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The FA were right to call for a delay in the election for FIFA President, but it was a bid doomed for failure.
This morning David Bernstein, Chairman of the FA, stood up at the FIFA congress and asked FIFA members to support his call to defer the imminent FIFA election so it can get its house in order. It's very rare for me to say this, but it made me proud of the English FA.
The recent allegations against the Qatar World Cup bid and the suspension of four of the 24 members of FIFA have cast a dark shadow over the governing body of world football. This was no time to coronate a man who has presided over an organisation which has proved itself to be less effective and more corrupt than any banana republic.
Blatter is the personification of everything that is wrong with football; his recent press conference displayed that he sees running the world football as an old boys' club, and fans to be treated as cash crops rather than keen stakeholders. His recent support for the World Cup bids from Russia and Qatar displayed an appetite for money, not a desire to put on a footballing spectacle.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with trying to make money out of football, as I mentioned in my previous article, football has to be a business. But like all businesses, you have to treat your loyal customers well. Fans from nations such as Holland, Spain, Portugal and yes, England, will no doubt have been put off by the way the 2018 bids were handled.
Similarly, nations such as Australia and the US, who have played in 12 World Cups between them must have looked on in horror as the competition was awarded to Qatar, whose national team was founded in 1975 and whose biggest clubs rarely feature in the business end of the Asian version of the Champions League. Indeed independent Australian Senator Nick Xenophon has called upon FIFA to reimburse Australia the 46 million Australian Dollars spent on their bid, in a race he described as “fixed”.
It therefore seemed that Bernstein was promoting the sensible option. Don't run an election on the backdrop of scandal, corruption and incompetence. Allow a proper election to take place so that regardless of winner, FIFA can come out of this more democratic, more transparent and more focused on the fans who care so passionately about the game.
However, this was doomed to failure. Nations stacked up to express their anger at the English FA for even suggesting such an idea, many still bitter at the way that British papers outed the corruption endemic in FIFA. It is worth noting the four countries who took to the stage to attack the plan: Cyprus, Benin, DR Congo and Haiti, all have records on Freedom of the Press which are questionable at best (although the former two are somewhat more lenient than the latter). The freedom of journalists to investigate is something cherished in this country; it is a sign of the problems in FIFA that it is criticised by those who don't permit their journalists the same freedom.
Most notable, however, was Vice President Julio Grondona, who took a swipe at “the English”, who he described as “always complaining” and begged England to “leave the FIFA family alone”. This is from a man who refused to vote for the English bid, not because of lack of technical or financial merit, but because he wanted the Falkland Islands returned to Argentina. A man who voted for the Qatar bid because “a vote for the US would be like a vote for England”. A man who said in 2003 Jews don't make good referees because “Jews don't like hard work”. If that's the FIFA Family, I think I'd be happy to be disowned.
Ultimately the FA has the most to lose from an incompetent and corrupt governing body. We invest the most money in football each year. The Premier League is the world's leading sports league. British fans are among the most passionate, most loyal and most determined in the world. If FIFA continues to run the sport into the ground, Cyprus, Haiti, DR Congo and Benin simply won't notice as much – none of these countries have ever qualified for the World Cup since 1974, and they don't look like doing so any time soon.
Countries who do have a lot to lose, like England, Scotland and Germany may be fighting a losing battle. It might seem like they are achieving little. But that's easy to say when you don't know what the alternative is – without pressure from countries such as our own, FIFA would be able to get further down this corrupt, short-sighted path it is on. David Bernstein might not have won the vote today, but with 34 countries refusing to vote for an immediate election, he's shown there is a voice for change.
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