Sadly, it is hard to argue with Lahm’s conclusion, though it should be noted that there is now an openly gay footballer – Anton Hysén, son of former Liverpool player Glenn Hysén (who coaches Anton’s fourth division Swedish team, Utsiktens BK). Anton came out in March in the Swedish soccer magazine Offside.

Anton is as far as I know the first professional player to openly come out since Justin Fashanu in England two decades ago, and he spoke about the challenges he thought his decision would bring:

I want to prove that there is no big deal if I’m a footballer and also gay. If I perform as a footballer, then I do not think it matters if I like men or women…There will always be people who can’t tolerate gay people, just like there are people who can’t tolerate immigrants. A club might be interested in me and then the coach might change his mind if he finds out I’m gay, but that is his problem not mine.

That’s brave of Anton, but obviously still points to the problematic situation facing players who might want to no longer have to hide their sexuality without damaging their professional prospects. And of course, the spotlight on a player higher up in football’s pyramid would be even harsher.

Tragically, it is still generally presumed in elite soccer circles that coming out would result in prejudice that could even impact on a player’s career on the field, nevermind the abuse players may fear from the terraces or gutter press. Justin Fashanu, a couple of decades ago in England, epitomised all those issues as the world’s first openly gay footballer, disowned by his own brother, eventually committing suicide partly as a result of the homophobia he encountered.

Times are, however, a-changin’ in professional sport. Even a decade ago it would be hard to imagine a Football vs Homophobia day in England being preceded by Justin Fashanu’s induction to the Norwich City Hall of Fame with a banner sponsored by the Justin Campaign, an organisation set-up in Fashanu’s name to fight homophobia in sport.

That said, English football and world soccer in general still lags behind other sports in taking pro-active strides to make its space feel comfortable for gay players. In baseball, the San Francisco Giants recently released a video in support of Its Get Better, aimed at LGBT youth. In rugby, Welsh player Gareth Thomas famously came out last year with very little noticeable negative reaction.

Just as importantly, recently retired England rugby international Ben Cohen – a gay icon but straight and married with kids – has launched a foundation, StandUp, to fight bullying, in particular homophobic bullying, that has attracted international support.

In the NBA, of course, mixed messages are coming out seemingly monthly.

Efforts to fight homophobia in soccer certainly do exist: the Justin Campaign has been a key part of that, receiving considerable support from Brighton and Hove Albion. The English Football Association, in a seemingly well-meaning but misguided manner, bungled the release of an anti-homophobia video just last year.

In the US, the Columbus Crew are organising a tournament for gay and allied players that is welcome. But there has been little done that I know of by MLS or US Soccer on the men’s or women’s sides of the game – which brings us to the difficult question of the culture of the sport beyond just sexuality, but into gender as well. As Jennifer Doyle put it: “Homophobia animates hostility towards the women’s game – so much so, it is indeed hard to tell the difference between it and simple sexism. (For women in many parts of the world – including England – just playing soccer is enough to make you a “dyke” and target of homophobic abuse.)”

It will take work by clubs, governing bodies, fans, gay and straight players to help fight homophobia and discuss these issues in the public sphere, something that could help soccer not only move towards a culture accepting of openly gay professional players but that would also have a positive influence at amateur and youth levels for LGBT youth involved in the sport, and for all who want to enjoy soccer without a side-dish of discrimination.

Who will take the next steps to stand up against homophobia?

I suppose those were the good ol’ days.

As Tim Vickery puts it in an important historical reminder of all that today, there is a reason much of the rest of the world is less up in arms about the Blatter era than the English press.

There was no pre-Havelange and Blatter garden of Eden — just a different FIFA with different defects. With its lack of historical context it is unclear whether the current hysteria in the English press is motivated by a genuine desire to carry the game forward on a global basis — or by nostalgia for when English rule was unchallenged.

The lack of accountability of the current FIFA is surely unsustainable, the quasi-feudal personal fiefdoms that develop inside the organization are disturbing and the fat-cat lifestyle of some of those at the top makes the stomach turn. But for all its flaws and problems, it is not hard to understand why much of the developing world prefers the post-Havelange FIFA to what came before.

Of course, from any objective standpoint of the good of world soccer, the fact that FIFA was f*cked up in the pre-Havelange era doesn’t make it any more right for it to be f*cked up in the post-Havelange era. Havelange and Blatter have made corruption and commercial exploitation a way of life in the sport’s global governing bodies. That may beat colonialist arrogance as a defining ruling trait, but not by a lot.

The cesspool of corruption that has followed the game’s drastic commercialisation under Havelange/Blatter is a great betrayal of the movement that overthrew Rous’ arrogant rule. The overthrow of Eurocentric rule in the 1970s was born of a genuine desire to spread the game around the world and allow more nations into the World Cup, a development that has allowed it to become a kaleidoscope of global talent on display.

Back then, there were administrators from the developing world who wanted to use their growing voice within the game to end discrimination and racism in sport, and to protect world soccer from the deleterious effects of rampant commercialism.

What would Ydnekatchew Tessema, the head of the Confederation of African Football (CAF) in the 1970s and a true visionary of the game from Ethiopia, make of today’s farcial FIFA election? Or that each FIFA confederation (perhaps excluding UEFA) is run by a tainted leader?

It was Tessema who helped forge the coalition that ousted Rous in 1974 with the election of Havelange, but it was not with CAF being used as a tool of Havelange – rather, it was a necessary move by CAF to end the roadblock to African development Rous seemed insistent upon. As Paul Darby wrote in his excellent book Africa, Football and FIFA:

The fact that Tessema was in a position to threaten the withdrawal of African support for Havelange’s presidential challenge illustrates that CAF was not only gaining confidence to assert itself within world football politics but was also beginning to recognise the potential that its voting powers offered the African continent. Indeed, it is clear from African accounts of the 1974 FIFA Congress . . . that the African nations did not see themselves merely as pawns in a power struggle for the control of FIFA. Instead, they saw Havelange as the means through which to achieve a realignment of the distribution of power and privilege within world football which would more adequately reflect their growing stature.

Tessema led the push for Africa to receive more places at the World Cup by fighting for the principle that each nation should have one vote within the governing body, one that Rous had tried to circumvent. Rous was blunt about his belief developing nations did not deserve the same rights within the global game:

Many people are convinced that it is unrealistic, for example, that a country like England, where the game started and was first organised, or that experienced countries like Italy and France, who have been pillars of FIFA and influential in its problems and in world football affairs for so many years, should have no more than equal voting rights with any of the newly created countries of Africa and Asia.

Tessema was curt in his response to this patronising attitude.

Although we acknowledge the role played by certain continents in the creation of FIFA, its development and their moral, material and financial contributions, we estimate that democratic rule dictates that all rights and duties that form an international organisation should be the same for all. This is why in the framework of legitimacy, and by following a process consistent with the interests of world football and its unity, a progressive equilibrium of the representation in the heart of FIFA and its competition is required.

At the same time, Tessema was cautious about submitting to the tide of dollars flooding into the sport: Tessema fought against alcohol and tobacco sponsorship in African football, and warned against the consequences of young talent leaving African shores. In the mid-1980s, not long before his premature death from cancer, Tessema stated:

African football must make a choice! Either we keep our players in Africa with the will power of reaching one day the top of the international competitions and restore African people a dignity that they long for; or we let our best elements leave their countries, thus remaining the eternal suppliers of raw material to the premium countries, and renounce, in this way, to any ambition. When the rich countries take away from us, also by naturalisation, our best elements, we should not expect any chivalrous behaviour on their part to help African football.

It is sadly now the case that FIFA under the Havelange-Blatter regime has largely made African football a pawn for its own needs by submitting world football to the power of money for its own rapacious greed, with the corruption that has wrought around the world. That money is now the tool by which Blatter maintains his fiefdom, and that corrupt the successors of Tessema. There are no Tessemas today.

Nor is there any chivalry in the way FIFA operates. One example can be seen in the distribution of money from the 2010 World Cup held in South Africa – most of the money, of course, kept by FIFA itself.

Sepp Blatter explained that the money actually paid out was to be given to those who had developed young talent. “We are pleased that we can share the success of the 2010 FIFA World Cup with the clubs by providing them a share of the benefits of our flagship event, in particular to recognise their efforts in the development of young players.”

Those payments did not go to the countries from which these players developed and that desperately need it, but to the rich European clubs who poached them at young ages. The largest payments from FIFA after the 2010 World Cup went to clubs from England ($5,952,133.30), Germany ($4,740,666.70), Italy ($3,880,666.70), Spain ($3,699,066.70), France ($2,202,666.70) and the Netherlands ($1,858,266.70). The first African nation in the list is South Africa, with its clubs receiving $662,666.70.

FIFA uses its largesse to cement the support that earns Blatter 186 votes even after all the revelations of the past year, and indeed, past decade – the rest of the world is also bought off by dubious development programmes whose monies often end up in brown envelopes, as we wonder where the development actually is.

FIFA has certainly overseen a massive expansion of the game’s popularity worldwide since the Rous era, and part of that does explain the continued support for the Blatter regime as Vickery says. The English FA’s hypocrisy is hard to stomach, given their willingness to play FIFA’s game until their failed 2018 World Cup bid and the lonely fight against FIFA’s obvious corruption that Andrew Jennings was left to.

Still, that is no reason for the rest of the world to say that makes turning a blind eye to Blatter OK. FIFA has co-opted and corrupted the growth of world soccer for its own benefit rather than fostered it in a truly beneficial way for the grassroots of the sport – at least in the postwar era. The history of the treatment of women’s football (short shorts?!) or the struggle it took for African football to gain recognition in the halls of FIFA is evidence of that, nevermind the blatant bribery present and submission to the power of the dollar above all. The support for Blatter in the FIFA Congress is not high-minded, it is deeply self-interested.

And when we are left hoping for sponsors to save the world’s game from FIFA, remember this. The last few weeks have certainly dented FIFA and Blatter, but it’s hard to see where the movement to truly reform it for the good of the goddamn game will come from in this day and age.

It’s been admitted by Fifa that hundreds of games have been fixed in the past few years. In response, it’s investing a few million bucks a year out of its billion dollar-plus cash reserves into education of players and coaches about match-fixing. Note: that’s education, not investigation.

We commented that given the key problem in world soccer with regard to match-fixing is the lack of investigation, this seemed like a half-hearted effort by Fifa. The world’s leading authority on match fixing, Declan Hill, agrees, explaining he told the very same thing personally to Sepp Blatter back in 2008 with apparently no impact:

In FIFA’s announcement about their new anti-corruption centre, there is no actual money being put aside for investigations or enforcement. Nor is there a mandate to investigate corruption inside FIFA. Without these things the centre will largely be a sham. To be clear, FIFA does not investigate match-fixing or corruption. Nor does Interpol investigate crimes. All of the money that FIFA has given to the centre is for education.

Ask yourself – what do players need education for? Do you really need to explain to them which goal they are supposed to score in? What does a referee need education for? Is it really that difficult to figure out they are supposed to do their job without taking bribes?

I am not being facetious. If there are no investigation or enforcement arms at this anti-corruption centre, then to teach athletes and referees about the dangers of match-fixing is simply providing a bunch of ‘how-to-be-corrupt’ courses. No one will be afraid to take the money. Why should they be? There are no resources devoted to catching people who are fixing games. So the anti-corruption centre promises to be one of those well-constructed snooze-fest places where people go to hear their bosses give seminars full of corporate nonsense and then leave to get on with the lives.

As it happens, there is a concrete example in the news in Asia right now illustrating this very problem, with several reports of match fixing in Malaysia coming out this week. Police in Malaysia have asked for help from Fifa in investigating suspicious activity:

The police need intelligence from world football governing body Federation of International Football Associations (FIFA) to kick-off investigations into a global match-fixing network allegedly involving Malaysians.

Federal Criminal Investigation Department chief Datuk Seri Mohd Bakri Mohd Zinin said this was necessary for the police to analyse and launch certain operations in connection with the case.

“We want the investigating team from FIFA to provide us intelligence on the alleged match-fixing network operating from Malaysia,” he told reporters at the Selangor police headquarters here today.

It was reported that in the near future, FIFA head of security Chris Eaton would lead a team of investigators to Malaysia, as part of the probe into claims that more than 300 matches in three continents were influenced by match-fixers.

The only problem? As Hill notes, Fifa doesn’t really have a match fixing investigative team. Eaton himself commented this week to the Malay Mail: “We are not an investigation agency. We are a football organisation and our duty is to protect, prevent and eliminate such illegal activities.”

Eaton, head of global security for Fifa and a former Interpol official, does have a long track record in investigating organised crime (check out his linkedin profile).

But Fifa still has not provided much muscle for him to work with. In January, Fifa surprisingly backtracked on an agreement to hire Interpol’s senior anti-corruption detective Frederick Lord, raising eyebrows regarding the organisation’s commitment to fighting corruption right when allegations of wrongdoing within its own halls were circling following the controversial World Cup bidding vote. The Telegraph of London reported:

Lord is a former colleague of Fifa’s security adviser, Chris Eaton, an Australian detective who stepped down as Interpol’s director of operations last March to advise Fifa on security issues.

Lord, who has spoken extensively on anti-corruption issues at conferences around the world, previously worked in the Australian police’s Internal Affairs Covert Services Unit, which focused on police corruption.

Fifa’s withdrawal of the offer to Lord prompted security sources to suggest that the organisation lacks the stomach to tackle the reputational issues it faces.

One source suggested that Fifa executive committee members had objected to the appointment because they feared Lord would conduct internal investigations, but a Fifa spokesman denied this.

The recent bid process for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups was mired in controversy following allegations of corruption against Fifa officials. Fifa executive committee members Amos Adamu and Reynald Temarii were banned for one and three years respectively by Fifa’s ethics committee, and four other officials were also banned.

The effectiveness of Fifa’s investigation into allegations of collusion between the Spain-Portugal and Qatar bids has also been questioned after the ethics commission was unable to establish a case against them.

If Fifa cannot get its own house in order, it’s of course little wonder its efforts around the world to tackle match-fixing seem so tepid.

“It is crucial for us to go together with political authorities, with police authorities to fight those who want to destroy our game,” Blatter said.

“I’m a sad president because, after 36 years in FIFA, I thought we would be at the end of a wonderful development of the game.”

The investment is not quite as dramatic as all the column inches devoted to it seem to be presuming. This money will be provided by Fifa over ten years, and breaks down to $5.73m in the first year, and $2.1m in the remaining nine years. According to the Telegraph, the money given to Interpol won’t actually go to investigations, but to developing preventative programmes – educating players, coaches and officials on match-fixing.

Though there’s nothing wrong with that approach, this is barely a pittance from Fifa’s coffers to tackle something Blatter described today in apocalyptic terms: “Match fixing shakes the very foundations of sport. We are committed to doing everything in our power to tackle this threat. We have to try to put an end to these activities.”

A police commissioner in Bochum, Germany, where a major match-fixing ring was smashed in 2009, offered this “chilling warning” to Fifa:

Fifa generated a surplus of $631m between 2007 and 2010. Fifa has over $1.2bn in financial reserves tucked away. So this supposedly major investment to tackle a worldwide threat that Blatter says “shakes the very foundations of sport” doesn’t seem to be drawing a huge amount of that surplus to invest in its eradication.

Of course, Fifa does have other anti-match fixing investments. It has an ‘early warning system’ (EWS) that examines betting patterns to try and figure out where something fishy might be. The problem, though, is the lack of an investigative unit to get to the roots of this, something this latest investment does not (cough) fix. Months ago, the always on-the-ball Declan Hill pointed out this was the sport’s biggest need in a careful critique of a Fifa seminar on match-fixing:

So who has the money to help create such an Agency? Who has the clout? Who, according to its own president, sees a clear and present danger from match-fixing to sport demanding the creation of such an Agency?

Three recent emails from MUST to its e-membership, currently at 163,430 (unpaid) members, introduced BetFred’s partnership with MUST and hinted that Done was testing the waters before fully backing a takeover bid.

The first email to MUST members explained the new partnership:

MUST met with Fred a couple of weeks ago for a chat over a cup of tea and a tour of his headquarters. As you look around his office a large picture of Duncan Edwards  takes pride of place – it is obvious Manchester United runs through his veins. He loves the club and he wants to see the right ownership in the future – perhaps a Barcelona style model. We agree with him there.

We’ll be forwarding a special message from Fred to MUST members along with his thoughts on the Liverpool game and United generally so look out for that to follow shortly.

As a direct result of the meeting we’ve entered into a partnership with BetFred which, with your help, will generate the revenue MUST needs to fund our ambitious expansion plans. We’ll be ploughing every penny from the BetFred partnership into the development fund for our Million Member Project (currently 163,430 members) which is set to be launched in the New Year. Details to follow in the coming weeks.

The two key factors in creating this partnership are:

* A fun way for supporters to generate funds to develop our Million Member Project.
* The first stage in building a relationship with Fred which could be hugely significant in our plans for change of ownership at United

This partnership with BetFred is a huge opportunity. We need to show Fred how much interest there is from members so we want to make him really sit up and take notice. Just by clicking through the link you can really help even if you don’t sign-up.

Some people aren’t interested in betting and that is fine. We don’t want to encourage members to bet who don’t wish to (or the Under 18s). However, for those who do enjoy a bet we’d urge you to switch to the MUST BetFred partnership. Fred is more than happy to pay out to United fans – almost as much as he likes taking money off Scousers.

The email hints that Fred is only just getting started – “The first stage in building a relationship with Fred which could be hugely significant in our plans for change of ownership at United”. It’s clear months, perhaps years of groundwork went into establishing the partnership, of obvious mutual benefit.

An email then followed from Fred to MUST e-members with a number of betting tips. Not bad for Fred to have a direct line to 163,430 football-mad potential customers.

Now, I’m not a United fan, I’m just on their email list because I pay attention to this stuff. But it sure felt odd to get an email from a supporters’ organisation with extensive betting tips and essentially an encouragement to gamble, without having asked to receive that kind of correspondence.

Six days after that email, MUST dropped another message on their 163,000-odd e-members, now asking “Are you happy to receive messages relating to match previews along with the MUST BetFred partnership or would you prefer not to?

“We don’t want to annoy any of our members by sending them messages they don’t wish to receive so let us know by clicking link [1] below and simply ticking the “opt out” box on the survey if you don’t want to receive messages.”

One can presume that Fred’s unsolicited betting tips a few days earlier had provoked the ire of a fair few folks not expecting that signing up to support the Trust would result in receiving emails about gambling from BetFred.

It’s not surprising MUST has jumped into bed with Fred: he’s very rich, very influential and he’s from Salford, Greater Manchester, a hardcore United fan. He’s also the kind of man you’d want on your side with the Glazers: toughness, ambition and willingness to take risks have long defined his career, rising from absolutely nothing on the streets of Salford to preside over a gambling empire, Britain’s largest independent chain with 800+ shops. He began his rise as a 15-year old in 1959 running an illegal gambling ring, turning legit and making a fortune with a serious of aggressive acquisitions, and a heads-on, personality driven approach to branding his bookmaking shops.

Until last year, BetFred was United’s official bookmaker. Now, the Glazers will surely wonder what a Fred-backed MUST campaign could achieve, with his connections and aggressive approach to takeovers. At the same time, MUST must be careful not to abuse the trust they have earned from supporters, and think carefully about how they use their email list and promote gambling in general: the moral high ground is easy to fall off, after all.

Yes, they may have both a Russian tycoon in Alisher Usmanov and an American billionaire investor in Stan Kroenke, but the club has been run by the Hill-Wood family since 1929 and takes pride in their plurality of ownership. What’s more, unlike several of England’s bigger clubs, the relationship between the board and the fans has always been generally good.

It’s not really a surprise, then, that Arsenal have become the first Premier League club to give their backing to a scheme from the Arsenal Supporters’ Trust (AST) that will see fans pooling their money in order to purchase shares in the club in an attempt to increase the voice of the fans inside the marble halls.

But while this is a first in the English top flight, it’s too early to say just how effective the Fanshare scheme will be. Some bloggers, notably Ahmed Bilal from Soccerlens, have criticised the scheme for promising more than he believes it can deliver

Arsenal fans who aren’t Trust members have initially appeared to give a cautious yet optimistic welcome to the plans. The main question, though, is will this really make a difference to the Gunners?

A fan-filled future at the Emirates

The scheme itself is reasonably simple. The current going rate for one Arsenal share is £10,250, which makes it somewhat expensive for ordinary fans to invest in their club. The Arsenal Fanshare scheme offers fans a chance to contribute to the cost of a share with monthly payments of between £10 and £1,000.

Any fan who puts in the equivalent of one hundredth of the share’s value – currently £102.50 – becomes a Fanshare member. This enables them to vote on club policy that requires shareholder approval, receive detailed financial information about the club, and be able to put themselves forward to attend Arsenal’s annual general meeting, although this will be chosen by ballot.

This Trust-run initiative also comes with the backing of the Gunners’ two biggest individual shareholders, Usmanov and Kroenke, while the club’s chief executive, Ivan Gazidis, has talked about the importance of valuing and nurturing fans. It’s a rare piece of Premier League unity between boardroom and supporters, with the latter potentially able to have their voice heard within the club without any hostilities.

And in this age of austerity, and with noises and aspirations of supporter takeovers at the likes of Manchester United, Liverpool and Newcastle United, it also scores a nice piece of PR for the North London club, although AST member Vic Crescit is adamant this is just a fortunate by-product.

“Arsenal Fanshare is NOT about public relations for the club,” he emails when I put this question to him. “It’s about ensuring OUR club remains OUR club.

“The people involved in Arsenal Supporters’ Trust, an independent not-for-profit mutual organisation, wouldn’t have launched this scheme if they didn’t think it was to the benefit of Arsenal supporters. The fact that the club listened carefully to the presentations made to them about Arenal Fanshare and decided to actively back it speaks well of the board and chief executive Ivan Gazidis.”

Significantly, it’s worth emphasising that this is a project of the Supporters’ Trust and not Arsenal Football Club. Had Gazidis and the board not given their approval, it’s likely the scheme would have gone ahead anyway. That they have the backing from the powers-that-be is an added bonus.

The practicalities: What’s in it for me?

A year on, and it looks like this change to La Liga kick-off times will actually happen, following an offseason that has revealed just how parlous Spanish finances are, Barcelona’s debt and Mallorca’s financial troubles only the most obvious examples. It’s now apparent La Liga executives see a shift to suit Asian television audiences as critical not just for revenue growth at Real Madrid and Barcelona, but for the whole league — even if it’s at the expense of Spanish tradition.

I would argue that there are root problems in La Liga’s foundations behind these levels of debt that need to be addressed with as much urgency as reaching out to a new market, but at least La Liga is starting to realise that a two-club league is not the way forward, as World Football Insider reports.

“We are trying to change gear the way the Spanish league is promoted, not only the league but the players and also the sport of football,” Francisco Roca, La Liga’s chief executive, told Soccerex delegates today.

“I say changing gears because so far most of the promotion of the Spanish league has been driven by the individual efforts of FC Barcelona and Real Madrid.

“This has been extremely successful for us because those are the two elite teams of the Spanish league, but it’s not enough.

“They will obviously continue to do their individual efforts to do their tours every pre-season but we think that as a competition we are mature enough to be able to promote not only our two elite teams but also the other teams of the Spanish league, especially the first division.”

Famously, unlike the Premier League, television rights in Spain are sold individually by clubs, with the income for Barcelona and Real Madrid dwarfing all other clubs: Real Madrid and Barcelona have deals worth about €150 million  a season, while the likes of Valencia and Sevilla earn around €30 million a year, at best. Ultimately, as great as that is for Barcelona and Real Madrid in the short term, in the long run it makes for a weaker league and a less appealing global “product” (ugh). The Premier League and Manchester United have demonstrated the ancillary benefit of being seen as the biggest and best club in the biggest and best league, at least as collective marketing power has driven that perception.

If any informed Spanish observer knows, I’d be curious to learn if overseas television revenue is also sold individually by clubs in La Liga, or whether it’s sold collectively and shared equally: if it is the latter as I suspect it is, it would appear this drive to the Asian market may be one way to financially compensate for that huge domestic imbalance in revenue, that only hurts smaller clubs and drives madcap spending by the big two. Because while there has been discussion of selling La Liga rights collectively in the domestic Spanish market too, such is Barcelona’s debt and reliance on their individual television deal that seems very unlikely to change right now.

Elsewhere, in discussion of that imbalance and the drive to the Asian market, La Liga CEO Francisco Roca said, according to SportBusiness, that “this is not about short-term. The real benefits are in the medium and long-term. As a league we have to promote our clubs and we have to recognise that promoting the league is not just about Real Madrid and FC Barcelona.”

This is, of course, the same question that exhausted South African ears over the past several years. It turned out that South Africa was prepared and that Danny Jordaan, CEO of the World Cup Local Organising Committee, had done a tremendous job. Jordaan, briefly a professional soccer player himself in the early 1970s ahead of his time as an anti-apartheid activist, is by all reports tough, humble. and hugely capable. The whiff of corruption does not follow him around as it does so many connected to FIFA (OK, there is one very faint whiff).

The man in charge of the 2014 World Cup, Ricardo Teixeira (president of the Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF)), has spent the past two decades doing little but generating suspicion of corruption in many of his dealings running Brazilian soccer. Teixeira is head of the Local Organising Committee, and also sits on FIFA’s 24 man Executive Committee.

Brazil’s Congress extensively investigated the corruption impeding the domestic game in Brazil at the highest levels in 2000-01: Teixeira, president of the CBF since 1989, was forced to admit he had lied about having only one bank account (conceding he had a second, operated out of the Cayman Islands at Delta Bank, at the time under investigation by the US government for money laundering). This Independent newspaper report on the Congressional investigation paints a picture of Teixeira struggling to hide his corrupt dealings, and making a promise to resign from his post in 2003 that he has yet to fulfil:

The president of the CBF was once the son-in-law of the former Fifa president, Joao Havelange. Teixeira has none of his mentor’s aristocratic bearing and has been regarded as an arrogant bully boy, yet even he has embraced humility as the inquiry has progressed. Even before his long-awaited appearance at the commission last week, Teixeira declared that he would leave the post at the end of his current mandate in 2003 and spoke openly about his mistakes. He admitted that some of the clauses in the Nike contract had needed correcting, and he agreed that he had erred in selling dairy produce from his farm to the CBF. As he shuffled through his files last week he gave the appearance of a schoolboy trying to cover up the fact that he had not done his homework. He had not brought an up-to-date version of the Nike contract and could not recall to how many politicians the CBF had made donations.

Ah, yes, João Havelange: the corrupt FIFA chief and the father-in-law of Teixeira at the time of the latter’s sudden elevation from obscure lawyer to head of the CBF. Soon, Teixeira was rich, with a condo in Miami, bodyguards, and an ever-increasing salary.

That CBF deal with Nike mentioned above left many wondering where all the money had gone: it certainly hadn’t filtered into development of the domestic game. The results of the Congressional investigations were damning for Teixeira:

The probe that exposed Teixeira began with a Brazilian congressional investigation (aka CPI) into a $4 billion, ten-year contract the Nike Corporation had with the Brazilian football conference (CBF). The investigation, as is the wont of many investigations, discovered a network and underlying web of deceit, lies, and illegal dealings that ran the gamut from forgery to outright theft of funds and bribery. The first CPI was in fact brought to a close with many of its investigative discoveries squashed because the committee itself voted to keep the report of its findings secret from publication. The reality was that many of the members of the investigative body were tied in with the CBF. Men such as Eurico Miranda were on the committee. Miranda also happened to be an owner of a team in the CBF, the Vasco da Gama club.  But Miranda, and others like him with CBF tie-ins, saw no reason to recuse themselves from the investigation or any ensuing votes because of this obvious conflict of interest.

It was a second CPI that the Brazilian congress convened that did trap Teixeira and others that were involved with the illegalities involving the soccer industry in Brazil.

Among the discoveries involving Teixeira were (1) he as the president of the CBF took on loans for over $30 million for the organization from a New York bank at the interest rate of about 53% annually; (2) he received from this same bank a personal loan but at the rate of 10% annually; (3) he supposedly helped to broker a $9 million fee to Jos Hawilla for acting as a go-between for the CBF and a Nike deal. Hawilla was a journalist for the Traffic Company. (That name Traffic sound familiar?) and (4) falsifying an expense of $8 million to be paid to a former partner, Marelo Tiraboschi, for being a supposed middleman for a ten-year sponsorship deal worth over $175 million with a company named Ambev.

The investigation was a humiliation for Teixeira, as it concluded that “Lack of control, disorganisation and bad management reign rife in the CBF. Mr Ricardo Teixeira, as president, is directly responsible for creating an environment which is ripe for an administrative disaster.”

The hundreds of millions of dollars that poured into the CBF’s coffers in the 1990s due to their lucrative deals with Nike and television company Traffic (run by a close ally of Teixeira) were spent without a budget, while expenditure on hotels and transport for officials rose 600%, and junket trips to the ’94 and ’98 World Cup were given to many people who had nothing to do with the sport, the investigation found.

Amazingly, Teixeira was reelected for a seven-year term as head of the CBF in 2007.

Last year, Teixeira was convicted of avoiding customs taxes, after returning home from the 1994 World Cup in the United States with 17 tons of imported goods that he failed to pay tax on.

Indeed, to go back to 1994, Teixeira had a run in with Pelé ahead of the 1994 World Cup that saw the star banned from the World Cup draw in Las Vegas, as Rob Hughes wrote in a 1994 New York Times article on Pelé’s elevation to Sports Minister in the Brazilian government:

And while Pelé, to my knowledge, has had a public run-in with only one man, that man happens to be Ricardo Teixeira, who presides over the CBF, Brazil’s soccer federation. More than that, Teixeira is the son-in-law of João Havelange, the Brazilian president of FIFA who single-handedly barred Pelé from the World Cup draw in Las Vegas a year ago.

It was an horrendous example of Havelange’s vindictiveness, and an early warning that the aging president intends to maneuver his son-in-law into becoming his successor in charge of the world game.

Pelé, then as now, was the catalyst between soccer and the American people; Havelange the autocrat blankly refused to speak Pelé’s name, or to discuss with his FIFA executive his reason for banning from the ceremony the greatest player the game has known.

We knew the reason. Pelé had accused Teixeira of corruption, of accepting a million-dollar bribe to favor one television contract over another, and Teixeira was suing Pelé in the Brazilian courts. So Havelange, having installed Teixeira on FIFA committees, shut out Pelé.

The backstory was that Pelé had attempted to purchase the broadcasting rights in Brazil to the 1994 World Cup, but had refused to pay $1m into a Swiss bank account as ordered by the CBF, under Teixeira’s direction. And then he had refused to keep quiet about it.

But Teixeira eventually won back the support of Pelé, whose attempts to lead reform of the Brazilian game in the 1990s failed. And that support from Pelé, coming right after the results of Brazil’s Congressional inquiry came out in 2001 and threatened to skewer Teixeira’s career, saved Teixeira, as they shared the stage to condemn the inquiry’s results. In Soccer Explains The World, Franklin Foer cites a columnist for the Brazilian sports daily Lance! on this sad moment for Brazilian soccer: “The union of Pelé and Teixeira is the biggest stab in the back that those of us fighting for ethics in sport could receive . . . He has sold his soul to the devil.”

This man, then, Ricardo Teixeira, is responsible for organising the 2014 World Cup, an organisation already described as “amazingly” behind schedule, and subject to Teixeira’s political needs, according to Tim Vickery:

Teixeira’s need to keep his power base onside has already affected the organisation of the tournament. Many state presidents wanted 2014 games to be staged in their domain, so the CBF successfully lobbied Fifa to have 12 host cities, rather than the original plan of between eight and 10. Seventeen cities applied – one later pulled out – and, to save Teixeira from the political embarrassment of excluding some of them, the final decision was pushed to Fifa.

Vickery, the most accomplished observer of the South American game we have in the English-language, concludes that the Teixeira-led power structure is the main danger to the preparations:

For all its progress, the moment in Brazil is very different [from South Africa]. Its football administrators could not be further removed from activists. They represent the old, semi-feudal Brazil.

Federal Deputy Paulo Rattes wrote a Congressional report on 2014 planning. “What struck me about South Africa,” he said, “was that there was participation from society and political leaders.” In Brazil, meanwhile, “it is a black box that no one enters, only Ricardo Teixeira and his friends.”

That black box of Teixeira is where the World Cup is headed in four years, sad to say.

Africa is a football-mad continent but has only ever sent three teams to the World Cup quarter-finals. It had six sides at the 2010 tournament but mustered only four wins – the strong showing of Ghana, a country with a good FA and innovative clubs, cannot mask the general trend of underachievements, including by Cameroon and Nigeria, countries who boast bountiful talent but finished bottom of their groups. When it comes to African football, tales of corruption, incompetence and infighting remain more common than success stories.

“Too many national associations are failing African football,” Nicholas Musonye, general secretary of the Council of East and Central African Football Associations, says. “We cannot have strong national teams without strong leagues but we do not have strong leagues because too often the associations are run by the wrong people, people who get involved for politics or money, not for football. Until we sort ourselves out, we will have the same old circus.”

To tackle this, Doyle explains, the Kenyan Premier League was formed, and significantly, it is owned and run by the 16 Kenyan clubs themselves.

The KPL represents a great example of African football sorting itself out, a successful rebellion by people who genuinely care about football against the powerful people seeking to hijack it for their own ends. Over the past decade the hijacking has at times been so blatant as to be farcical – an investigation into corruption in the Kenya Football Federation (KFF) in 2005 found that from the first eight matches played by the national team following the arrival of a new president “there was not a single penny banked by the treasurer as proceeds from gate receipts”. There were also reports of top KFF officials acting as unregistered agents to sell players abroad and embezzling funds given by Fifa. Even 30 computers donated by Fifa disappeared.

Kenya’s clubs, sick of being hindered rather than helped by their federation, began agitating for reform and, in the face of repeated sabotage and intimidation by the KFF, eventually took over the running of the domestic league, forming, in 2008, the country’s first professional league, the KPL, and only the second one in the continent, after the South African Super League, to be owned entirely by clubs.

“When you have a company that owns the league and the 16 clubs are equal shareholders and equal decision‑makers, then you automatically have three things,” Bob Munro, chairman of Mathare United and a KPL official, says.

“First, you have complete accountability, because you basically have 16 auditors as every shilling that comes in belongs to the clubs together and they sit and decide how best to allocate it – how much goes to the clubs, how much to a common pool for staff, referees, marketing and so on. Secondly, you have complete transparency because there are no secrets when there are 16 owners. And, thirdly, you automatically have fair play – if any official or referee tries to favour one club, the 15 others will fire them. Fair play, financial accountability and democratic transparency, that’s all you need to have good football management.”

At the end of the piece, though, Doyle raises a point that is worth considering further in global terms: when politicians attempt to stamp down on corruption within the national associations that run the sport, should they always automatically be chastised and threatened with a ban from international competition by FIFA?

Doyle raises this point with regard to the much-mocked move by Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan two weeks ago to wipe clean the slate in Nigerian soccer by banning the national team from play.

But, as this BBC article explains, this was not simply a populist move by Jonathan; he was attempting to deal with a serious crisis in the institutions of soccer in Nigeria, run not for the good of the game but with a strong whiff of corruption pervading the air.

The actual banning and un-banning of the team is irrelevant,” says Churchill Olise, owner of elite football academy Ebede FC in Shagamu.

“What matters is that at last the powerful have realised the seriousness of our problem.

“Sport is the one area where we can compete internationally – and win. We simply cannot continue to waste our young talent.”

In theory, an abundance of gifted young players ought to make Nigeria a global super-power in the game.

But insiders point to squandered talent, a national sport strangled by poor infrastructure, and football officials obsessed by gaining re-election for themselves. There is also evidence of corruption.

“The sackings just scratch the surface,” says Wilson Ajua, a lawyer and owner of Rainbow FC in Lagos.

“The president should take it further. The structures must be cleaned out and rebuilt.”

He points to problems deeper than corruption.

“Many of these local clubs are like empty shells without good players,” he says.

“I believe the state of football in Nigeria is dead. The clubs are run as political tools, not as businesses.”

Jonathan’s extreme action suddenly made more sense just days ago when it came to light FIFA had been warned the Nigerian team was “at risk” of involvement in match-fixing; and, as Declan Hill discussed, this will continue to be the case when players are not paid for their participation in the World Cup directly, but often see their money disappear into the pockets of corrupt national officials (this, incidentally, doesn’t only happen in Africa). Significantly, Jonathan’s more important action was not the headline-move of banning the national team, but his demand that the Nigerian Football Federation be dissolved and its books opened to anti-fraud police.

Jonathan had to back down from his action when FIFA intervened. But the idea brought up above by Olise that Jonathan did not go far enough as the entire sport’s infrastructure needed cleaning out raises a serious question: who, exactly, is going to be able to clean out a corrupt or incompetent national association of a sport if a national government is not allowed by FIFA to do it?  FIFA, obviously, does not do it. And once entrenched, changing the guard at national association level from the grassroots up is extremely difficult. Isn’t it, indeed, in part the responsibility of national governments to ensure their national associations of their national sports are following good governance principles?

That, at least, is the conclusion of Doyle’s insightful piece. In Kenya, he observes, while the national league appears to have enlightened leadership, no such change has taken place at national league level, with the existing dubious leadership of Football Kenya Limited still in place, despite the urging of reform from the national government:

This week Kenya’s prime minister, Raila Odinga, requested that the FKL step aside and let clubs vote for new officials. It was only a request, mind, because Odinga knows that any more forceful move by him would incur the wrath of Fifa, who are fundamentalists when it comes to upholding their ban on governmental interference in football – sometimes with the effect that they prevent reform.

And as he quotes Elias Makori, sports editor of Kenya’s biggest newspaper The Nation:

“What Fifa needs to do is stop insisting on no government interference and instead insist on good governance,” Makori says. “It needs to help the right people and thwart the opportunists by drawing up a model constitution for all its associations and demanding that it is respected. If the status quo remains, it is hard not to be pessimistic.”

This is a brilliant suggestion by Makori, it seems to me; sure, it wouldn’t necessarily be easy to ensure model constitutions were implemented properly, but their mere existence — and an end to a blanket ban on government “interference” in soccer by FIFA — would set standards for each national association to be held up to by a country’s clubs, players, fans, regional confederation, FIFA and government officials alike. There is simply to much money in world soccer in every country, too many people involved, to simply trust a few officials to run the sport right with no serious system of standard principles and oversight to be in place for national associations.

BARCELONA’S new chief has admitted the club have had to take on a £125million loan to ease debts and cash-flow problems.

Nou Camp president Sandro Rosell, who replaced Joan Laporta last week, revealed the extent of the financial woes and admitted players’ wages for last month have not been paid.

He also told how they were forced to sell Dmitro Chygrynskiy to former side Shakhtar Donetsk for £12.5million.

Rosell said: “We found a club in debt, with liquidity problems. At this point we have to take a loan to pay the wages of the players.

“The squad were supposed to be paid at the end of last month and still haven’t been.

“We’ll fix a loan of 150m euros (£125m). The banks know we have a business plan that will allow them to recover the money. The club is not bankrupt because it generates income.”

It may get worse for Barcelona; they’re heavily reliant on a massive $1.5 billion television contract with Spanish company MediaPro, currently seeking bankruptcy protection.

The point is this: if a club as massively successful as Barcelona are scraping for loose change just to pay their players, it’s just one more reminder of the dubious long-term economic set-up in place in European leagues.

What this does, though, is validate the concern of UEFA about the debt level taken on by European clubs, with their new regulations aimed to restrict such debt to come into place in the coming seasons.

One other possibility to restrict overspending would be a salary cap solution. The Irish league recently became reported to be the first top-tier European league to introduce a salary cap, with a 60% limit on spending per club on salaries as a proportion of turnover — yet it also seems Ireland tried this before in 2008 with a 65% limit in place, a system that broke down to be replaced by the new cap.

This kind of “soft” salary cap is of course much more palatable to clubs that want to spend more than others (especially big clubs that generate large revenues, of course) than a “hard” salary cap, like that in MLS, restricting each club to spending the same set amount of money on salaries league-wide. This is probably why then-Barcelona President Joan Laporta made the following comment last summer: “Maybe we have to establish some parameters for revenues and players’ salaries but maybe not as strict as in MLS.”

The 60% number adopted by the Irish League is the same as that adopted by Leagues One and Two in England, and so seems to have some general acceptance as a “reasonable” limit to place on wage-spending.

If we look at the spending from this fairly recent table in the biggest leagues, each of the big five leagues except for Germany has exceeded that 60% figure on average this past decade (which means some clubs would have been way over that number, and Italy hitting an absurd 99% level in ’01-’02):

Interestingly, Barcelona would not have been impacted by a 60% spending limit on wages; according to this outstanding analysis of Barcelona’s economics a couple of months ago by Swiss Rambler, their wages accounted for a reasonable 55% of their turnover last year. However, Barcelona’s success has in part led to their current predicament, as they offered their players massive bonuses that were suddenly all realised at once when they won everything under the sun last year. Their costs rose hugely last year due to higher wages and bonuses, from €166m to €211m. All the same, though, it seems a soft salary cap would have done nothing to prevent their present problems paying wages, as their revenue has continued to grow too.

Moreover, the obstacles to implementing a salary cap are obviously considerable philosophically and logistically for European clubs; at the very least, such a system in the top European leagues would (like UEFA’s debt regulations have secured) need the support of the European Club Association, representing a 100-odd of Europe’s elite clubs continent-wide. At the very least, you would think, the biggest four or five leagues might be needed to collectively agree to implementing a salary cap before any one of them does, for fear of losing competitiveness for their clubs in the Champions League (unless a league-wide economic implosion appears imminent anyway).

And to go back to Ireland again, their new salary cap set at 60% of revenue replaces the previous “Salary Cost Protocol”, that was supposed to restrict spending to 65% of a club’s income in any given year. But the failure of that system suggests a soft cap without tough enforcement and examination of clubs’ books is pointless, as the Irish Independent pointed out in February 2009, after the end of the first year the Salary Cost Protocol was supposed to be enforced:

When clubs were frequently failing to pay players, slashing budgets in haphazard fashion and investing in new additions when logic dictated otherwise, the defence from Abbotstown was that the necessary checks and balances were in place to punish the offenders. We had licensing deadlines, and the 65pc Salary Cost Protocol, which would serve as judge and jury come January.

Or so we thought. January 31 has been and gone, the accounts submitted and the individual cases have been judged. And, aside from the sorry plight of Cobh Ramblers, who effectively exited the League of Ireland proper yesterday, the news from the FAI is that everyone else has received the report card they were looking for. Nothing to see here, folks.

Sure, a few parties have been given the provisional OK subject to fulfilling a few more terms and conditions — after all, where would we be in Irish football without more deadlines — but the sum total is that after a calamitous campaign, where numerous clubs practised their business flagrantly, the sanction is a rap on the knuckles and a sterner warning not to do it again.

No wonder those few clubs who have lived within their means and within the letter of the law are exasperated. “It’s like a year’s grace has been granted,” said one official, who didn’t wish to be named yesterday. The frustration is understandable.

All that said, the benefits for global soccer from salary caps being introduced in Europe’s top leagues would be enormous. But a soft cap might not make as big a difference as it might seem at first glance, and getting agreement and implementation in the messy set-ups of European leagues quite a challenge compared to the single-entity of MLS, for example.