Recent decisions by football governing bodies all over the world confirm that this is an age during which ethics are redundant.
Perhaps in the fullness of time, the 2025-26 season will come to be remembered as that in which football’s governing bodies gave up on the pretence of not being corrupt.
Whether we’re talking about Africa, Europe, or the global governing body of the game, there has grown an absolute shamelessness about the way in which those who run the game which indicates that we can only expect the game to be bent increasingly towards the will of the richest and most powerful in the years to come.
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It leads from the top, of course. There have been reports that Gianni Infantino’s decision to give a peace prize to the warmongering president of the United States of America caused red-faces elsewhere around FIFA before said president decided to declare war on a country which caused no direct threat to his own.
Quite what those who were embarrassed about it before the Peace Guy bombed a school in the Iranian town of Minab and killed 165 kids - and 175 people in total - thought of it as the bombs rained down is anybody’s guess.
Iran are surely now vanishingly unlikely to appear in the tournament finals, and FIFA’s response to this has, from what can be made out of it, to be to bury their heads in the sand. Meanwhile, anybody who actually travels to this tournament only has themselves to blame should they be arrested and sent to a foreign country, with no due process having been carried out.
This week’s episode of eyebrow-raising executive decisions spans two different continents. In England, the Premier League decided that the slightest possible slap on the wrists was an appropriate level of punishment for a football club that had been systematically cheating for years and who won a truckload of silverware as a result of it. This, of course, came after docking two smaller clubs points for what look on the surface like far less egregious breaches of financial rules.
And now in Africa, the Confederation of African Football (CAF) have decided, almost two months after the event, to annul the final of their biannual continent-wide tournament and award the hollowest win possible to a country which had already been criticised for having too much power within that organisation, as well as their running of the tournament.
If the CAF wanted to demonstrate that African football had escaped the shackles of corruption which went so far towards holding the game on the continent back for decades, they chose the worst possible way in order to do so.
It did feel a little at the time as though there were no real ‘winners’ of the AFCON 2026 final between Morocco and Senegal. The host nation had stood accused of benefitting from dubious decision-making throughout the tournament, and nothing that happened in the final disavowed that notion.
But the response of the Senegal team to this - leaving the pitch - was a self-inflicted injury. It opened them up to the sanctions that have been applied, even if they may have felt that to strip them of the title 57 days after the event may have been a little too on the nose to actually happen. Morocco have stood accused of being too powerful within African football for some time.
Of course, we here in England are uniquely placed to not be throwing stones from our particular glass house on the matter of the final of a major tournament being played under chaotic circumstances. The Euro 2020(1) final at Wembley was every bit as much of a mess as the final of the final of AFCON 2026, with it being a miracle that no-one was killed as security collapsed in the face of a crowd that was pretty much beyond control.
And in the same week, the Premier League demonstrated that it has one rule for the rich and another for everybody else with its kid gloves handling of Chelsea over a period between 2011 and 2018 during which they paid more than £23 million to seven unregistered agents “or entities associated with them” in connection to the transfer and registration of seven players, including Eden Hazard, Ramires, David Luiz, Andre Schurrle and Nemanja Matic.
A total of £47,524,925.74 was paid to 12 individuals or corporate entities, “each of which implicates one or more of the rules”, during that time. It can hardly be said that the players involved didn’t directly benefit them, but apparently the new ownership’s “eagerness” to assist with the investigation and - for some reason - the fact that their transfer dealings didn’t impact upon their PSR position were deemed sufficient reasons to not really punish them in any meaningful way whatsoever.
The Premier League’s rationale for such a mild slap on the wrists hasn’t really been believed by anybody, and although I’d probably stop short of calling them ‘corrupt’, they are at least craven, and administering an effectively non-existent ‘punishment’ on a very wealthy club after having docked two others points over their financial affairs is a very, very bad look indeed.
This is essentially a reflection of the world in a broader sense. The USA and the UK have led by example, in their own ways. It is perfectly clear that the US is a fascist kleptocracy, and there’s every possibility that this country will be as disgusting by the end of this decade, if it isn’t already.
And in less than three months time, they’ll all come a-calling, expecting us to surrender our time and the evidence of our own eyes as they seek to enrich themselves even more through an expanded World Cup which has apparently been designed to wear players out even more than they already are, and which already feels as though it’s got a curse on it.
It is a strange world, in which the game’s governing bodies remove this particular mask while filling the calendar with extra matches and tournaments that no-one even asked for, demanding that we exert even more time and energy while spending more money in order to fuel ever-spiralling wages, and not only for players.
But this summer might mark the point at which the strangling noises that the goose is making will finally start to become audible. But there’s a potential blockage at this point. Only by promising to cut off or take back the supply of golden eggs will even the possibility of meaningful reform come, andeven if that turned out to be generally agreed, it would need to be global.
No, me neither.
Image byAnnette fromPixabay
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