Some of those who have profited from football and athletics over the past three decades have been brought to book but the champagne should be kept on ice
Far from shaking off a hangover on New Year’s Day, the dank fug that enveloped world sport in 2015 as it lurched from crisis to crisis like a drunken reveller looks set to only intensify in the coming months.
For those looking through a glass half full, the past year was one where light was finally shone on dark corners and the stench that had emanated from the black granite boardroom in Fifa’s opulent $300m headquarters for decades began to clear.
It was the year when the scale of the alleged corruption at the world athletics governing body was brought to public attention in such a violent and jaw-dropping manner that it is becoming increasingly clear that the sport is faced with an existential crisis.
And yet, for all that the turn of the year is traditionally associated with a desire to look forward with optimism, the actions of those supposedly leading the clean-up from the inside have so far done little to inspire confidence.
Criminal investigations in the US, Switzerland and France will take their course and more revelations are imminent about just how deep this corrosive culture of patronage, corruption and culpability runs.
All the while, trust in sport will continue to ebb away. In football the irony is Fifa has endured the darkest year in its 111-year history as the game continues to boom around the world – commercially and culturally. Even while at its lowest point in the wake of the dramatic Baur Au Lac raids on 27 May, Fifa’s officials were busy putting the final touches to what was an organisationally successful women’s World Cup in Canada.
For millions of children around the world, Fifa 2016 still meant a new video game to rip open on Christmas Day rather than a byword for corruption and the cartoonish, gluttonous excess epitomised by Chuck Blazer – the former Fifa executive who ratted out his colleagues when faced with a tax bill for millions of dollars on undeclared ill gotten gains.
But meanwhile, the game was being hollowed out from the inside by the actions of those who might yet end up killing the goose that laid the golden eggs by robbing international football of its power and primacy. Not only by those who brazenly lined their own pockets by taking cuts of TV deals, World Cup tickets and other scams but by those who tolerated and encouraged such practices. And those who looked the other way or pleaded ignorance, happy to carry on turning up for meaningless committee meetings, staying in luxury hotels and picking up generous expenses (and expensive watches).
And those, such as their now disgraced leader Sepp Blatter, who used the system they created to propagate a lifestyle and sense of power and entitlement from which they became indivisible.
Look at the bribery allegations that have now enveloped just about every World Cup bidding process since 1998 and they all have in common the fact that money was channelled to voters for development purposes that was later pocketed as bribes.
At its most nefarious, this meant the US Department of Justice alleging the former Concacaf president Jack Warner had misappropriated funds meant for Haiti earthquake victims. At its most brazen, it meant Blazer with his globe trotting tour of world leaders and his apartment for his cats, skimming millions upon millions of dollars from commercial contracts on an industrial scale.
But it was also an everyday practice for many of those that inhabited the shameless universe painstakingly revealed by Andrew Jennings and David Yallop more than 15 years ago. Further back, Blatter was spawned by Horst Dassler, the Adidas scion who looms so large in the commercialisation of modern sport, and João Havelange, the now disgraced Brazilian who minted the modern Fifa way.
If the US investigations have mostly centred on the US, Central and South America for the simple reason that those were the payments channelled through American accounts, then it would be naive to assume similar cascading layers of payments and favours were not also at work in other parts of the world – the revelations are likely to tumble forth for months if not years to come.
And as the rapid downfall of Michel Platini from Uefa president and hot favourite to succeed Blatter proved, as the once-revered three-times European player of the year struggled to explain away a £1.35m payment, Europe was far from immune.
A year that began with a shabby Fifa TV rights deal with Fox to smooth the path to moving the Qatar 2022 World Cup to winter at a meeting in Doha ended with the sight of Blatter, frail but still defiant, promising to fight on against his eight-year ban in the face of all available odds. The fact he and Platini exited railing against the unfairness of the Fifa ethics committee, so often shamelessly used by Blatter to punish his enemies and suit his own ends, was one of many ironies behind their demise.
But now the mighty have fallen, the question is: what next? Those behind the reform proposals that will be voted on in February at the same extraordinary Congress that will elect Blatter’s successor are privately vigorously arguing they will set the tone for a new Fifa. They argue the emphasis should be on the new structural blueprint they will lay out rather than the misdemeanours of the personalities currently passing through Brooklyn courtrooms.
There are two problems here. One is the fatigued notion that we have heard it all before. Reform road maps, transparency pledges and vows of good governance have been endlessly promised down recent years sometimes by the very people now under arrest or cast from the game in disgrace.
The public has every right to judge Fifa on actions rather than words, even if a promised reform package that includes separation of executive powers, term limits, streamlined committees and greater independence is voted through by its 209 members (no foregone conclusion).
The second is that the most detailed governance overhaul in the world will amount to no more than putting lipstick on a pig if it does not go hand in hand with a wholesale reform of the culture, personnel and practices at the top of world football – including, crucially, at each of the confederations that supply its most senior figures.
On top of that, it is hard to take the promises entirely seriously when they come from the mouth of Issa Hayatou – the Cameroonian acting Fifa president who is a veteran of the bad old days and was recently cited by Blatter as his closest ally in football (despite having stood against him in 2002).
Censured by the International Olympic Committee for his part in the ISL scandal, Hayatou recently changed the rules at the Confederation of African Football to allow him to extend his tenure as president to more than three decades. So when in the introduction to February’s Congress agenda he promises “a new culture of transparency and accountability that will help to restore Fifa’s reputation and change perceptions of our organisation for the better” we can be forgiven for withholding judgment.
Likewise, the parade of five candidates for the next Fifa presidency do not exactly inspire confidence even as a battle for control of the administrative side of the organisation rages amid the power vacuum within Fifa House. Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim al-Khalifa, the Bahraini Asian Football Confederation president who is the favourite, remains a target for trenchant criticism from human rights groups for his alleged role in quelling pro-democracy protest in 2011 and recently claimed the US arrests were nothing to do with Fifa but purely an issue for the confederations. Nothing he has said or done thus far inspires confidence his Fifa would be anything other than more of the same with a few licks of paint. How did that song by The Who go again?
As such, it is impossible not to be convinced by those who continue to argue with impeccable logic but seemingly little chance of success that the only sensible course of action is to shut the whole place down and press ahead with an external reform process. Running a sport as globally successful and powerful as football should not be complex, but the internecine internal politics and global power struggles make it so.
And if you thought things were bad at Fifa, the situation in athletics is arguably even more grim. Even the worst that Warner could dream up did not affect the integrity of the sport itself, as the central accusation that senior IAAF officials – including the president, his son and the head of the anti-doping unit – suppressed positive drug tests of Russian athletes does.
Football gets along very well without a fully functioning Fifa, but athletics is a sport on life support. Sebastian Coe, the British sporting icon who was a vice-president for seven years under Lamine Diack and succeeded him in August, faces a crucial first three months of 2016. The nuances of Lord Coe’s message have no chance of getting out while he struggles beneath the growing avalanche of allegations, proven and as yet unproven, submerging his sport.
Even if some of his missteps (paying homage to his now disgraced predecessor Diack, failing to align himself with the brave whistleblowers and investigative reporters who brought the situation to light) could be partially explained away by his electioneering, we are now more than four months on from that moment and the malaise has deepened. Sidetracked by a damaging row over his association with Nike and now having to explain why his right-hand man, Nick Davies, was apparently concocting a plan to combat negative press and massage the release of positive drug tests in 2013 with Papa Massata Diack, the son of the president who is at the heart of many of the most serious allegations, he remains on the back foot. For Coe, it will get worse before it stands any hope of getting better and the jury remains out on whether he is able to sufficiently extricate himself from his complicity in the mess to properly tackle it.
There are also serious structural issues. The World Anti-Doping Agency itself must prove it is fit for purpose – tough regulator rather than purveyor of fluffy educational programmes and PR. And the International Olympic Committee must prove it is not horribly conflicted and compromised itself as the eyes of the world turn to Rio for a Games that was billed in 2009 as a fun packed carnival of sun, sea and sporting excellence.
It has not quite turned out that way. Brazil, mired in an economic slump and facing challenges from ticket sales to sewerage issues in the bay where sailors will compete for medals, has its own issues. Meanwhile, the blazered mandarins of the IOC are battling to reverse a growing tide of public opinion in prospective host cities around the world that the Games are simply not worth the expense and the hassle.
But more than that, as IAAF inspection teams set off for Russia in the early part of January before a decision in March about whether to let them compete in Rio and Dick Pound prepares the release of the explosive second part of his Wada independent report, it will be harder than ever to suspend disbelief. Every two years, broadcasters and sponsors pay billions in the belief that viewers around the world will temporarily disengage from the murkiness surrounding those who govern and sell world sport to gorge on the power of the sporting spectacle and channel the purity of stories of individual heroism from which they draw their power. In Rio, that may prove tougher than ever.
Yet, to end where we began, if there is one aspect of all this that must provide some hope it is that some of those who have arrogantly profited as they have hollowed out global sport over the past three decades have finally, belatedly been brought to book in 2015. That alone is reason to raise a glass to the US Department of Justice, the attorney general Loretta Lynch, the Russian whistleblowers Yulia and Vitaliy Stepanov, the investigative journalist Hajo Seppelt and all those others who got us here.
But the champagne should stay very much on ice until it becomes clear whether the grim catalogue of revelations in 2015 really offers hope of a full stop to a story of four decades of sporting corruption and contagion – or merely signals a pause.
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