The hammer finally came down on Fifa, the world governing body of soccer that has long been viewed as a morass of corruption. And that hammer came from an unlikely place: the US Department of Justice (DoJ). The most glaring omission? Fifa president Sepp Blatter.
Blatter is the head of the beast, and any real effort to reform Fifa and rid the association of its dirty dealings must involve his ouster. There’s little sign that will happen any time soon. Blatter is still pretty sure to win re-election in a vote scheduled to take place today, despite the fact that 80 percent of soccer fans want to see him gone.
But don’t fret: Throughout Wednesday’s announcements, the DoJ has been careful to stress that its investigation is still under way.
It’s a common tactic in prosecuting white-collar crimes to parlay charges against high-ranking officials into testimony against even higher ones. That’s partly how we ended up here. The DOJ’s investigation used the convictions and guilty pleas, sealed until now, of several officials to gain testimony against the 14 indicted.
You might be wondering what exactly compelled the US, not a soccer powerhouse in itself, to go after Fifa in the first place. It’s that the US is essentially treating it as a criminal enterprise. It also makes some sense that a country with less emotional attachment to soccer would face fewer complications from its public and politicians in cracking down on the sport.
And as DoJ officials stated in Wednesday’s press conference, the conspiracy partly took place on US soil, involved US soccer officials and used US banks and wire services to facilitate the illegal transactions.
Fifa, an enterprise worth billions, has plenty of legitimate resources to fight off the corruption allegations – some $400 million (R4.83 billion) a year from sponsorship alone.
Bloomberg