FIFA dirty secrets

[DeKuip]

I think that if one good thing can come of this, is it doesn't help once in a while to be reminded of how the English are often perceived abroad.  As a nation we have a certain aloofness, a superiority attitude (e.g. "The Best League in the World") and one of the legacies of Empire is a lingering resentment in many areas of the globe. 

Agree... and the same arseholes that keep telling everyone we have the best league in the world also had the brilliant 39th game idea last year... telling the rest of the world that their football is so piss poor we'll send our clubs out to play a game in your country and rip off your deprived fans too.
I bet that went down really well around the globe!

[Rigadon]

David Bond at the BBC: "Before today's World Cup vote, Sepp Blatter reminded FIFA executive comm members about "certain media" and "recent media coverage.""

Forget all that "Woodward and Bernstein" bullshit, dragging up old allegations against FIFA and then broadcasting them two days before the vote was not an exercise in investigative journalism, it was the BBC letting us down.

Everyone knows Blatter is a c***, and that Warner is a bigger c*** and overtly corrupt, but why on earth choose to shout it from the rooftops as the bid team was going to head out to Zurich?

Surprised at you viewpoint to be honest.

Hopefully Panorama was an attempt to shed light to the masses so to speak at a time when the coverage of the issue and FIFA as an organisation was at it's peak.  I find it very disconcerting that our PM has bent over to a sporting organisation that is utterly unaccountable for it's actions.  If the FA's of the countries bidding for these competitions weren't knee deep in the shite themselves and so had any scruples they would've pulled out of what was clearly a warped version of a democratic process.  Maybe you could call it naive but I'm not sure I'd really want to stage a world cup knowing we'd bribed our way to 'winning' the 'bid'. Cynical, cold and unnerving bollocks of a process.

Of course this is just idealistic nonsense if you read some of the papers like The Sun (hello Mr Murdoch) who ran an editorial distancing our country from the BBC.  What a surprise.  I don't give a monkeys about the world cup anymore and won't until FIFA is no longer running it.  They are more cynical and more self serving than the premier league and that is saying something.

[ROBBO]

Australia got one vote and like England went out in the first round, i feel sorry for those that have invested three years of their lives in the attempt to bring what is now a tarnished competition to their homeland. I really don't give a rats about it i'm over the England team and the year on year crap they serve up, i'm sick of overbloated egoes and paypackets of prem players and their agents. If it wasn't for my inbred love of Aston Villa i could quite happily totally ignore the sport, it has become a corrupt beheamoth that swallows everything that's good. It is totally self serving and is there to make sure those in power stay in power.
Fck the England team, Fck FIFA, UP THE vILLA.

[Nev]

It's no good everyone jumping up and down about the voting process being corupt. It didn't bother people when we still had a chance of winning it.

Rank hipochrisy.

[cdbearsfan]

If the FA really want to clean up football they should democratise their own structures and allow fans some say on who runs the FA, the Premier League, etc.

[dave.woodhall]

Good on the BBC for not bowing to pressure and to their reporters for doing the job they entered their profession for.

So, just because there was pressure on the BBC (not to derail a bid to bring the World Cup to England and thus deny hundreds of thousands of football fans and licence fee payers possibly the only chance of they'll ever get to witness it live), they were right not to bow to it? There is always pressure on people and organisations not to do bad things, so should they just do them anyway, rather than 'bow' to it?

If anyone is inspired to become a reporter by the prospect of exposing FIFA as corrupt, I've got something even more inspirational for them regarding the toilet habits of bears and the possibility of the Pope being a Catholic.

They had a story and ran it. That isn't bad, it's their job.

[KevinGage]

Australia got one vote and like England went out in the first round, i feel sorry for those that have invested three years of their lives in the attempt to bring what is now a tarnished competition to their homeland. I really don't give a rats about it i'm over the England team and the year on year crap they serve up, i'm sick of overbloated egoes and paypackets of prem players and their agents. If it wasn't for my inbred love of Aston Villa i could quite happily totally ignore the sport, it has become a corrupt beheamoth that swallows everything that's good. It is totally self serving and is there to make sure those in power stay in power.
Fck the England team, Fck FIFA, UP THE vILLA.

Australia - like England- would be good to go tomorrow.

Two first class venues in Melbourne with Docklands/Telstra Dome and the MCG, two in Sydney with the Olympic/ ANZ Stadium and the Aussie Stadium, two in Brisbane with the Gabba and Suncorp Stadium and in Perth you have Subiaco.

That's seven before you even need to talk about building or upgrading any of the others.

Temperatures at that time of year wouldn't be an issue either as it would be Australian winter time -which lets face it,  is winter Jim but not as we know it.

You can understand the pull of opening the thing out and leaving a legacy in Russia and the Middle East. But taken individually both of those bids when it came to actual specifics looked flawed. Russia has about two decent stadiums so far to speak of and is a logistical nightmare and if the bid had to go to a Middle East country there would be far better alternatives than Qatar.

I didn't see the Qatar presentation but the Ruski one looked piss poor, like it had been cobbled together overnight. No positives or certainty about what it could offer. Just plenty of "Trust us! Please!" type appeals.  It was revealing too that yesterday when the Head of the Russian bid was asked about the arrival of the British PM he sneered and said something along the lines of "You think that can have an impact at this stage?"  He knew it was in the bag.

Only thing where FIFA might have caused grief for themselves is the winning margin for both nations. It just doesn't tally with the information presented, so the natural conclusion is that the decision was taken on other criteria or factors not made public.

[mr woo]

Good on the BBC for not bowing to pressure and to their reporters for doing the job they entered their profession for.

So, just because there was pressure on the BBC (not to derail a bid to bring the World Cup to England and thus deny hundreds of thousands of football fans and licence fee payers possibly the only chance of they'll ever get to witness it live), they were right not to bow to it? There is always pressure on people and organisations not to do bad things, so should they just do them anyway, rather than 'bow' to it?

If anyone is inspired to become a reporter by the prospect of exposing FIFA as corrupt, I've got something even more inspirational for them regarding the toilet habits of bears and the possibility of the Pope being a Catholic.

They had a story and ran it. That isn't bad, it's their job.

True, but they had the option of waiting a couple of weeks to air it.

Like the tabloid media who print exposes on England players in the run up to a world cup, then complain when said player has a poor tournament.

Yes, they are only doing their job, but its obvious they are putting their job before their countries sporting achievements.

[dave.woodhall]

True, but they had the option of waiting a couple of weeks to air it.

Like the tabloid media who print exposes on England players in the run up to a world cup, then complain when said player has a poor tournament.

Yes, they are only doing their job, but its obvious they are putting their job before their countries sporting achievements.

There wouldn't be much point showing the programme afterwards. This week it's news, next week it's history. That's one of the drawbacks of a free press.

[Bosco81]

If they wanted to give the world cups to somewhere new then they should have told us 2 years and we wouldn't have bothered.

I hope the FIFA commitee lead Puritan lives from now on because they'll be journos tracking them.

It would be nice to set them up when some of them will be over for the European cup final in may.

[mr woo]

True, but they had the option of waiting a couple of weeks to air it.

Like the tabloid media who print exposes on England players in the run up to a world cup, then complain when said player has a poor tournament.

Yes, they are only doing their job, but its obvious they are putting their job before their countries sporting achievements.

There wouldn't be much point showing the programme afterwards. This week it's news, next week it's history. That's one of the drawbacks of a free press.

Ok. So fuck other peoples 3 years of hard work, not to mention a countries hopes.

 I'm a journalist and I want my 5 minutes.

There are times in life, love and politics its just better to keep your big gob shut.

[dave.woodhall]

It isn't 'a country's hopes.' I'm sure more people in Britain don't care who gets the World Cup than do, and sometimes football should remember that everything does not revolve around the game. As if the programme made one iota of difference.

[mr woo]

There are millions in this country who follow football and wanted the world cup hosted here.

There are countless others who don't give a shit about football but would have appreciated the revenue this event would bring in.


The likes of you and I will probably never know whether this was all decided weeks ago, thats true.

But I have to maintain, what these people did was at best disrespectful and at worst destructive.

[dave.woodhall]

I don't think it's disrespectful, nor destructive. It could be argued that if they have a story, they have a duty to broadcast it. If you censor things, for whatever reason apart from national security, you're starting to head down a very murky road.

[mr woo]

Absolutely Dave, I agree. Censorship is wrong.

But you know, especially in a position of power, the repercussions of telling things 'how they are' can have such a negative effect they are best left unsaid.

It all sounds a bit selfish to me, that's all.