Big Story
I’m pretty sure Sepp Blatter and FIFA’s executive committee is trying to drive me insane, if not kill me. I’m not sure why they’d have a vendetta against a little-known British-born blogger exiled to the United States, but there can be little other reasonable explanation for them forcing me to write the same commentary over and over again on their practices: stop forcing me to presume you are fixing everything!

Once again, it’s the timing that’s suspect, as FIFA’s World Cup 2010 Organising Committee today announced the seeds for this week’s World Cup finals draw (the top eight seeds in pot 1 are South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, England, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain), with France notably missing out on a pot 1 seeding spot as FIFA decided to use their rankings from October rather than November to determine the order: the Netherlands had been ranked higher the previous month. Some immediately suspected FIFA were making sure France weren’t seeded, at the least, as the controversy over their qualification drags on.

It’s fair enough to use the October rankings rather than November’s, simply because that did put every European team on a level playing field in terms of competitive games played in qualification. FIFA’s Vice-President Jerome Valcke explained, “This is not a case of wanting Holland to be seeded instead of France, just that the feeling was the October seedings represented the best teams.” Yet bizarrely, Valcke went on to say that the decision had been made “last month” — if so, why did they not bother to tell anyone?

Once again, by not setting the rules for seeding in advance and releasing the information in public, the speculation that FIFA are making the decision most convenient to them is fed, just as with the playoffs seeding controversy. If FIFA could only set and release their seeding procedures ahead of knowing which countries would be seeded depending on the system they decide to use, I wouldn’t have to keep writing the same thing: a little more transparency goes a long way.

Worldwide News

• This is one way to fight back: following the controversy over the amount the Premier League is spending on agents’ fees, the agents association has no shame in calling for their important role to be acknowledged by being awarded a position on the Football Association Council. Supporters Direct’s acid commentary on this is a must-read.
• Remember Alisher Usmanov, the Uzbeki oligarch and Arsenal shareholder who once threatened to sue this very blog for posting information about his criminal past from former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray?  Well, Arsenal’s biggest shareholder Stan Kroenke obviously wanted to know more about that as their power struggle heated up over the past year, sending a private investigator hired by the company working for Arsenal’s board to Uzbekistan to dig up more information. Unfortunately, the Uzbeki authorities weren’t exactly cooperative, and as is his wont, Usmanov is up in arms about this terrible slight to his reputation. Once again, Alisher, if you have nothing to hide, stand up and prove it by taking up former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray’s offer to let the courts decide.
• It’s very impressive that WPS expansion team the Atlanta Beat will be playing in a brand new soccer stadium come spring, as the Atlanta Journal Constitution explains: “Kennesaw State announced Tuesday the school will build an 8,300-seat stadium for its women’s soccer team, a facility officials called “the first of its kind in the world” because of its size and focus on women’s soccer.” Great news, and a $16.5m project is entirely reasonable. Just one question: how do you build a stadium in five months?
• Finally, Pitch Invasion shockingly wins futfanatico award for best blog with “futfanatico” in the URL!

The Sweeper appears daily. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

Meeting at the Home of FIFA in Zurich, the representatives of the organisations present (cf. list at the end of this media release) agreed on the intention to regulate their future relationship with a number of actions. These are to include the planned evolution of the European Club Forum into the European Club Association (ECA), the formal signature of a memorandum of understanding with UEFA and subsequently the dissolution of the G-14 with the withdrawal of its claims in court. As part of the planned moves, UEFA and FIFA will enter into a series of commitments including financial contributions for player participation in European Championships and World Cups, subject to the approval of their respective bodies.

A new independent club forum, consisting of over 100 clubs from all 53 Uefa member nations, will be formed in its stead. It won’t be controlled by Uefa, but will be recognised by it through a “memorandum of understanding”.

As usual, we mere football fans are not privy to all the details of this, and that’s the fundamental problem with the bizarre claim today’s meeting was somehow a victory for the game as a whole.

The BBC’s Dave Munro illuminated us a little more on the details.

Significantly, the clubs are going to get paid when their players take part in international tournaments. All the details have not yet been sorted out but I understand that it is going to be a daily rate irrespective of whether it is £100,000-a-week or £1,000-a-week.

FIFA boss Sepp Blatter, never one to miss out on the chance to get his name on a press release, chimed in with the absurd hyperbole that “Something very special has happened today. The clubs, which are the basic cells of our game and fundamental to its thriving, are at last to become a part of the pyramidal football organisation.”

I actually thought players and supporters were the basic cells, not the greedy and self-serving list of participants at the meeting, including Blatter himself, his mendacious deputy Jerome Valcke, Manchester United’s David Gill, and interestingly — given they’re not even in the G-14 — Chelsea’s Peter Kenyon.

At the Fanhouse, Dave Warner calls the dissolution of the G-14 a win for Michel Platini. He is, I think, correct in the sense that the result fits his gameplan perfectly: as I’ve written previously, some of his more unlikely suggestions in the negotiations over the Champions League places were clearly pawns he could give up in a future compromise with the G-14 to fulfill his promises to central and eastern European clubs.

Brian at the Run of Play also seems to concur, saying that “this looks like a colossal victory for Blatter and Platini against the power of the big European clubs. The threat of a breakaway superleague appears to have expired, gently, in its sleep, and the lawsuits that the G-14 had arrayed around FIFA will pack up their things and go home.”

While that’s true, I’ve long believed that the superleague threat was a bluff the G-14′s just been using to extract more out of Uefa over the past decade, most of which they’ve now got. There isn’t really much else they need, with the final contentious issue on international compensation settled. The superleague simply isn’t realistic: you don’t walk away from the huge television contracts and packed stadiums the national leagues and the Champions League are already providing unless there’s a deal sitting on the table guaranteeing — literally — trillions of dollars in future revenue to replace it. And there isn’t such a deal on the horizon, as everyone knows there isn’t much interest among football fans in watching the G-14 clubs play each other to death.

The new forum does reflect a reality that the G-14 would have had to expand further anyway (as it already has and had plans to do), though the new forum does reflect there has been a slight powershift, especially given the growing financial power of certain other European teams outside the original core. Yet we can be sure that whilst each of the 53 nations will be represented, it won’t be composed equally: expect the richest leagues, home to most of the G-14 as it stands, to have the most representatives, and thus the most power.

And all the real dealings will continue to go on behind closed doors, the curious fan left to guess at how the fate of football is actually decided. A “Victory for football as a whole” would only come if the fans’ interests or even those of the clubs lower down in the pyramid Blatter mentions were also considered in these deliberations.

Photo credit: Antoon’s Foobar on Flickr

So anyone interested in the suspect dealings going on at FIFA might want to read my latest column at the Chicago Sports Weekly on Sepp Blatter, Jérôme Valcke and the various nefarious goings on by the men who supposedly run world football for the benefit of, well, us.

Thank goodness journalist Andrew Jennings is on this case, as most the world’s football journalists doze on, happy to focus on Blatter’s blathering about women’s shorts or Brazilian invasions instead of the size of his bonuses or how whether his own right-hand man is blackmailing him.

Yet less than twelve months ago, Valcke, then FIFA’s marketing director, faced ruin following the finding of an American court that he had lied to both Visa and Mastercard during sponsorship negotiations for the 2010 and 2014 World Cups.

Shortly after, he lost his job and seemed destined for oblivion. But he was reinstated as the ruling went to the appeals court, and FIFA finally settled out of court for a mere US$90 million with Mastercard.

Amazingly, just six months later, Valcke was promoted to an even more powerful position in FIFA as Blatter’s number two. As ever, acclaimed investigative journalist Andrew Jennings cuts through the bullshit surrounding this bizarre timeline of events, and simply asks in today’s Sunday Herald: “What hold does the mendacious Valcke have over the wily Blatter, to prise out of him the game’s No 2 job?”

Valcke was asked whether he knew of corruption at FIFA by The Independent in the summer, answering that “Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but I can swear on the people I like the most that I have never seen in my four years at Fifa… something where I could have said, ‘Oh, this is corruption’.”

But pay attention to his careful wording of “in my four years at Fifa,”, for Valcke had close dealings with Sepp Blatter in 2001, before he worked for FIFA. Jennings explains:

Wind the clock back, it’s Spring 2001. The sports marketing company that pays hefty bribes to certain of Fifa’s leaders in return for billion-dollar World Cup contracts sinks into insolvency. In the 1990s the ISL company has parted with nearly £20 million in kickbacks. The well is dry.

Along comes Monsieur Valcke and a band of entrepreneurs from the Vivendi company in Paris. They will buy the wreckage of ISL and its dreamy World Cup television and marketing contracts. But, first, due diligence, as the forensic accountants call it, to see what assets are left and how the company got its business.

Valcke and his team look hard at the books, have exchanges behind closed doors with Fifa, then suddenly go home to Paris, leaving ISL to crash. There’s never been an explanation of what went wrong [. . .]

After the crash I went to the first creditors’ meeting in a salon in the city of Zug, cornered the liquidator and secured the easy admission that he had found evidence of dirty money washing around ISL’s basement and out to Fifa officials.

The bribes went to offshore companies and accounts connected to some members of Fifa’s executive committee. Any trainee accountant would have found the money-trail his first morning excavating ISL.

Did Valcke and his team find the same evidence? How could they not? Everybody in the sports marketing loop knew, had gossiped for years about the screamingly obvious.

And Jennings has gained possession of a key document that discusses “threats” made by Vivendi’s lawyer Alain Goor to FIFA as the negotiations unravelled. In the letter from Blatter to Valcke, he asserts that “the position of Fifa in no way will ever be altered by any threats or attempts of blackmailing.”

Clues to what the “blackmailing” threat refers to can be seen in two memos sent to Blatter from FIFA’s Zurich lawyers, Niederer Kraft & Frey, which suggests Vivendi had threatened FIFA with “extremely serious consequences” against what Blatter himself describes as “certain gentlemen of FIFA.”

Ultimately, those “serious consequences” were evaded by FIFA’s “gentlemen” and two years later Blatter picked Valcke to run FIFA’s marketing in-house. When Valcke blundered and lied his way into a massive humiliation that cost FIFA $90 million, he only found himself promoted months later.

Valcke will be all smiles again today at the draw, but one hopes it won’t be long until it’s justly wiped off his face for the good of the game.

You can read the Blatter’s letter and the FIFA memos at Jenning’s website, Transparency in Sport.