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Fifa, a house of cards

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Tokyo Sexwale has been tipped as a candidate for the Fifa presidency. PHOTO: Markus Schreiber
Tokyo Sexwale has been tipped as a candidate for the Fifa presidency. PHOTO: Markus Schreiber

Acclaimed Nigerian author Chinua Achebe could easily have been writing about Fifa when he titled his classic novel, Things Fall Apart.

Never has the world football governing body been rocked by so many scandals in its more than 100 years.

Cameroonian Issa Hayatou will on Tuesday preside over an extraordinary executive committee meeting of a Fifa whose incumbent president, Sepp Blatter, is on suspension (s

ee box for agenda).

Among some of the prominent figures who will be absent from the meeting are:

. Vice-president Michel Platini (suspended).

. Secretary-general Jérôme Valcke (suspended).

. Former vice-president Jack Warner (banned for life).

. Former Fifa vice-president and Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football (Concacaf) president Jeffrey Webb (suspended). Webb was arrested by Swiss police in May on charges of racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering.

South Korean business mogul and former Fifa vice-president Chung Mong-joon, who previously raised his hand for the presidential election scheduled for February 26, faces a 15-year ban from the no-nonsense Fifa ethics committee.

This left Prince Ali bin al-Hussein of Jordan as the sole candidate before Trinidadian David Nakhid put his name in the hat. Another man whose name has been bandied about is South Africa’s Tokyo Sexwale, who has still not confirmed whether he will challenge for the position. The closing date for candidates to enter is next Monday. Last week, German legend Franz Beckenbauer endorsed Sexwale as the right candidate and said the German Football Association (DFB) would support him.

Reporting for duty, Hayatou acknowledged: “It’s certainly an unprecedented situation for Fifa.”

But typical of football administrators, he also seemed somewhat oblivious to the dire crisis Fifa was in.

“Football has never enjoyed greater support throughout the world, and that is something everyone associated with Fifa should be proud of.”

As if Hayatou needed a wake-up call, the Fifa scandal snowballed even further on Friday when German Magazine Der Spiegel broke a story suggesting Germany bought the votes for the 2006 Fifa World Cup. The magazine claimed that the organising committee led by Beckenbauer and Wolfgang Niersbach had created a “slush fund” into which the late Adidas boss Robert Louis-Dreyfus deposited £5 million.

Germany beat South Africa by 12-11 votes after Charles Dempsey abstained from voting. This means the award of every World Cup since 1998 has become the subject of corruption allegations.

South Africa’s 2010 World Cup is also mired in controversy over a $10 million payment made to Concacaf by Fifa on behalf of the South African government for a “diaspora football-development programme”.

In the latest exposé, Der Spiegel reported that documents in their possession revealed that in 2005 Beckenbauer and Niersbach began “looking for a way to pay back the illicit funds in an inconspicuous manner”.

Internal documents show that a cover was created with the help of Fifa to facilitate the payment. Using the cover, the Germans made a contribution for a gala Fifa opening ceremony that was planned at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium but later cancelled. The money was paid into a Fifa bank account in Geneva. From there, Fifa allegedly promptly transferred it to a Zurich account belonging to Louis-Dreyfus.

In a statement on Friday, the DFB admitted that the World Cup 2006 Organising Committee made a payment in April 2005 of around €6.7 million to Fifa, the magazine stated.

The football body, which Niersbach now heads, said it was possible that the payment was not used for the stated purpose: a “Fifa cultural programme”.

But the association said “the payment had no connection to the awarding of the World Cup.”

Another development was that at the end of a Uefa crisis meeting of all 54 European national associations on Friday, the English FA withdrew its backing of Platini as their favoured candidate for the Fifa presidency. They said their about-turn came after Platini’s lawyer failed to counter allegations that there was no written agreement validating the money given to his client by Blatter.

This concerns a payment of $2 million made to Platini by Fifa in 2011, which Blatter described as part of a “gentleman’s agreement” between the pair over work Platini had done for him nine years earlier.

With Platini and Mong-joon seemingly out of the way, only the prince, Sexwale and Nakhid, who submitted his candidature yesterday, seem to remain.

The fight in Europe – Fifa’s strongest bloc – now seems to be more about who will replace Platini in the region than at Fifa.

With all this, Fifa does seem like a house of cards about to collapse, which will be a huge challenge for whoever comes in as president on February 26

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