Ask any soccer fan what was on his or her mind in the first week of June last year, and it's most unlikely that they will reply: "Well, I was absolutely riveted by the battle between Lennart Johansson and Sepp Blatter for the presidency of the Federation Internationale de Football Association, aka FIFA". In the event Blatter won the election by 110 votes to 90 - a result that was, like the retirement of the outgoing president of FIFA, the 82-year-old Brazilian Joao Havelange, dutifully noted on the back pages of the world's press.
No, what was preoccupying the average football fan - and many of the front pages - at the time was the mystery of the missing World Cup tickets. Despite repeated statements from FIFA that tickets for France '98 had been allocated responsibly and - given that demand exceeded availability by ratios as high as 5,000 to one - fairly, tickets for even the most unglamorous games were like the proverbial gold dust. For the majority of fans the official ticketing channels had turned out to be a bad joke: in one day in May alone, four million people from the UK had phoned the Paris-based "ticket hotline" in a vain attempt to secure seats. Yet tickets had been turning up on odd corners of the Internet, mostly through American travel agencies, at vastly inflated prices. Were these valid tickets? And if so, where had they come from?
Four weeks and 64 games of fevered football later, there was a new mystery to ponder. What should have been a "dream final" between the host nation and the samba boys degenerated into a "will-he-won't-he" farce involving the teenage Brazilian star Ronaldo. Did he, as the team doctor later stated, have an epileptic fit the night before the World Cup final? And if so, why was he allowed to play - no, not play, but wander through the match like a sleepwalker who had strayed on to the pitch by mistake?
As far as David Yallop is concerned, the mysteries of France '98 were not coincidental misfortunes - "part and parcel of the game", as the old cliche used to have it - but events which illustrate, all too clearly, the rottenness at the heart of international football. And in How They Stole the Game, he flings open the doors of the smoke-filled rooms where the decisions which affect the modern game are made, and, like a terrier with a particularly unappetising rat, repeatedly shakes his allegations of corruption, mismanagement and downright criminality under the noses of the "overweight elderly men" who run it. He doesn't, needless to say, receive any unequivocal answers; but he does assemble a jaw-dropping collection of facts and figures concerning the financing of top-flight football.
It will surely come as a shock to even the most cynical soccer fan to discover that the bill from the Bristol Hotel in Paris for the outgoing - the outgoing, mark you - president of FIFA in June last year came, for six weeks in a £3,500-a-night suite, to £147,000. That the bill for bringing FIFA officials to Spain for World Cup '82 was over £3 million - more than it cost to transport and accommodate the 24 teams. That the financial records at the Adidas sportswear company show an unexplained million-dollar payment to the then president of FIFA, Joao Havelange, in the late 1970s. And that at around the same time, though his position at FIFA was officially a non-salaried one, the same Mr Havelange's expense allowance ran to some £800 a day.
Yallop's thesis, in a nutshell, is that Joao Havelange took football from the fans and handed it to international business interests on a plate, aided and abetted by a varied cast of South Americans.
These are not your average guys - take Eduardo Viana, president of the Rio Football Federation, whose recorded outbursts include "I detest public opinion. The people could all be shot by machine guns for all I care" - and a certain Admiral Lacoste, one-time vice-President of FIFA, charged in Buenos Aires in 1984 with a variety of crimes including the theft of funds from the World Cup Organising Committee's accounts and responsibility for the murder, in August 1976, of the head of that committee, General Carlos Omar Actis. The case against him was dropped after a general amnesty in Argentina in 1989.
If even half of the allegations in How They Stole The Game are true, then the book will dispel any lingering doubts concerning the ugly face of the beautiful game. True, most of the specific allegations of corruption relate to past offences - though Yallop's lively account of the manner in which the current head of FIFA, Sepp Blatter, beat Lennart Johansson in last June's aforementioned presidential contest, which includes a tale of a million dollars spirited into a FIFA electoral Congress in white envelopes courtesy of the Emir of Qatar, seems to have been enough to inspire FIFA to try and stop publication of How They Stole The Game in Holland. They lost. Nor does Yallop - who has published the English-language edition of the book himself, under the delightfully-titled imprint Poetic Publishing - seem to hold out much hope of a golden future, given his condemnation of the hanky-panky concerning the British bid to host the World Cup in 2006.
With seven investigative best-sellers behind him, Yallop spills his beans in considerable style. Though it shows signs of having been written in a hell of a hurry - there's an intriguing little gap on page 289 which could be filled with either the word "before" or the word "after", utterly changing the impact of the sentence - How They Stole The Game is engagingly passionate in its defence of football as a sport, with lyrical, sometimes devastatingly effective "action replays" of magic moments from matches past, and sympathetic references to individual players. Pele, in particular, emerges as a sort of crusading super-hero of the kind who just might be able to save soccer from the suits, if he gets enough support; but Yallop's theory that Ronaldo was pushed on to the pitch for last year's World Cup final, doped to the eyeballs to kill the pain of an injured knee and still dazed from a pre-match panic attack, simply to fulfil the requirements of Brazil's $400 million sponsorship deal with Nike would, if true, be a sickening indication of just how much soccer has changed since the days when, in Yallop's phrase, "product placement meant a tin board with Oxo written on it".
The book is structured like a whodunnit, kicking off with a leisurely study of the life and times of Joao Havelange and gradually gaining momentum as it proceeds to a final, furious epilogue, with its bleak summation of the current state of play at English Premiership matches.
"Many thousands of supporters earning less - often far less - than the national average regularly pay over a significant part of their weekly wage for the right to applaud on and off the pitch 22 millionaires . . . "
You're not singing any more? Too right. Read this, and you'll be too busy weeping.
Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times jour- nalist.
