And so once the door was open, allegations of corruption poured out in all directions. In the Argentine case, the issue is that “50 million francs were transferred to various companies without any economic justification in the official documents. The payments were made to companies controlled by individuals receiving social assistance and to businesses linked to the AFA treasurer and members of his family.”
Of course, stories in the media related to football come and go at speed and get forgotten. Worse, there are so many stories relating to corruption in world football now that people tend to ignore them and still go ahead and celebrate any success their nation has. Arsenal won the league, so we stop talking about PGMO. England win the World Cup, and no one will mention the refs.
So the FA continues to fund Fifa and the PGMO, and the home nations will still enter the World Cup next time around. Nothing changes.
Indeed, the media has reported that around two years ago the “Argentine authorities had transmitted information to their American counterparts concerning “potential risk areas linked to the Argentine FA.” And yet here they are playing a team in the current World Cup. In essence, it seems it doesn’t matter what you do – you can keep playing. We move on and forget Trump’s intervention in the WC, just because it was so overt.
Of course the problem for football is that it makes a fortune out of the World Cup, and there no organisation other than Fifa that is ready to take it over. Because once the notion of integrity is broken, you can’t get it back, and Fifa has been teetering on that edge for years.
In the world we now live in, we don’t need any evidence to show that football is fixed; the amount of money sloshing around in the game is so big that we have no choice but to believe that there is something fishy going on somewhere, even if we can’t see it in the games we watch. And for that Fifa, Uefa, the FA and indeed (given the ongoing ManC case with the Premier League) all appear to have things to hide. People no longer take as the starting point the notion that those in charge of football are doing a good job. Now the starting point is the reverse.
So mention words like “integrity” in relation to football, and people start to laugh. It doesn’t matter if you are talking about PGMO or Fifa or Uefa or Manchester City. And it doesn’t matter if there is no evidence. We have moved from a world in which we are willing to accept that everything is fine within football and by and large the authorities are doing a good job, to a world in which such a thought is laughable.
Now there are fixers everywhere, gambling has become all-important and nation states with infinite wealth are involved. And indeed, if you remember your European history, you might recall Nicolae Ceaușescu of Romania. He held such absolute power that he thought he could get away with anything, and was eventually convicted of economic sabotage. Beware people with lots of power.
So to be clear, I am not presenting evidence of corruption but saying that a combination of vast sums of money, suggestions of corruption and decision-making within organisations that demand the right to make decisions because they are always right, generally leads to an explosion.
Of course the media don’t report this because the media is making a fortune out of football as it exists now, although they will report the collapse of the empire with a lot of shaking of the collective heads, and a wondering why no one saw that things were going wrong. But the signs are there.
The problem isn’t that football is fixed by gambling firms or syndicates; it is that we are reaching the point where the level of public cynicism is becoming so great that many people have stopped believing in football. Certainly, in the run-up to Arsenal winning the league, there was a huge level of talk of the league being fixed in Arsenal’s favour. And the evidence was “it’s obvious, it’s gotta be”.
And whether that was true or not, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we believe it is not fixed. But more and more people are starting to lose that belief, as football becomes more isolated from us regular supporters and more in the hands of people like Fifa, Uefa, PGMO, the president of the USA; the chances of it not being fixed decline more and more. They have made us more and more cynical, and that move by the President of the USA to overturn a red card took us another major step along that road.