Unfortunately, I am told that given the numbers involved this is not a scaleable solution. In which case, just for the merriment, please, please let the FBI open an investigation into how hosting rights for the 1966 World Cup were won. I don’t even care about international law any more, or the increasingly bonkers mission creep which has seen the US announce additional probes into the 2010 and 2014 World Cups, as well the 2018 and 2022 vote, and which will now clearly end in this being the US’s legal equivalent of Nam. I just want someone – anyone – to bring home the realisation that we really are the Ukip of international football. And, increasingly, of international life.

Do Ched Evans or Amir have an automatic right to rehab in sport?

 Kamran Abbasi in Cricinfo

The Pakistan board's unseemly haste to bring Amir back reflects poorly on it  © AFP

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Ched Evans is a footballer trying to resurrect his career. He is also a convicted rapist. Evans says he is innocent and since his release from prison he is looking for a new football team. First, he made plans to train with his old club, Sheffield United, but the public outcry was such that Sheffield United distanced themselves from him. Any subsequent opportunities with other clubs have ended abruptly following protests and threats by sponsors to end deals. Evans and his supporters argue that he deserves a chance at rehabilitation.

A few weeks ago, Ramiz Raja questioned the rush to return Mohammad Amir to professional cricket. The crimes of Amir and his fellow spot-fixers are different to that of Evans, of course, but the principle championed by Amir's supporters is the same, that he deserves a chance at rehabilitation. Ramiz spoke from the heart, of how it would feel for other players to welcome back a cheat. Pakistan's linguistic innovator has also worked as chief executive of the Pakistan Cricket Board. He speaks from board and broad experience.

Rehabilitation of offenders is an important principle that has benefits for individuals and society. No doubt that Evans and Amir and other sportsmen who commit a crime during their sporting careers have every right to be rehabilitated, but the question is whether or not they have an automatic right to be rehabilitated back into the sport they have dishonoured?

Some professions take criminal conduct so seriously that practitioners can be disbarred or struck off. The medical and legal professions are prime examples. Decisions to end careers are difficult. Professional bodies, for example the General Medical Council and the Bar Council in the United Kingdom, are responsible for making judgements on whether or not individuals are fit to practise. Hence, a barrister who has committed rape or a doctor who has made fraudulent financial claims for patient treatments will probably be judged by the relevant professional council to be unfit to remain in the profession. A doctor or barrister can be rehabilitated into society, find alternative work, but any career as a doctor or barrister will be finished.

Some professions take criminal conduct so seriously that practitioners can be disbarred or struck off. The medical and legal professions are prime examples

Society rightly demands high standards of doctors and barristers since they hold positions of influence and power. A professional sportsman is influential too, even powerful, especially in a privileged position as a role model to thousands and millions of adoring fans. Why then should a sportsman have an automatic right to return to a profession? Why shouldn't he be judged by high standards too? Role models are immensely powerful in sport and brushing over serious misdemeanours risks diminishing the gravity of the crimes. Rehabilitation back into the sport might cause offence to team-mates, fans and victims. Being disqualified from a sport might be the most powerful deterrent to future spot-fixers and rapists.

None of this reduces the onus on society and professions to support the rehabilitation of offenders. Each case requires careful consideration by a suitably qualified governing body equipped to make judgements on the seriousness of offences. But just like other professions of influence and power, rehabilitation shouldn't necessarily mean rehabilitation back into a sport. Unlike medicine and law, sport isn't geared up to make such sensitive and profound decisions. The ICC, FIFA, and national bodies like the PCB and the FA, must ensure that codes of conduct for standards of behaviour are in place and that they are enforceable.

Ramiz began to articulate that Amir and other fixers from Pakistan and elsewhere should not be rehabilitated back into professional cricket. Dissenters in England argue that Evans should not be rehabilitated back into professional football. The governing bodies of cricket and football must consider mechanisms to put the honour, reputation and values of their sports before individual and corporate gain.

This will be an unpopular view for fans who have an emotional attachment to a tainted star. Amir's case is a perfect example, tugging at our heartstrings. His role in the spot-fixing of 2010 might be judged to be too minor to bar him from cricket? But the unseemly haste to return him to international cricket reflects poorly on the PCB and ICC. A code of conduct panel for cricket might judge that other spot-fixers and match-fixers should never return to the sport. It might even decide the same for Amir?

Either way, the current systems and processes of the ICC and PCB, like the governing bodies of other sports, seem to miss the point on rehabilitation. Sport, as we are reminded each time a great player retires or moves on, is far bigger than any individual.

If we're going to cry foul over Fifa, then we should at least hold our banks to the same standard

Mary Dejevsky in The Independent

Modern life provides many opportunities for bafflement, but the continuing capacity of the British to regard themselves collectively as paragons of public virtue never ceases to amaze.

This week we have seen the lid taken off two prominent areas of our national life – banking (again) and football – to reveal something quite unpleasant beneath. But the response has been – in the first case – to insist yet again on “just a few bad apples” and – in the second – to attack a report that was so misguided as to exonerate Qatar and Russia over their World Cup bids, while fingering England (how dare they?) for being economical with its observance of the rules.

I remember vividly my response to the first reports that bankers in the City of London were suspected of fiddling the Libor rate. I was horrified. Was Libor – the London inter-bank offered rate – not the benchmark for international banking? The standard-setter? If Libor was being manipulated, what did this say about the soundness of UK banking generally? How and why had anyone been able to cook the books for so long? With something as fundamental as Libor, why were there no fail-safe mechanisms for checking?

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The two questions that I asked most often, though, were the most basic. How come the only remedies being mooted were fines on the institutions – fines that would ultimately be paid to a large extent by you and me, the taxpayers, seeing as how we had rescued these banks by taking them into public ownership? And even more basically, why had the reputation of the City of London not been tarnished beyond recall? The Prime Minister and the Chancellor were still, it seemed, lavishing time and energy trying to secure some arrangement with Brussels that would minimise the damage to the City from tighter eurozone regulation. Frankly, why bother? Let City banking lie on the bed it has made.

It then transpired that not only Libor was being rigged, but the foreign-exchange market, too, with gung-ho bankers exchanging jocular emails about what they were doing. And not only doing, but getting away with, until last year. What was the price for such cynical profiteering? More fines on the institutions, no doubt plea-bargained down, and again likely to be paid, one way or another, by you and me. Is it not passing strange that the offending emails could be cited verbatim, but that those who sent them remain unnamed? Even stranger, that there are apparently no criminal charges yet being brought? Oh yes, the Serious Fraud Office is apparently looking into that possibility, but such a tentative response hardly inspires confidence.

 

As a journalist, I find it hard to believe that hacking someone’s voicemail warrants something akin to a show trial and a prison sentence, but swindling the country out of millions of pounds isn’t treated as a crime – at least not one that anyone shows much eagerness to prosecute. Are there frauds that are too big or too brazen to punish? Even the reputational damage seems limited. Far from being diverted to Frankfurt or New York, the money, it seems, continues to roll in. Or is this perhaps a reflection of the sort of money that now flows through London; a quality of money and banking that deserve each other? 

And so to the “national game”. When Fifa published its report into allegations of corruption during the most recent bidding process, and essentially absolved Qatar and Russia, the initial reaction here in Britain seemed to veer between disbelief and resignation. After all, Qatar’s bid had succeeded despite summer temperatures that are now requiring the whole global football schedule for 2022 to be rewritten, while questions over Russia’s capacity for bad behaviour are hardly new. When it emerged, however, that Fifa had put someone in the dock for rule-bending, and that someone was England, the response was apoplectic. Righteous indignation hardly begins to describe it.

The fury was palpable, with MPs talking about a “whitewash” and the English FA categorically rejecting charges that it had tried to “curry favour” with the former Fifa vice-president, Jack Warner, despite a list of actions that at least permitted such an interpretation. The former English FA chairman, Lord Triesman, accepted the findings as “legitimate” and “embarrassing”, while also insisting that the report reflected Fifa’s “dislike” of England.

Already turbid waters were further muddied when the US lawyer, Michael Garcia, who actually conducted the inquiry, complained that the report contained “incomplete and erroneous representations”. There is now pressure for his findings to be released in their entirety. But the self-justifying anger the report prompted in London leaves a sour taste and suggests a verb that can be conjugated “I entertain; you offer encouragement; he/she/it gives bribes”.

One consequence could be that the next time the UK casts aspersions on the probity of an Arab state or Russia, the polite response will cite pots and kettles.

What I fail to understand is why the same seems not to apply to the City of London and its banks.