Does anybody care anymore? These things keep being brought up but we all know it was rigged, tbh as soon as the tournament starts I really won't give a shit and I suspect a large proportion of those watching won't either.
We should care as if corruption is not correctly punished it will continue. Of course it comes down to whether we care about corruption in football or not!
Does anybody care anymore? These things keep being brought up but we all know it was rigged, tbh as soon as the tournament starts I really won't give a shit and I suspect a large proportion of those watching won't either.
We should care as if corruption is not correctly punished it will continue. Of course it comes down to whether we care about corruption in football or not!
Caring is all well and good but changes nothing unless someone actually does something about it. All that's happened here is that the faces have changed at FIFA. The culture remains unaltered and will continue as long as the national federations go along with it. The majority of federations will do so as they're benefiting massively from the corruption. Much like our own political system, everyone wants change apart from those empowered to make such changes, as they're the ones benefiting from the system.
Senior national associations like England, Germany, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, France, Italy etc should make a stand against FIFA. Refuse to go to the World Cup and organise their own competition. Many of the decent smaller countries like Australia, USA etc would welcome it and the sports media would be just as interested in the new competition as the fans. Isolate FIFA and then create a new world football body and invite countries to join. FIFA will never reform on its own. fuck em.
Senior national associations like England, Germany, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, France, Italy etc should make a stand against FIFA. Refuse to go to the World Cup and organise their own competition. Many of the decent smaller countries like Australia, USA etc would welcome it and the sports media would be just as interested in the new competition as the fans. Isolate FIFA and then create a new world football body and invite countries to join. FIFA will never reform on its own. fuck em.
I dont think this is a bad idea. 20+ years of corruption cannot just be wiped clean.
It wont happen though, we just wont get the support we need from Europe and beyond.
Senior national associations like England, Germany, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, France, Italy etc should make a stand against FIFA. Refuse to go to the World Cup and organise their own competition. Many of the decent smaller countries like Australia, USA etc would welcome it and the sports media would be just as interested in the new competition as the fans. Isolate FIFA and then create a new world football body and invite countries to join. FIFA will never reform on its own. fuck em.
The bigger problem is that some/most/all of the above nations have (allegedly) been involved in less than transparent deals to secure either world cup votes or media rights to the tournaments. It seems they are all as bad as each other unfortunately.
I highly recommend the Ugly Game by Heidi Blake and Jonathan Calvert, The Sunday Times journalists who exposed the corruption. A real insight into how they exposed the process, culture and the individuals.
Yes, it was known to all associations that you had to grease the palms to get a tournament, and all were guilty of it to greater and lesser extents. Does that mean it is fine for it to be held in Qatar? For me it doesn't. FIFA seems to have replaced their corrupt officials with slightly less corrupt ones who just want to put the past behind them. Over time, corruption will increase again because it has to hurt you and it doesn't hurt these people, getting caught hurts them!
The game in this country and probably most European countries is I think clean at Association levels. EUFA are very suspicious. If individual associations stand by and watch the world game descend into a mire of sleaze and corruption then eventually we will see the same happen at all levels. The fact that the FA and others are doing nothing is scandalous for the game of football as a whole. I’m not hopeful.
Senior national associations like England, Germany, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, France, Italy etc should make a stand against FIFA. Refuse to go to the World Cup and organise their own competition. Many of the decent smaller countries like Australia, USA etc would welcome it and the sports media would be just as interested in the new competition as the fans. Isolate FIFA and then create a new world football body and invite countries to join. FIFA will never reform on its own. fuck em.
I suggested this ages ago. It only needs England, Germany, Italy and Spain to kick it off. Half the world supports teams from those countries. It is the one time that the mindset of the modern football supporter would work in our favour. They won't support a world cup half as keenly without the biggest nations, even if their own is playing.
Brazil and Argentina would soon follow and then the whole sorry FIFA pack of cards would come tumbling down. Every other nation would be falling over themselves to join - a worldwide Premier League of sorts.
I cant see National Teams only having their Premier League players a week before the WC finals start. They will want them 3 or 4 weeks surely. Then the players will need a break after the finals. Think there will be at least a 2 month break.
But of course it doesnt matter that you are buggering up a couple of season of league football, that has been around for over 125 years, for the WC. Said it before, the UEFA national teams should have told FIFA that it doesnt work for them & they weren't going. Try having a WC without the top 5 or 6 countries there (England, Germany, Spain, France & Italy) and see how far that gets you.
Extending the end of 19-20 and delaying the start of the 20-21 European season couldn’t have come at a better time for FIFA and the headache this WC was going to cause.
U.S. Prosecutors Say Qatar and Russia Bribed FIFA Officials to Win World Cup Bids
For nearly a decade, Russia and Qatar have been suspected of buying votes to win hosting rights for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. On Monday, for the first time, the Department of Justice put things in black and white.
After years of investigations and indictments, the United States Department of Justice on Monday said for the first time that representatives working for Russia and Qatar had bribed FIFA officials to secure hosting rights for the World Cup in men’s soccer.
Prosecutors made the accusations in an indictment charging three media executives and a sports marketing company with a number of crimes, including wire fraud and money laundering, in connection with bribes to secure television and marketing rights for international soccer tournaments.
The accusations were the latest in a yearslong corruption case that has already produced convictions of numerous soccer officials and executives as well as depositions from former leaders of FIFA, world soccer’s governing body. Never before, though, have prosecutors so clearly described the scheme that helped deliver the votes that gave Russia and Qatar hosting rights for one of the world’s biggest sporting events.
The U.S. prosecutors on Monday explicitly revealed details about money paid to five members of FIFA’s top board ahead of the 2010 vote to choose Russia and Qatar as hosts. Russia defeated England and joint bids from Holland-Belgium and Spain-Portugal to host the 2018 men’s tournament. Qatar, a tiny desert state that has spent billions of dollars to prepare for the 2022 World Cup, defeated the United States in a runoff by a group of voters that had already been trimmed because two members had been secretly filmed agreeing to sell their votes.
Three South American officials, according to the indictment, received payments to vote for Qatar.
One of the officials, Julio Grondona of Argentina, died in 2014. Another, Nicolás Leoz, died in Paraguay last year while under house arrest and fighting extradition to the United States. The third man, Ricardo Teixeira, the former leader of soccer in Brazil, remains in that country, which does not have an extradition treaty with the United States.
Leoz and Teixeira were indicted in 2015 on charges related to bribery schemes to sell lucrative soccer rights to sports broadcasters.
The U.S. prosecutors also stated in Monday’s indictment that the former soccer official Jack Warner of Trinidad and Tobago, who has been fighting extradition to the U.S. since 2015, received $5 million through a string of shell companies to vote for Russia. Some of the money, the indictment said, came “from companies based in the United States that performed work on behalf of the 2018 Russia World Cup bid.”
Rafael Salguero, a Guatemalan soccer official who pleaded guilty in 2016 to money laundering and fraud charges, received $1 million to give his vote to Russia, the indictment said.
None of the former soccer officials were immediately available for comment. Officials at Russia’s soccer federation and FIFA did not reply to an email sent after business hours to request comment.
Qatar has long denied allegations of acting improperly despite facing a slew of accusations since it started bidding for soccer’s biggest prize.
A FIFA document alluded to the bribery scheme last year. The names of Grondona, Leoz and Teixeira and references to payments they received were included in an ethics document justifying a lifetime suspension of Teixeira from FIFA.
The allegations against the South Americans mirror those made by Alejandro Burzaco, a former Argentine television executive who turned state’s witness after being named as a central figure in the soccer corruption case. He said at the New York trial of three other officials in 2017 that Leoz, Grondona and Teixeira had been paid to vote for Qatar.
More than half the people involved in the votes for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, including the former FIFA president Sepp Blatter, have been accused of wrongdoing, though not necessarily criminally charged.
The choice of Qatar — a country with such hot summers that five years after the vote FIFA was forced to move the start of the 2022 World Cup to November — received most of the attention after the votes. But Russia, too, has faced allegations of improper bidding behavior.
Russian officials told a FIFA panel that investigated its bid that they could not turn over computers used during the process to a FIFA investigator because they had all been destroyed.
Last May, almost a year after Russia staged the World Cup, Gianni Infantino, who came out of relative obscurity to secure the FIFA presidency after the corruption scandal took down almost all of the organization’s senior leadership, received the Order of Friendship medal from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
Two of the sports media executives who were charged in Monday’s indictments, Hernan Lopez and Carlos Martinez, formerly worked for international subsidiaries of 21st Century Fox. This was the first time the federal government had formally accused Fox, which won the rights to televise the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, or any of its executives of wrongdoing.
During the 2017 trial, Burzaco accused Fox of bribing officials, an accusation that the company denied at the time.
Lopez, 49, was the president and chief executive of Fox International Channels, and Martinez, 51, was the president of Fox Networks Group Latin America. According to the prosecutors, the pair participated in a scheme that paid millions of dollars in bribes to officials of South America’s continental soccer federation, in order to direct how the officials awarded broadcast rights for the Copa Libertadores, South America’s premier club soccer competition.
They are also accused of using inside information to help Fox win the English-language rights in the United States to televise the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. Lopez and Martinez “relied on loyalty secured through the payment of bribes,” according to the indictment. Among other things, the prosecutors said, the bribes helped Fox obtain confidential information “regarding bidding for the rights to broadcast the 2018 and 2022 World Cup tournaments in the United States.”
Through their lawyers, Lopez and Martinez denied the charges and accused the U.S. government of pushing forward a thin case.
“The indictment contains nothing more than single paragraph about Mr. Lopez that alleges nothing remotely improper,” Matthew Umhofer, a lawyer for Lopez, said in statement. Steven McCool, a lawyer for Martinez, called the charges “nothing more than stale fiction.”
In 2011, it was announced that Fox had agreed to pay more than $400 million for the English-language rights in the United States to the men’s 2018 and 2022 World Cups, as well as to the women’s 2015 and 2019 World Cups. The win was a surprise, as ABC and ESPN had broadcast the men’s World Cup since 1994.
FIFA later awarded Fox the rights to broadcast the 2026 World Cup without holding an open bidding process, after Fox had challenged the federation’s decision to move the 2022 tournament to late fall from its traditional summer window.
Lopez left Fox in 2016 to start the podcast company Wondery; Martinez left in 2019.
Also charged Monday was Gerard Romy, a former executive of a Spanish media conglomerate, and Full Play, a Uruguay-based sports marketing company. Hugo Jinkis and Mariano Jinkis, the owners of Full Play, were charged individually in 2015 as part of the first FIFA indictments in the case.
Comments
fuck em.
It wont happen though, we just wont get the support we need from Europe and beyond.
Brazil and Argentina would soon follow and then the whole sorry FIFA pack of cards would come tumbling down. Every other nation would be falling over themselves to join - a worldwide Premier League of sorts.
But of course it doesnt matter that you are buggering up a couple of season of league football, that has been around for over 125 years, for the WC. Said it before, the UEFA national teams should have told FIFA that it doesnt work for them & they weren't going. Try having a WC without the top 5 or 6 countries there (England, Germany, Spain, France & Italy) and see how far that gets you.
Typical governing bodies though- no backbone.
U.S. Prosecutors Say Qatar and Russia Bribed FIFA Officials to Win World Cup Bids
For nearly a decade, Russia and Qatar have been suspected of buying votes to win hosting rights for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. On Monday, for the first time, the Department of Justice put things in black and white.
After years of investigations and indictments, the United States Department of Justice on Monday said for the first time that representatives working for Russia and Qatar had bribed FIFA officials to secure hosting rights for the World Cup in men’s soccer.
Prosecutors made the accusations in an indictment charging three media executives and a sports marketing company with a number of crimes, including wire fraud and money laundering, in connection with bribes to secure television and marketing rights for international soccer tournaments.
The accusations were the latest in a yearslong corruption case that has already produced convictions of numerous soccer officials and executives as well as depositions from former leaders of FIFA, world soccer’s governing body. Never before, though, have prosecutors so clearly described the scheme that helped deliver the votes that gave Russia and Qatar hosting rights for one of the world’s biggest sporting events.
The U.S. prosecutors on Monday explicitly revealed details about money paid to five members of FIFA’s top board ahead of the 2010 vote to choose Russia and Qatar as hosts. Russia defeated England and joint bids from Holland-Belgium and Spain-Portugal to host the 2018 men’s tournament. Qatar, a tiny desert state that has spent billions of dollars to prepare for the 2022 World Cup, defeated the United States in a runoff by a group of voters that had already been trimmed because two members had been secretly filmed agreeing to sell their votes.
Three South American officials, according to the indictment, received payments to vote for Qatar.
One of the officials, Julio Grondona of Argentina, died in 2014. Another, Nicolás Leoz, died in Paraguay last year while under house arrest and fighting extradition to the United States. The third man, Ricardo Teixeira, the former leader of soccer in Brazil, remains in that country, which does not have an extradition treaty with the United States.
Leoz and Teixeira were indicted in 2015 on charges related to bribery schemes to sell lucrative soccer rights to sports broadcasters.
The U.S. prosecutors also stated in Monday’s indictment that the former soccer official Jack Warner of Trinidad and Tobago, who has been fighting extradition to the U.S. since 2015, received $5 million through a string of shell companies to vote for Russia. Some of the money, the indictment said, came “from companies based in the United States that performed work on behalf of the 2018 Russia World Cup bid.”
Rafael Salguero, a Guatemalan soccer official who pleaded guilty in 2016 to money laundering and fraud charges, received $1 million to give his vote to Russia, the indictment said.
None of the former soccer officials were immediately available for comment. Officials at Russia’s soccer federation and FIFA did not reply to an email sent after business hours to request comment.
Qatar has long denied allegations of acting improperly despite facing a slew of accusations since it started bidding for soccer’s biggest prize.
A FIFA document alluded to the bribery scheme last year. The names of Grondona, Leoz and Teixeira and references to payments they received were included in an ethics document justifying a lifetime suspension of Teixeira from FIFA.
The allegations against the South Americans mirror those made by Alejandro Burzaco, a former Argentine television executive who turned state’s witness after being named as a central figure in the soccer corruption case. He said at the New York trial of three other officials in 2017 that Leoz, Grondona and Teixeira had been paid to vote for Qatar.
The choice of Qatar — a country with such hot summers that five years after the vote FIFA was forced to move the start of the 2022 World Cup to November — received most of the attention after the votes. But Russia, too, has faced allegations of improper bidding behavior.
Russian officials told a FIFA panel that investigated its bid that they could not turn over computers used during the process to a FIFA investigator because they had all been destroyed.
Last May, almost a year after Russia staged the World Cup, Gianni Infantino, who came out of relative obscurity to secure the FIFA presidency after the corruption scandal took down almost all of the organization’s senior leadership, received the Order of Friendship medal from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
Two of the sports media executives who were charged in Monday’s indictments, Hernan Lopez and Carlos Martinez, formerly worked for international subsidiaries of 21st Century Fox. This was the first time the federal government had formally accused Fox, which won the rights to televise the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, or any of its executives of wrongdoing.
During the 2017 trial, Burzaco accused Fox of bribing officials, an accusation that the company denied at the time.
Lopez, 49, was the president and chief executive of Fox International Channels, and Martinez, 51, was the president of Fox Networks Group Latin America. According to the prosecutors, the pair participated in a scheme that paid millions of dollars in bribes to officials of South America’s continental soccer federation, in order to direct how the officials awarded broadcast rights for the Copa Libertadores, South America’s premier club soccer competition.
They are also accused of using inside information to help Fox win the English-language rights in the United States to televise the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. Lopez and Martinez “relied on loyalty secured through the payment of bribes,” according to the indictment. Among other things, the prosecutors said, the bribes helped Fox obtain confidential information “regarding bidding for the rights to broadcast the 2018 and 2022 World Cup tournaments in the United States.”
Through their lawyers, Lopez and Martinez denied the charges and accused the U.S. government of pushing forward a thin case.
“The indictment contains nothing more than single paragraph about Mr. Lopez that alleges nothing remotely improper,” Matthew Umhofer, a lawyer for Lopez, said in statement. Steven McCool, a lawyer for Martinez, called the charges “nothing more than stale fiction.”
Neither the Fox Corporation nor Disney — which acquired most of Fox’s international assets in 2019 — immediately responded to a request for comment.
In 2011, it was announced that Fox had agreed to pay more than $400 million for the English-language rights in the United States to the men’s 2018 and 2022 World Cups, as well as to the women’s 2015 and 2019 World Cups. The win was a surprise, as ABC and ESPN had broadcast the men’s World Cup since 1994.
FIFA later awarded Fox the rights to broadcast the 2026 World Cup without holding an open bidding process, after Fox had challenged the federation’s decision to move the 2022 tournament to late fall from its traditional summer window.
Lopez left Fox in 2016 to start the podcast company Wondery; Martinez left in 2019.
Also charged Monday was Gerard Romy, a former executive of a Spanish media conglomerate, and Full Play, a Uruguay-based sports marketing company. Hugo Jinkis and Mariano Jinkis, the owners of Full Play, were charged individually in 2015 as part of the first FIFA indictments in the case.