BREAKING: Top FIFA officials arrested in Switzerland, to be indicted on corruption charges
- Thread starter DHSC
- Start date
- Latest activity Latest activity:
- Status
There is zero reason to believe this corruption has not reached UEFA or the FA of the FIFA member nations.
The only question is how deeply rooted is this corruption.
The correct thing to do is to disband all bodies while suspending all international games for two years until such a time as alternative means of governing football can be established.
But there is a fat chance of that ever happening....someone else will replace Blatter and start lining gis pockets....its all pointless.
The only question is how deeply rooted is this corruption.
The correct thing to do is to disband all bodies while suspending all international games for two years until such a time as alternative means of governing football can be established.
But there is a fat chance of that ever happening....someone else will replace Blatter and start lining gis pockets....its all pointless.
FIFA cannot ne so corrupt qithout the respective FAs allowing it, can it? It would have taken only one genuine noncorrupt member to be the whistle blower??
I wish FIFA would just implode from within and the whole world of football crumbles and it will be the end of football.
The more I think about it, the more I can to the conclusion that @Red Astaire is either :
A) A FBI informant that has been travelling the globe secretly recording details for a case against Blatter.
B) running for Blatter's position and has started touring the world to lock in votes already.
C) Blatter's "bag man" who has just dumped huge amounts of cash into a secret bank account in the Caymans.
D) Just been given an idea for his next script.
A) A FBI informant that has been travelling the globe secretly recording details for a case against Blatter.
B) running for Blatter's position and has started touring the world to lock in votes already.
C) Blatter's "bag man" who has just dumped huge amounts of cash into a secret bank account in the Caymans.
D) Just been given an idea for his next script.
I bet he didn't just throw it in....I bet he curled it around and over a wall.
Europe's been raiding African countries for centuries now, there's nothing new there. Then you get mouthpieces like that gob shite Hopkins saying the migrants trying to cross the med should be met with gun boats.
Isn't there an argument to be made that Blatter's FIFA has promoted and improved football around the world in a massive way? His FIFA has spent billions on football projects across Africa and Asia (ranging from pitches to academies) which has had big effects on the quality of life in areas where it's needed the most, and he's also overseen the first ever African world cup, and Asian world cup. Maybe the reason we Europeans are so pissed off is because Blatter has degraded the Eurocentric nature of FIFA, for the betterment of world football?
Having read the article Ryan posted on page 7, I very much doubt it.
They probably could have splashed out a bit more if they weren't taking backhanders.
When they modernise anywhere, they do it so madly fast that the foundations are already crumbling before the project is completed. If FIFA were to 'help' a village primary school to expand a little, it would turn it into a university, then go away, leaving it in need of demolition. There's no concept of gradualness in FIFA. It only really galvanises a region into action unless it first sucks it into hosting something, then it's modernised mainly for short term aims that have little to do with long term local needs. Then it leaves behind a veritable community of parasites to make the infrastructure seem necessary. It's an obscenely inept way of investing in development.
That can be summarised into one word - corruption. Stinking filthy corruption and selfish gain.
Wow. Mystic you obviously haven't been to Asia or South America.
Go ask the Brazilians and South Africans. They are FIFA's biggest fans.
Sorry, i meant to type fiends.
Go ask the Brazilians and South Africans. They are FIFA's biggest fans.
Sorry, i meant to type fiends.
Hahaha, I work with a South Africian who was less than impressed with the world cup when it was held there, so I know, my post was mostly in jest, I in no way support Blatter, or Platini, or indeed any of them. Personally I don't think the world cup should ever been held outside of a country who's already got the infrastructure to support it, it's irresponsible and worsens the quality of life for the natives of those nations.
Here's an all too typical story about FIFA's 'help':
April 15 – The writing was on wall from the moment the decision was taken to build. The Arena Amazonia - a beautiful and giant stadium, in the heart of Manaus, the capital city of the most important forest on Earth, and constructed for the greatest show on Earth, the FIFA World Cup – has become a monument to Brazilian football's financial folly. A legacy nightmare.
Club football in Brazil does not have an equal national spread and the Amazon region is not a hotbed of the game. There has not been a single team in the top or second division in Brazil for a number of years while the local Amazone State League struggles with few clubs, and most of them are outside of Manaus – and most of them are cash-strapped.
Nacional is a good example. One of the traditional and most important Amazonian clubs, playing in the local state league, the Brazil Cup and the so-called Gren Cup (for clubs connected regionally to the Amazonian Basin and environs), Nacional had to drop the price of match tickets the Arena, to a maximum of £10 to encourage attendance.
Now in a position where the club cannot even cover the costs of playing in the Arena Amazonia, Nacional is switching venue.
With the loss of the Arena's main club tenant, a search is on to find ways to cover the £180,000 monthly cost to taxpayers in a stadium that lies empty more than 65% of the time.
Close to £200 million was spent to build the Arena, in a city that still fights serious poverty, where public hospitals are in dramatic need of supplies, and sewage is still far from being 100% treated.
With loan repayments being missed and the interest on those loans currently at £18 million, the hunt is on to to find a way to transfer the management and maintance of the Arena to a private entity.
One bright spot for the Arena is that it is one of the stadia to host matches for the 2016 Olympic Games. This effectively means that it will have to remain government funded until after the Olympics.
Since the four matches of the World Cup, the Arena has hosted less than one match a month (statistically 0.7 of a match per month). In 2015 there have been just five matches played there.
As if to add insult to injury (and adding to the taxpayer's bill) is that the stadium grass, costing £65,000 to install to meet FIFA standards, is having to be replaced at a cost of £50,000.
The Arena has become a political football locally, even being used for a public protest by striking teachers demanding higher salaries, the teachers claiming there was money to maintain the stadium but not to pay them.
The jury is out on the future for the Arena, but one thing is certain, it will require public money to keep it open through the Olympics and it is unlikely to see increased usage before then. Post Olympics, persuading a private entity to take on the commerical challenge is major challenge that at this point looks unlikely to be achieved.
April 15 – The writing was on wall from the moment the decision was taken to build. The Arena Amazonia - a beautiful and giant stadium, in the heart of Manaus, the capital city of the most important forest on Earth, and constructed for the greatest show on Earth, the FIFA World Cup – has become a monument to Brazilian football's financial folly. A legacy nightmare.
Club football in Brazil does not have an equal national spread and the Amazon region is not a hotbed of the game. There has not been a single team in the top or second division in Brazil for a number of years while the local Amazone State League struggles with few clubs, and most of them are outside of Manaus – and most of them are cash-strapped.
Nacional is a good example. One of the traditional and most important Amazonian clubs, playing in the local state league, the Brazil Cup and the so-called Gren Cup (for clubs connected regionally to the Amazonian Basin and environs), Nacional had to drop the price of match tickets the Arena, to a maximum of £10 to encourage attendance.
Now in a position where the club cannot even cover the costs of playing in the Arena Amazonia, Nacional is switching venue.
With the loss of the Arena's main club tenant, a search is on to find ways to cover the £180,000 monthly cost to taxpayers in a stadium that lies empty more than 65% of the time.
Close to £200 million was spent to build the Arena, in a city that still fights serious poverty, where public hospitals are in dramatic need of supplies, and sewage is still far from being 100% treated.
With loan repayments being missed and the interest on those loans currently at £18 million, the hunt is on to to find a way to transfer the management and maintance of the Arena to a private entity.
One bright spot for the Arena is that it is one of the stadia to host matches for the 2016 Olympic Games. This effectively means that it will have to remain government funded until after the Olympics.
Since the four matches of the World Cup, the Arena has hosted less than one match a month (statistically 0.7 of a match per month). In 2015 there have been just five matches played there.
As if to add insult to injury (and adding to the taxpayer's bill) is that the stadium grass, costing £65,000 to install to meet FIFA standards, is having to be replaced at a cost of £50,000.
The Arena has become a political football locally, even being used for a public protest by striking teachers demanding higher salaries, the teachers claiming there was money to maintain the stadium but not to pay them.
The jury is out on the future for the Arena, but one thing is certain, it will require public money to keep it open through the Olympics and it is unlikely to see increased usage before then. Post Olympics, persuading a private entity to take on the commerical challenge is major challenge that at this point looks unlikely to be achieved.
This exactly highlights the problems, people will cry that you're locking the world cup to only be in rich countries, stopping the world cup from travelling the world like the truly global competition it is, because apparently it's more important for a country to host the world cup, than to spend it's money on tackling poverty in the streets. The world cup should only go to countries who already have the infrastructure to support it, or at the very least only require moderate work to prepare for it, moderate work the country can afford without making human sacrifice. Korea and Asia were fine, Brazil and South Africa were not.
Yes. FIFA would help if it maintained a trickle of money into building up grassroots football, rather than dragging countries about 50 years into the future with a sudden huge injection of investment. But of course the former isn't 'sexy' or newsworthy or likely to win masses of votes in the short term.
The biggest news story of the year was breaking, but the journalist responsible was fast asleep. It was just after dawn on May 27 when Andrew Jennings’s phone began ringing. Swiss police had just launched a startling raid on a luxury hotel in Zurich, arresting seven top FIFA officials and charging them and others with running a $150 million racket. The world was stunned.
The waking world, that is. If Jennings had bothered to climb out of bed, he wouldn’t have been surprised at the news. After all, he was the man who set the investigation in motion, with a book in 2006, “FOUL! The Secret World of FIFA: Bribes, Vote Rigging and Ticket Scandals,” followed by an exposé aired on the BBC’s “Panorama” program that same year, and then another book in 2014, called “Omerta: Sepp Blatter’s FIFA Organised Crime Family.”
“My phone started ringing at six in the morning,” Jennings said Tuesday from his farm in the hilly north of England. “I turned it off actually to get some more sleep, because whatever is happening at six in the morning is still going to be there at lunch time, isn’t it?”
If you can’t tell already, Jennings is an advocate of slow, methodical journalism. For half a century, the 71-year-old investigative reporter has been digging into complex, time-consuming stories about organized crime. In the 1980s, it was bad cops, the Thai heroin trade and the Italian mob. In the ’90s, he turned to sports, exposing corruption with the International Olympic Committee.
For the past 15 years, Jennings has focused on the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), international soccer’s governing body. As other journalists were ball watching — reporting scorelines or writing player profiles — Jennings was digging into the dirty deals underpinning the world’s most popular game.
“Credit in this saga should go to the dogged obsession of a single reporter, Andrew Jennings,” the Guardian’s Simon Jenkins wrote last week, citing in particular Jennings’s BBC “Panorama” film called “The Beautiful Bung: Corruption and the World Cup.”
For the full article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...-that-toppled-sepp-blatter/?tid=hp_mm&hpid=z3
The waking world, that is. If Jennings had bothered to climb out of bed, he wouldn’t have been surprised at the news. After all, he was the man who set the investigation in motion, with a book in 2006, “FOUL! The Secret World of FIFA: Bribes, Vote Rigging and Ticket Scandals,” followed by an exposé aired on the BBC’s “Panorama” program that same year, and then another book in 2014, called “Omerta: Sepp Blatter’s FIFA Organised Crime Family.”
“My phone started ringing at six in the morning,” Jennings said Tuesday from his farm in the hilly north of England. “I turned it off actually to get some more sleep, because whatever is happening at six in the morning is still going to be there at lunch time, isn’t it?”
If you can’t tell already, Jennings is an advocate of slow, methodical journalism. For half a century, the 71-year-old investigative reporter has been digging into complex, time-consuming stories about organized crime. In the 1980s, it was bad cops, the Thai heroin trade and the Italian mob. In the ’90s, he turned to sports, exposing corruption with the International Olympic Committee.
For the past 15 years, Jennings has focused on the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), international soccer’s governing body. As other journalists were ball watching — reporting scorelines or writing player profiles — Jennings was digging into the dirty deals underpinning the world’s most popular game.
“Credit in this saga should go to the dogged obsession of a single reporter, Andrew Jennings,” the Guardian’s Simon Jenkins wrote last week, citing in particular Jennings’s BBC “Panorama” film called “The Beautiful Bung: Corruption and the World Cup.”
For the full article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...-that-toppled-sepp-blatter/?tid=hp_mm&hpid=z3
Good read, thanks.
Credit to the Yanks for doing something the Swiss should have done ages ago ...
Apparently he stepped down so he could have more time to concentrate on his tennis game.
Rumour has it his serve and forehand need a bit of work, but his backhanders are fucking amazing
Rumour has it his serve and forehand need a bit of work, but his backhanders are fucking amazing
He has spread the game far and wide.
But he's done it so he'd have his own fiefdom and has done it through corruption. Does the end justify the means? I'm not at all sure in this case.
It was funny to hear Ruud Gullit on R5 this morning. He cackled uncontrollably when it was suggested the bids should be rerun. He said it was bitterness from us and the USA about not getting the gig.
He said the joint Holland & Belgium bid made better sense as they'd never had it. He also said that if Blatter had said beforehand they were looking at new territories then it would have been prudent to leave it to the newcomers to bid and not waste hundreds of millions.
Can you see the flaw in that plan of transparency for Blatter and his cronies. Meanwhile there's Jack Warner. The deputy head of FIFA. The man who loves a bung...sorry fee, for fixing things for people. It's cronyism at its worst.
The French executive has been defending Blatter today. Defending him! The whole system is corral to the core and needs ripping up and starting again. It needs moving from Switzerland, where it hides or evades taxes and uses loopholes in the laws there to say it's a not for profit organisation. Let that little sentence sink in. Not for profit! Hahahahahaha!
If it wasn't true it would be laughable. People are realising their little gravy trains could be about to end. That's why people are defending him.
A bid is effectively a tender for business. I find it amazing that having seen the leaked risk assessments of the 2018 & 2022 bids, which clearly show that both winners represent more risk than all the other bids.
Since winning the bids, Russia has continued with its anti-gay rhetoric and is currently doing very dubious things in the Crimea which smacks of a "what are you going to do about it?" stance to the world.
Meanwhile in Qatar, we are just counting the bodies of the imported slave labour. But Blatter et al still have the gumption to suggest that there's nothing to see here?
Since winning the bids, Russia has continued with its anti-gay rhetoric and is currently doing very dubious things in the Crimea which smacks of a "what are you going to do about it?" stance to the world.
Meanwhile in Qatar, we are just counting the bodies of the imported slave labour. But Blatter et al still have the gumption to suggest that there's nothing to see here?
- Status
