But the hard line taken by Blatter and other top FIFA officials has that unmistakable feel of the Nixon White House in October 1973. Jens Sejer Andersen, director of Play the Game, an international sports ethics conference, said the two year investigation by Michael J. Garcia, a former U.S. attorney who pursued international terrorists, has “opened a mandate for answers for corruption scandals that have haunted FIFA for decades.”
Answers that Blatter and Co. do not want out and the refusal to release the so-called Garcia Report is an obvious and desperate act by a desperate and corrupt administration as it tries to buy time to figure just how damaging Garcia’s investigation is to Blatter and FIFA and what their end game is.
“If people have nothing to fear,” Jim Boyce, a FIFA vice president from Northern Ireland and Blatter critic, told The Telegraph, “they should not worry about information being published.”
Few longtime FIFA watchers would be surprised if Blatter’s next move isn’t to make Garcia a futbol version of Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor Richard Nixon ordered fired after he pushed for tapes of Oval Office conversations. Already Blatter and other top FIFA officials appear to be laying the groundwork for such a move, loudly complaining about Garcia’s request that his report receive “appropriate publication,” suggesting that the request violated FIFA policy.
Among the charges Garcia has been investigating is that Cameroon’s Issa Hayatou, president of the Confederation of African Football and a FIFA vice president, and Jacques Anouma, president of the Ivory Coast Football Federation, were paid $1.5 million by Qatar officials in return for their support of country’s World Cup bid. Amos Adamu, a FIFA member from Nigeria, has already been suspended by FIFA after the ethics committee ruled that he solicited bribes from reporters posing as lobbyists.
Garcia isn’t alone in calling for the report’s release. Sen. Bob Casey, Jr. (D-Pa.) this week also demanded FIFA release the Garcia Report. Casey has also called for FIFA to strip Qatar of the World Cup, citing unsafe conditions for migrant workers on World Cup-related construction projects.
Casey has joined European politicians and Joyce and a new generation of FIFA executive board members such as Joyce Sunil Gulati, the self-important president of U.S. Soccer, CONCACAF president Jeffrey Webb of the Cayman Islands and Ali bin al-Hussein of Jordan, in demanding the Garcia report’s release.
Whether the latest soccer corruption scandal has an ending similar to Watergate with a president resigning in disgrace and a series of top officials in prison could be up to the sponsors and broadcasting partners that have enabled decades of corruption within FIFA and in some cases even been its (corporate) partners in crime.
Under Blatter, the governing body’s president since 1998, and his predecessor Joao Havelange, FIFA has been driven by a single simple and overarching force: greed.
Top corporate sponsors such as Coca-Cola, Sony, Visa, adidas, Hyundai and Emirates pay FIFA between $25 million-$50 million per year. A second tier of World Cup sponsors such as McDonalds, Budweiser and Johnson & Johnson kick in another $10 million-$25 million annually.
It’s time that the likes of Coke and McDonald’s and Budweiser step up and demand FIFA release the Garcia report. Demand that unless FIFA releases Garcia’s work unredacted and with all its gory and embarrassing details you’re cutting FIFA off. No more corporate suites. No more junkets. No more eight-, nine-, 10-figure contracts. It’s long past time for FIFA’s corporate partners to hit Blatter and his crew at the one place they pay attention to: their Swiss bank accounts.
Absent unyielding pressure from the Golden Arches, FIFA’s current plan is for Hans-Joachim Eckert, the organization’s “ethics judge,” to review Garcia’s report while Blatter and FIFA circle the wagons and assess the damage.
Although FIFA has confirmed Garcia’s reports “detailed factual findings (and) reaches conclusions concerning further action with respect to certain individuals,” Eckert said he hasn’t finished reading the report and will not be ready to rule on whether Garcia has enough to pursue disciplinary action against FIFA officials until November.
If Garcia is allowed to proceed with cases against individuals rulings on those cases won’t come until April, FIFA officials said, although it is more likely the decisions would not be revealed until after May’s FIFA elections in which Blatter is seeking a fifth term.
