Lord Triesman’s testimony in Parliament may not prove to be quite the defining moment for FIFA that the media coverage suggests. Triesman’s statements have been seen as FIFA’s equivalent of the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) Salt Lake City moment. That ended with the IOC cleaning up its act and expelling 10 members.
My worry is that the Triesman intervention could be great theatre but not lead to any real change.
I say this based on having witnessed an even more explosive drama at the IOC’s headquarters in Lausanne back in December 1998. Then a Swiss lawyer who was in his 80s and one of the most senior IOC members, sensationally alleged that the entire Olympic Movement was corrupt.
That day was even more dramatic than Triesman’s appearance in front of the House of Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport.
Yet, in the end, for all the media headlines that the Swiss lawyer, Marc Hodler, generated, it was not what he said that that led to the IOC clean up. That happened because there was hard-proven evidence of corruption which could not be challenged in court. What is more, the IOC had the will to do something about it. On both counts, the jury on FIFA is still out and looks like remaining that way for a long time.
Let us just go back to that Hodler moment.
Like FIFA now, back in 1998, the IOC was suspected of being an organisation where bidding cities could buy favours. Indeed many cities had done so. A few days before the Hodler outburst, KTVX-TV, a television station in Salt Lake City, had revealed that a scholarship had been provided to Sonia Essomba, the daughter of IOC member Rene Essomba from Cameroon, to attend university in Washington. The evidence for this was an unsigned letter from David Johnson, a leading light in the Salt Lake City bid, to Sonia saying that Salt Lake could not continue to fund her.
The letter had emerged as a result of a fall out within the Salt Lake Organising Committee with a faction wanting dirt on Johnson. For a few weeks, it seemed no more than a local story. Winter Games do not attract too much attention and Salt Lake, a Mormon city, was expected to attract even less.
So, when the IOC met for its final Executive meeting of 1998 over that December weekend, the revelation from the Salt Lake television station caused only a few ripples. Juan Antonio Samaranch, IOC President, asked Dick Pound to investigate, but it was not a major story. The IOC itself was more concerned about setting up its proposed World Anti-Doping Agency. Very few journalists were covering the meeting, so routine was it expected to be. I, personally, was there because I happened to be in Lausanne for what was then a much bigger story – UEFA, threatened by a breakaway European league, was forced to completely reshape the Champions League, allowing the big countries like England four places each.
Image courtesy of Insideworldfootball.biz
But then, after the morning session of the IOC Executive had finished on that Saturday, December 11, Hodler (pictured) suddenly came down to the lobby where we journalists were chatting. He started telling us how deeply the IOC was mired in corruption. He had been a keen champion of Salt Lake, he was worried that the 2002 Games might now be taken away from the city. He asserted that corruption was endemic in the Olympic Movement. What is more, he said that the IOC was to blame. “The cities are the victims not the villains.”
We had the feeling that we were hearing hidden secrets that we were not meant to. Holder gave the appearance of a man who had carried this dreadful secret for too long and wanted to unburden himself. For such a senior IOC member, one who had unsuccessfully stood against Samaranch for the IOC Presidency, to say this was sensational. The reaction of the IOC hierarchy added to the drama.
Up on the executive floor, Samaranch could not believe what was going on and orders went out to muzzle Hodler. It led the irate Swiss gesturing as if a muzzle were being put on a dog. This unscripted performance ended with him being led away from the journalists by a top IOC official, Francoise Zweifel, as if Hodler was her old uncle who had lost his way.
However, his intervention meant IOC corruption, long suspected, could no longer be pushed under the carpet. The IOC knew it had to do something and, to its credit, it did. Within months, the Pound Commission found enough evidence to enable the IOC to act.
But this is crucial. The evidence came not from Hodler, but from the documented proof, provided by Salt Lake City, which the guilty IOC members could not contest. Pound, in his memoirs, Inside the Olympics, has described how, when Hodler came before his commission, he could provide no proof. “To our astonishment he had no facts whatsoever and…he had been speaking solely from hearsay,” Pound wrote. “Furthermore, much of the corruption that he was ranting about turned out to relate to the Ski Federation of which he had been President during the entire period that the impugned conduct had apparently occurred.”
Indeed, the Hodler drama was to have a strange sequel. Many of Hodler’s stories concerned wrong-doing by the Agnelli family with Ferraris being given away so Italy could host the World Ski Championships. Reporting the Hodler outburst, one of the doyens of Olympic journalism, the Italian Gianni Merlo, speculated that he was trying to damage Turin’s bid for the 2006 Winter Games and help the Swiss city of Sion. The next day in the IOC lobby, Hodler confronted Merlo and called him names. Merlo successfully sued and collected damages from Hodler.
Triesman’s allegations are more than hearsay. But they are still his word against that of FIFA Executive members and, unlike Hodler, Triesman made the allegations long after he left the Football Association. Had he done so while still leading the England bid, it might have destroyed the bid, but made more of an impact in cleaning up FIFA. He can now be presented as a football failure trying to get his own back as Jack Warner, one of Treisman’s targets, has already claimed.
The other crucial difference with the IOC is that it had to act to protect its business. It was worried that sponsors might walk away. Following the Holder bombshell, Michael Payne, then IOC marketing director, flew to Atlanta to talk to Coke, a sponsor since 1928 and the Amsterdam Games, to make sure they stayed. There was much worry about insurance company John Hancock, whose chief executive David D’Alessandro, said: “If they fail to investigate, the rings will not be tarnished, they will be broken. A failure to do so will cost the IOC its golden aura and the Olympics will become a mere mortal like the NBA and NFL.”
And this is the key to whether something emerges to change FIFA as a result of this latest corruption story. FIFA, unlike the IOC, is a mere sporting mortal. It demonstrated this over the ISL saga. That story of FIFA and the relationship with its former marketing company after nearly a decade has left many unanswered questions. And, with the investigations in Switzerland now concluded, they may never be answered.
During that saga, we did not hear a peep from FIFA’s sponsors. Unlike the IOC, FIFA’s sponsors, which also include Coke, do not, it seems, care about these stories of alleged corruption. FIFA, like the IOC, understands money. If change is to come, then it is the money men who must do the talking. When they do, FIFA will be forced to act.
Not till then.
May 23rd, 2011 at 8:38 pm
Kiaora Mihir.
I have read articles about the IOC vice-president Juan Antonio Samaranch who being a “facist” who became the IOC’s President in 1980 and the allegations of corruption that he faced after beig summoned under threat of a subpoena to testify before the Commerce Subcommittee at a US Congressional Hearing, held on Capitol Hill – to undergo his first “Democratic Scrutiny”.
“When Samaranch said, ‘we must constantly expand sport’s capacity to open the minds and hearts of young people,’ he might have added, ‘and open their wallets to buy a Big Mac and Coke.’ He created the myth of the Olympic ‘Movement’ while in effect privatising the Games”.
Throughout his presidency Samaranch tolerated if not encouraged IOC members’ efforts to extract personal gain from their power to decide which cities got to host the Olympic Games.
“Bidding cities’ complaints of shakedowns, scams and sexual demands were buried, whistleblowers intimidated. Critical journalists were investigated, harried and sued. Andrew Jennings (my partner) and his co-author Vyv Simson got a 5-day suspended jail sentence for alleging in their 1992 book, The Lords of the Rings, that Samaranch maintained his autocracy through corruption, that he tolerated doping because it helped fuel the record-breaking performances and television ratings that sponsors require”.
“Over Christmas 1998 the shit hit the fan. Box-loads of documents from Salt Lake City’s bid, and then Atlanta’s, spilled out Samaranch’s dirty secrets across the world’s media. Coca Cola, McDonalds, IBM, Kodak, Panasonic, Visa and other global corporations who thought they had hitched their brands to youth, fair play and idealism, found their billion dollar assets shackled to old men soliciting legovers, luxury holidays, knee replacement surgery and college scholarships for their kids.
Fearing a sponsor stampede, Samaranch reluctantly expelled a few dear friends, promised reform and paid millions of dollars to Hill & Knowlton, the ‘reputation’ experts who had defended Union Carbide’s profits from the victims of Bhopal. In a secret dossier that popped through our letterbox one fine day, Hill & Knowlton told Samaranch, ‘This is your Bhopal.’
They called in Henry Kissinger, who had turned freelance since his glory days of carpet-bombing Cambodia, colluding with murderous juntas and winning the Nobel Peace Prize. The Kissinger Associates consulting firm had Coca Cola on its client list. Dr Kissinger joined Samaranch’s hastily convened ‘reform commission’, and came along to lend support on Capitol Hill.
When Samaranch stood up smartly to take the oath, and raised his right hand . . . in my mind his arm shot out, as in the good old days, he clicked his heels, like Dr Strangelove — ‘Mein Fuhrer, I can walk!’ . . .”
There are similar parallels that one can see in regards to the allegations (heresay, I might add) made by Lord Triesman ‘Under Parliamentary Privilege’ which I concur with you, “Triesman made the allegations long after he left the Football Association” which upon reflection says a lot about those who represented the 2018 England bid (him in particular) that had England won the bid, would these allegations have surfaced? Sour Grapes springs to my mind.
Also the mayor Of London, Boris Johnson who withdrew free stay offer to FIFA executives, during the 2012 Olympics…”The Mayor of London had offered the free accommodation for Fifa president Sepp Blatter and his team.
But after Fifa’s decision on Thursday’s 2018 World Cup vote – which saw the England bid get just two votes out of a possible 22 – the offer was rescinded”. SOUR GRAPES and ALSO AN INDUCEMENT TO CURRY THE BID IN ENGLAND’S FAVOUR…LOOK WHO’S CALLING THE ‘KETTLE BLACK’
With the impending FIFA Presidential elections on the 1st June, 2011 in Zurich, which it appears that Sepp Blatter will be re-elected to the position (which I do support) I will be honest, I am biased against Mohamed Bin Hammam for his vigorous attempt to oust New Zealand’s One and ONLY Professional Football Club, The Wellington Phoenix out of the A-League (the club to have been disbanded this year, 2011 unless they packed up and left HOME SOIL to set the club up in Australia…However the timely intervention of Sepp Blatter put paid to that BULLY’S DEMAND!
Life changes all the time Mihir and like the Tide of the Ocean…The ‘Ebb and Flow’ so will FIFA at some stage…’Ebb and Flow’
Kiaora.