Did English World Cup bid team really avoid FIFA’s muck?

… How “Three Lions” can still change the globeOne of the suggestions to the English FA, after a humiliating end to its 2018 World Cup bid, was that it should abandon the immoral global football governing organisation that is FIFA and start an alternative body.

The noise that followed this off-the-cuff retort was not a clamour by the rest of the world to join the disgraced superpower.

Make no mistake about it, England is truly disgraced. Australia is too. But not for the reasons that they think.

I recalled a scene in the spy thriller “Traitor” that showed suspected terrorist Samir Horn (portrayed by actor Don Cheadle) being roughed up by an enthusiastic FBI agent. The agent’s more even-tempered and distinguished partner Roy Clayton (played by Guy Pearce) offered to stop the abuse. Horn was not interested. The only difference between you and your partner, Horn pointed out, is that he knows he is an asshole.

I thought of Horn’s pointed statement when the England FA bid chief Andy Anson bemoaned the supposed treachery of FIFA vice-president and Trinidad and Tobago Football Federation (TTFF) special advisor Jack Warner.

“When people look you in the eye and promise you something,” said Anson, “you hope they live up to their word, but clearly that hasn’t happened.”

Presumably, Anson then withdrew his life savings and wired it for jailed Bernard Madoff to invest and sent his wife and any daughters he has for a weekend with golfer Tiger Woods.

If Anson’s brilliant plan to bring the World Cup “back home” rested on the integrity of the likes of Warner then I think Prime Minister David Cameron’s inquiry into their failed bid would be a very short one. Either Anson is the daftest Englishman since Mr Bean or he does an awfully good impression.

The Football Federation of Australia (FFA) arguably topped the “whinging Poms”.

“Somebody sent me a very aggressive e-mail calling me a loser,” revealed a FFA 2022 World Cup bid consultant. “I said ‘I didn’t lose’. Football lost…

“The most fundamental mistake we made... is that we played it clean. I’m not accusing anybody. I’m just telling you that Frank Lowy’s motto from the outset was: ‘… We’ll do everything we possibly can, we’re going to do the best possible bid, but there will be no inducement’.”

The name of the consultant was Hungarian businessman Peter Hargitay, who once spent seven months in a Miami cell accused of cocaine trafficking and was twice acquitted of the charge in Jamaica and the United States. Hargitay’s claim to fame is his supposed friendship with FIFA heavyweights like President Sepp Blatter, German legend Franz Beckenbauer and Warner. (Hargitay was among the guests at the 2010 Under-17 Women’s World Cup final in Port of Spain).

And Hargitay’s “clean” Australian bid—that picked up one vote, believed to be from Beckenbauer—involved gifts of pearl cufflinks and necklaces that, when made public by journalist Nick McKenzie of the Melbourne Age, prompted a FIFA investigation which naturally revealed that FIFA officials saw nothing wrong with free pearls.

Warner, never shy around gift horses, also had the FFA at least partly sponsor Trinidad and Tobago’s Under-20 World Cup preparation—never mind the fact that the team was already being funded by the T&T government.

Hargitay, according to the Age, prodded the FFA to keep the gifts flowing. He shook his head at Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd when he offered a bottle of wine to Warner.

“A bottle of wine is a bit cheesy/cheap if not embarrassing,” Hargitay allegedly wrote in a leaked document published by the Age. “If anything, a case is more of an idea.”

Hargitay also allegedly asked the FFA to extend week-long taxpayer-funded trips for journalists that various FIFA officials wished to woo.

Warner reportedly offered the name of then Trinidad Guardian reporter Francis Joseph as a “journalist who is important to him at this time”. Indeed, Joseph, who is now Warner’s employee at the Ministry of Works and Transport, is a key figure in the TTFF’s appeal against a court order to pay bonuses to 13 Germany 2006 World Cup players.

Warner claimed that the “Soca Warriors” breached the confidentiality clause of their arbitration agreement by leaking information to Joseph. The players insisted that they never spoke to Joseph.

Joseph, incidentally, never made it to Australia but then 2010 was a busy year as he was helping Warner’s coalition party win control of the government in the general election.

Anson and his bidding team, David Beckham included, could not have been ignorant of Warner’s skeletons. When England travelled to Port of Spain on June 1, 2008 for a friendly match that obviously meant more to the FIFA executive committee member than it did to the European nation, they met a Caribbean team still hurting from a TTFF blacklist, which sidelined the majority of World Cup players who had publicly questioned Warner’s accounting. England romped to a 3-0 win with embarrassing ease.

Anson and Beckham were back in Trinidad, three months ago, to hold a football festival at the CONCACAF Centre of Excellence in Macoya—a compound that Warner runs with absolute authority.

I found it interesting that the David Beckham Academy, which closed its doors in London and California in 2009 for financial reasons, would stump out money for a six-day camp that catered for 200 children and also included a slew of British coaches who would have incurred travel, accommodation and meal expenses. But my requests for financial transparency got nowhere with the English contingent.

“That is for David Beckham to answer,” said Anson, before immediately aborting my interview.

 “The cost is irrelevant,” said Phil Mepham, Media Coordinator for the 2018 bid. “We are not getting into that.”

 “I don’t know how much it costs,” said Beckham, “but as long as the kids are happy…”

 There was a caveat too from England’s most recognizable player.

“Hopefully if we do get the World Cup,” said Beckham, “it would continue.”

It is arguably not a head-turning inducement but it surely is one all the same.

FIFA’s “Rules of Conduct” regarding the bidding process forbids “any benefit, opportunity, promise, remuneration or service to any of such individuals, in connection with the bidding process” as well as “any kind of personal advantage that could give even the impression of exerting influence or conflict of interest, either directly or indirectly, in connection with the Bidding process such as at the beginning of a collaboration…”.

There has been much speculation about shady incentives tendered by the eventual winners Russia and Qatar. But, even if Beckham’s promised return and Australia’s funded trip did not set Warner’s pulse racing, that does not make the offerings as innocent as the parties might suggest.

England tried to get away with just showing a bit of cleavage in the bidding war but they were dealing with men who expect a lot more from their dates. So Anson’s protestations about the indignity of the process sounded hollow and hypocritical.

Four years ago, Beckenbauer visited Trinidad in the build-up to the Germany World Cup. I had just exposed a World Cup ticket scandal after finding that Warner had diverted the country’s ticket allocation to his family company and was charging locals an extortionate rate to support their team.

I asked Beckenbauer what Germans thought about Trinidad and Tobago’s citizens being priced out of attending the competition in this manner. His response was as direct and authoritative as his tackling. “That is not our business,” he said, before turning away.

And that is the way the big football nations have treated the problems of their smaller relatives. Jamaica, Guyana, St Kitts, Antigua, Ghana, Greece, Poland, Dominica and even Trinidad and Tobago—to name a few—stood up and questioned FIFA at one time or the other. On every occasion, powerful European nations that might have made a difference shrugged their shoulders or, in England’s case, helped the bully—in the same way that the bidding team sought to take the sting out of the BBC Panorama report directed by the excellent sport investigative journalist, Andrew Jennings.

Trinidad and Tobago defender Brent Sancho, whose dreadlocks were memorably tugged as Peter Crouch scored the opener in a 2-0 2006 World Cup win for England in Nuremberg, could not even get into the ground when England visited Port of Spain, two years. His only crime was a call for transparency from Warner.

Anson might have echoed Beckenbauer’s sentiment.

“Not our business.”

But the world is smaller than you think.

Warner’s blacklist meant that attacker Kenwyne Jones, among others, did not play the requisite number of international matches when, in 2007, Sunderland swooped in to poach the talented player from Southampton. Jones begged the TTFF to explain the extenuating circumstances but was met by silence. It took a plea from his World Cup teammate and ex-Newcastle goalkeeper Shaka Hislop—in his capacity as then president of the Football Players Association of Trinidad and Tobago (FPATT)—to salvage the deal.

Jones is a hot ticket at present for Premiership club Stoke City but Warner’s machinations might have conjured up a far different scenario for player and club.

Likewise, who knows what the outcome might have been if, instead of averting their gaze, nations like England, Germany and Australia supported countries that were bullied by an autocratic FIFA.

And now Anson wants transparency and expects the world to forget that he spent so much of the past four years so far up Warner’s rear that he might have been mistaken for his Adam’s apple.

England may still lead a revolution against FIFA but, if they expect to find comrades in arms, they must first show that their concerns extend beyond their own shores.

What is the difference between Anson, Hargitay and Warner?

Just ask Samir Horn. 

(Courtesy www.caribbeanicon.com)