The governing body of the world’s most popular sport, Fifa, was rocked by criminal charges on both sides of the Atlantic this week. US authorities announced that nine football officials and five sports media executives faced corruption charges involving over $150m of bribes. One of the 14 people indicted by the US Department of Justice included Fifa Vice President Jeffrey Webb.
Six people have already pleaded guilty. The Swiss President of Fifa, Sepp Blatter, has not been arrested. In what appeared to be a separate investigation, Swiss authorities raided Fifa’s Zurich headquarters and opened criminal proceedings against unnamed parties on suspicion of irregularities in the allocation of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups (which went to Russia and Qatar respectively).
What the commentators said
Blatter’s 17-year tenure has been marked by “a steady stream of internal and external investigations into embezzlement and bribery”, noted Bloomberg. Little’s changed. A 400-page report by a former US federal prosecutor, for instance, had “the effect of a snowflake hitting a tank” as Fifa’s wouldn’t release it. But things are starting to happen, said The Economist. The US incurs criticism for interfering in other countries. But in this case “it deserves a pat on the back for lobbing a legal grenade into an organisation that’s got away with too much for too long”.
A key player in this is Chuck Blazer, a former Fifa official turned FBI informant over unpaid tax bills. He apparently kept two luxury Trump Tower apartments: one for him and another for his cats, noted The Guardian’s Marina Hyde, while his Amex bill allegedly reached $29m. “It was always going to take the intervention of law-enforcement agencies” to get to the bottom of Fifa’s dodgy dealings, said Matt Dickinson in The Times. Let’s hope “the biggest cleansing job since Hercules set about those stables has only just begun”.