Blatter attacks Uefa, EU and media conspiracy for bringing him down
• Insists controversial £1.3m payment made to Platini was above board
• Insists controversial £1.3m payment made to Platini was above board
Sepp Blatter has launched a remarkable attack on the “envy and jealousy” ofMichel Platini – blaming what he called an organised conspiracy of the Uefa president, the European Union and the media for bringing him down.
In a wide-ranging interview with the Russian news agency Tass, Blatter spoke in detail about the £1.3m contract at the centre of Fifa’s decision to suspend him and Platini, and set out his position on the turmoil at Fifa – suggesting he is the victim of an artificial crisis which has “nothing to do with criminal activity”.
Among the issues raised by Blatter in the interview:
• An unsubstantiated claim that there was a pre-vote agreement in place that Russia would host the 2018 World Cup and the USA would host the 2022 tournament – which was undone when Platini pressed for Qatar following a meeting with Nicolas Sarkozy and the crown prince of Qatar.
• An insistence that Russia will not be stripped of the 2018 World Cup, whatever the investigations into the validity of the bidding process turn up. Blatter said the tournament was now “anchored” and could not be withdrawn.
• An attack on the Fifa ethics committee for failing him and imposing a suspension that was “total nonsense … I put these people into the office, where they are now, and they don’t even have the courage to listen.”
• A claim that he wanted to step down as Fifa president after the 2014 World Cup, “but at that time five of the six confederations have asked me at the 2014 congress: ‘Please stay as president.’”
• And an ambition that he will return from his ban to lead the next Fifa congress in February. “If God is with me, I do hope that I’ll be back as president of Fifa. Then I could at least conduct this congress. This is my dream.”
Blatter and Platini were both given 90-day bans after the Swiss attorney general, Michael Lauber, opened a criminal investigation into allegations that Blatter mis-sold a TV rights contract to the former Fifa official Jack Warner, and made a “disloyal payment” to Platini in 2011. Blatter and Platini both deny wrongdoing.
Discussing the £1.3m payment, Blatter set out his recollection of events for Tass, saying: “When [Platini] was chairman of the organising committee for the [1998] France World Cup, he told me at the end of the Cup: ‘I would like to work for you.’
“I said this is great because we all already worked with him. And then he said that I am very expensive. I said OK. So he said: ‘I am worth one million a year.’ I said I cannot pay this, it’s impossible. And he said: ‘OK, then pay me later.’ So we have made some contract, where he got some money, but not one million. He was working until he was elected in 2002 to Fifa Executive Committee and UefaExecutive Committee.
“He stopped his working contract because he was then an official of Fifa. He never touched this issue until 2010. In 2010 he approached the financial director of Fifa by saying: ‘Hey, listen, Fifa owes us money.’ I was informed about that and I said, OK let him make an invoice of this what we owe him. And then he said we owe him two million Swiss francs. And then I analysed that and I said OK. Yes, it’s a contract we have made. It’s a principle I have in my life that if you owe money to somebody, then you pay it. Then we paid it. That’s all. And this money was not paid for any other reasons.”
Elsewhere in the interview, though, Blatter is far less conciliatory towards Platini’s position, blaming the Frenchman for whipping up the turmoil surrounding world football’s governing body.
Claiming Uefa had led a campaign to remove him for the last three years, Blatter pointed towards a “personal attack” by Platini, and a wider European agenda involving the European Union.
“Who has been involved in this attacking situation towards the Fifa president? Politics. The European Union. Because this matter was then discussed in the European Union and if you go to the history, the European Union’s parliament has taken resolutions twice – first, Blatter shall not be elected. But that is political interference in sport. And after being elected Blatter should go out. Twice they did it. The European Union Parliament.
“Platini started it, but then it became politics. And when it is in politics, it is not any longer Platini against me, it is then those who have lost the World Cup. England against Russia. They lost the World Cup. And the USA lost the World Cup against Qatar. But you cannot destroy Fifa. Fifa is not the Swiss bank. Fifa is not a commercial company. So, what they have done together with the Swiss, they have created this attack towards Fifa and the president of Fifa.
“And you are from Tass and you know what are the problems between your country and the US. The Fifa World Cup or the Fifa president is a ball in the big political power game.”
Blatter said Platini’s dislike for him was because: “He wants to be Fifa president. But he had not the courage to go as the president. Fifa is working well. Since I became president of Fifa, we have made Fifa a big commercial company. And this naturally provokes envy and jealousy.”
On how Qatar ended up hosting a World Cup, Blatter claimed there was an agreement in place before the voting began that the 2018 tournament would go to Russia and 2022 to the USA, until Platini intervened.Asked when they fell out, Blatter said: “It was after he was elected Uefa president in 2007. One year we were the best friends. And one year later in the 2008 European Championship in Switzerland and Austria I was sidelined by Uefa. And since then I never went to Uefa competitions because it’s non-respect, not to me as a person, but to the office and the people I represent. He could not [explain it]. Uefa is affected by anti-Fifa virus for years. They have an anti-Fifa virus.”
In comments that will provoke further controversy over World Cup bidding – with England, Spain/Portugal and Belgium/Holland having spent tens of millions of pounds on the process – Blatter said: “In 2010 we had a discussion of the World Cup and then we went to a double decision. For the World Cups it was agreed that we go to Russia because it’s never been in Russia, eastern Europe, and for 2022 we go back to America. And so we will have the World Cup in the two biggest political powers.
“And everything was good until the moment when Sarkozy came in a meeting with the crown prince of Qatar, who is now the ruler of Qatar. And at a lunch afterwards with Mr Platini he said it would be good to go to Qatar. And this has changed all pattern. There was an election by secret ballot. Four votes from Europe went away from the USA and so the result was 14 to eight. If you put the four votes, it would have been 12 to 10. If the USA was given the World Cup, we would only speak about the wonderful World Cup 2018 in Russia and we would not speak about any problems at Fifa.”
On which of the seven candidates he now favours to replace him, Blatter said: “At least 140 national associations cannot exist without Fifa. And these people want somebody who goes on with the same idea that football is not only the Champions League. This is also very important for me, for my legacy that somebody’s coming in and trying to go on with the development of football. Personally, I think most of the candidates here would like to do that, with the exception of Platini.
“I’ll tell [my successor]: don’t forget that Fifa is the most valuable institution in the world. On one side, our game is best in discipline and respect. It’s a school of life for all its players. And secondly, it’s a game that gives you emotions. And today emotion is very important. Emotion and hope because in football you lose today and you can win tomorrow. It creates people with a positive thinking.
“Football is connecting people. It brings people together. It makes bridges. This is football, and this we cannot abandon.”
If Uefa had any moral backbone it would consider withdrawing from Fifa
The only way these seven Fifa presidential candidates could be considered new brooms is if they were placed next to a recently unearthed fossilised sweeping implement believed to date back to the early Iron Age
“I cannot deny something that I haven’t done,” declares the Fifa presidential frontrunner Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim al-Khalifa, a statement which suggests he can only deny something he has done. He certainly denies having headed up a committee which identified dissident athletes during the 2011 Bahrain pro-democracy uprisings (many of whom were imprisoned and tortured), despite an announcement at the time by Bahrain’s official government news agency that he was to take this post, and an Associated Press report from the same era which also described him as the committee’s chair.
“It’s not just damaging me,” he frets to the BBC of these mysterious contemporaneous documents, “it’s damaging the people and the country.”
And I’ve no doubt the sensitivities of the Bahraini people are always his primary concern. Still, I hope no one ever tells Sheikh Salman that his country is consistently ranked near the very bottom of any index that measures freedom, his family’s regime considered among the most authoritarian on the planet. The shock of it could give him a fit of the vapours.
Yet for a man who has not clocked up a whole lot of hours inside the democracy simulator, his grasp of electoral politics is strong. Given that the vast majority of Fifa’s member associations have about as much interest in the organisation being cleaned up as they have in football, Sheikh Salman has moved quickly to dismiss the mad idea that what Fifa actually needs is a genuine outsider to begin the mammoth task of reform. As he told the BBC: “You wouldn’t put a baker in charge of a bank.” Debatable. What if it was 2006 and Mr Kipling expressed an interest in running Lehman Brothers?
It looks like we’ll never know, because the list of runners and riders for the Fifa presidential election is finally in – and it does not make an exceedingly good read. Behold, seven good men and true. Well, seven men, anyway. To the untrained eye, the headshots of the candidates could easily be mistaken for one of those increasingly familiar galleries of Fifa executives who are wanted or already charged by prosecutors.
Indeed, Michel Platini occupies the intersection of the Venn diagram, being both under investigation for corruption and a candidate in the great anti-corruption election. I assume he is deluded enough to imagine himself the Aung San Suu Kyi of this process – under the equivalent of house arrest, yet still standing on heroic principle.
Back in the real world, meanwhile, the only way these men could be considered new brooms is if they were placed next to a recently unearthed fossilised sweeping implement believed to date back to the early Iron Age.
Almost the most excruciating entrant of all is the 11th-hour candidate, Uefa’s Swiss general secretary Gianni Infantino, who was clearly pushed forward by a European governing body devoid of anything approaching serious quality, but desperate to have someone to vote for that wasn’t Sheikh Salman. A Platini lieutenant who indicates wanly that he’d stand aside should his suspended boss somehow manage to get rid of the allegations against him, his last-minute candidacy only serves to underscore the moral inadequacy of the various Uefa members, who can see that the sheikh will likely be the winner but reckon they can just about cover their arses politically back home if they vote for someone else.
What Uefa should really be considering, now they have surveyed the field and the way in which the wind is blowing, is the possibility of withdrawing from Fifa. Nuclear options increasingly feel like the only way to force the radical change the world governing body needs, and if Europe truly was the moral beacon it likes to fancy itself within the game, then this secession would be starting to feel inevitable. When you consider the financial allegations against Blatter are actually less morally repugnant than the human rights ones against Sheikh Salman … well, what are you really saving your depth charge for? Megatron to get through to the second round on a bye?
As for whether such a game-changer is even remotely on the cards, the smoke signals are not encouraging at present. It doesn’t help that our own emissaries to European HQ are the FA chairman Greg Dyke and his vice-chairman David Gill, who have reportedly told the FA council “the only people they could really trust within Fifa and Uefa are each other”. I don’t want to dampen any flicker of optimism but it might help to think of them as Bob Hope and No Hope. These are the men who precipitously declared their support for Platini, only to see him engulfed in scandal. Yet instead of appearing remotely chastened by a turn of events that could only have been predicted by a few million casual observers of the situation, they had the FA issue a bizarre and wholly reprehensible statement in which they wished Platini “every success” in getting off the hook.
So no one in their right mind can expect the English component of Uefa to show any real backbone. But if only the other, more serious nations would consider it. There really is nothing so terminally craven as forever waiting for the likes ofMcDonald’s or Coca-Cola to take the decisive “moral” stand, or imagining that it will be enough to have one of your own suits lose honourably to a man whose family regime stand accused of torturing footballers.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário