When Jack Warner was first suspended from Fifa for corruption in 2011, he was full of fighting talk. "I tell you something . . . you will see a football tsunami that will hit Fifa and the world that will shock you," he predicted.
In the event all Warner produced was an email from Fifa general secretary Jerome Valcke that included a line suggesting Qatar had "bought the World Cup". This information obviously didn't shock anybody, and Warner's tsunami barely created a ripple. Now, following his unfortunate entanglement with the US Department of Justice, Warner is back on the attack. Yesterday he published a video on his Facebook page in which he laid out some of the facts as he sees them.
Warner began by thanking people – his supporters (including those who sent him “blank cheques”); the deputy commissioner of the prison service who had treated him with respect; and especially his family, without whose love and support, etc.; before addressing his current difficulties.
“Nothing I’ve done in Fifa has been inconsistent with the international culture of Fifa,” Warner observed, before posing an excellent question: “If Fifa is so bad, how come the head of Fifa is not?”
Dishonest motivation
Warner then held up a press clipping which, in his view, proved the dishonest motivation of his American tormentors. The headline read: “Fifa Frantically Announces 2015 Summer World Cup In United States”.
The clipping came from the satirical news site The Onion. The story began: "After the Justice Department indicted numerous executives from world soccer's governing body on charges of corruption and bribery, frantic and visibly nervous officials from Fifa held an impromptu press conference Wednesday to announce that the United States has been selected to host this summer's 2015 World Cup.
"We are thrilled to reveal that, for the first time in 21 years, the World Cup will finally return to America, with matches set to kick off today at 5pm local time in Los Angeles," said Fifa president Sepp Blatter, smiling broadly before unveiling the tournament's official logo, a hand-drawn stick figure kicking a soccer ball with "USA 2015!" hastily scribbled in black marker.
Warner reacted with incredulity: “I see that Fifa has frantically announced 2015 – 2015, this year! – the World Cup, beginning May 27th . . . if Fifa is so bad, why is it the USA wants to keep Fifa World Cup?”
It’s easy to laugh at the 72-year old’s apparent failure to notice the article was a spoof, but perhaps 30 years in Fifa have deadened his satirical faculties and taught him that no proposal, however apparently outlandish, can be dismissed out of hand.
Mixed in with the inadvertent hilarity, Warner made some significant points.
“I have made the point over and over, that all this thing has stemmed from the failed US bid to host the World Cup,” he said. “The US applied to host the World Cup in 2022, and they lost the bid to Qatar. A small country . . . a Muslim country. I can understand the US embarrassment that a small country as Qatar, with less than 30,000 people as residents [sic], could overcome them in this way.
“ I can understand their pain, but no one country has any divine right to host a World Cup. And if the Fifa authorities in their wisdom, or lack of it, choose to award the World Cup to Qatar, then so be it. Take your losses like a man, and go.”
It sounds like a conspiracy theorist’s view of the world – did USA Bid Committee Inc really have the power to stick the Feds on the Fifa executives who had rejected their vision for 2022?
Yet even though Warner himself is nobody’s idea of a credible witness, it would be a mistake to ignore what he is saying altogether, because his idea of how the world works is shared by people all over the world. They look around them and see a world where big countries bully small ones and nobody’s bona fides can be taken for granted.
In the US and most of Europe, the news that the Americans were investigating Fifa was greeted with enthusiasm. But in the 133 countries whose associations cast their vote for Blatter, you’ll find many who struggle to see the US as a white knight.
Blatter understands this just as well as Warner. As Fifa president, he has always positioned himself as the champion of the global periphery against the selfish rich countries who want to have it all their own way. He has always been able to rely on the distrust of what used to be called the First World.
Outrage fatigue
The other thing Blatter has always counted on is outrage fatigue. Yesterday, his daughter Corinne defended him in an interview with the BBC. “I can tell you in about two, three weeks nobody’s gonna talk about this anymore,” she said. “Because other news are gonna be top, and he’s gonna work normally . . . ”
The younger Blatter was right about the amnesiac tendencies of the media, which will always be distracted by the next story. But as Lance Armstrong could tell her, the attack dogs of the US government have a longer attention span. Richard Weber, the head of criminal investigations at the IRS, has told the New York Times: "I'm fairly confident that we will have another round of indictments." This time, Blatter's problem isn't going away.
