Qatar World Cup Investigation: "If Fifa isn't Corrupt, then it's Incredibly Stupid"
By Tom Chivers, The Telegraph UK, 23 March 2014
A billion people going "well, obviously", at the news that a senior Fifa figure and his family were apparently paid millions of dollars by a Qatari firm shortly after Fifa made the decision to give Qatar the 2022 World Cup.
The figure was Jack Warner, formerly the vice president of the football's ludicrous global governing body; he and his sons appear to have received $2 million (£1.2 million) from a company owned by Mohamed Bin Hammam, Qatar's Fifa representative.
Warner had already had to leave his role at Fifa in 2011, after a series of bribery allegations.
The thing is, it doesn't really matter whether the decision to grant Qatar the World Cup was the result of bribery and corruption. If it was, then oh no, Fifa is corrupt (as though this would hardly come as a surprise, given that at Fifa's last "election" for its president, Sepp Blatter was literally the only name on the ballot. Crimean referendums have nothing on this).
But if it wasn't if Fifa actually made the Qatar decision in an entirely fair, even-handed and high-minded way, to the very best of its abilities that's even worse. It means that it consists of idiots who think that a country with roughly the population of West Yorkshire, a country which averages 41C in the summer months, is a sensible place to hold the world's biggest summer sporting competition.
I could go on, and you know what, I will. It's a country which has a large population of "forced migrant workers", or trafficked slaves, to you and me; a country in which male homosexuality is punishable by imprisonment; a country in which criticism of the government is illegal (the poet Mohammed al-Ajami was imprisoned for testing this one out).
If Fifa is a bastion of sea-green incorruptibles, and it still thinks that is the right place to hold a global sporting tournament, then they're just stupid. Fantastically, don't-understand-the-sport-they-govern, not-fit-to-manage-a-fruit-stand dumb.
They're not alone, of course. The list of daft, utterly avoidable crimes against football by all the governing bodies goes on and on. My current favourite is the Uefa decision to expand the neat 16-team European Championships into a 24-team nonsense with "best losers" going through the groups. But you could also have the sprawling mess of the Europa League, the bizarre attitudes to goal celebrations, the fear of any technological help for referees or even just going back and sorting out obvious miscarriages of justice.
The sordid squeezing of every last penny out of TV rights, by spreading Champions League fixtures around all over the place and diluting the competition's impact. It's like they don't actually enjoy football at all.
But those are all arguable, I suppose. Some people might like having a second-rate European club competition which seems to involve 300 matches, or they might like the refs having authority, or whatever. But the Qatar decision exposed Fifa utterly. There is no way a not idiotic person could make that decision without being corrupt; ergo, Fifa are either corrupt, or they're idiots. I don't think it makes a great deal of difference for football's future governance which is the case.
ENGLAND LOSE WORLD CUP. But look on the bright side
Well done Panorama, even if we lose the World Cup