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Hans-Joachim Eckert, chairman of the independent Adjudicatory Chamber of football governing body FIFA\u2019s Ethics Committee, announced on Thursday that his committee had\u00a0exonerated<\/a>\u00a0Qatar and Russia over the controversial bidding process for the 2018 and 2022 World Cup hosting rights.<\/p>\n A report to Eckert\u2019s committee also criticised England and Australia, whose respective bids for the 2018 and 2022 tournaments yielded princely votes of two and one.<\/p>\n In\u00a0response<\/a>, FIFA felt emboldened to \u201cwelcome the fact that a degree of closure has been reached\u201d and announced that:<\/p>\n \u2026 the evaluation of the 2018\/2022 FIFA World Cups bidding process is closed for the FIFA Ethics Committee.<\/p>\n But within hours of the report\u2019s release, Michael Garcia, chairman of the independent Investigatory Chamber and a former US federal prosecutor who had spent two years looking into the allegations,\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0that the 42-page summary of his 430-page report:<\/p>\n \u2026 contains numerous materially incomplete and erroneous representations.<\/p>\n \u201cClosure\u201d never looked more open-ended. FIFA has never appeared more foolish, deluded and self-serving.<\/p>\n The ABC recently broadcast\u00a0Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond<\/a>, a two-part series about the literary creator of James Bond. Fleming died in 1964, two years before England\u2019s\u00a0sole victory<\/a>\u00a0in the FIFA World Cup. It is a shame that he never turned his attention from\u00a0SMERSH<\/a>, the fictional Soviet spy agency in the James Bond novels, and international espionage to take on the murky world of FIFA and international football.<\/p>\n With a ready-made cast of villains, sundry convoluted plots and a raft of shady transactions, it would have been easy for Fleming to take some minor fictional liberties with FIFA\u2019s shenanigans and bash out From Zurich With Cash or The Executive Committee Member Who Milked Me.<\/p>\n There has been something of a bad smell around the FIFA Executive Committee\u2019s\u00a0decision<\/a>\u00a0in 2010 to award the 2018 World Cup to Russia and, especially, the 2022 World Cup to Qatar.<\/p>\n Even by FIFA\u2019s inglorious standards, it seemed patently odd that the host of the world\u2019s biggest single sport event would be a nation of two million people with little standing in the game and\u00a0temperatures<\/a>\u00a0at game time exceeding 40C.<\/p>\n FIFA told surprised observers that Qatar got the World Cup purely on the merits of its bid, and that in-stadium technology would enable the players to run around in a very comfortable stadium temperature of 22C. When many remained unconvinced, FIFA president Sepp Blatter\u00a0intimated<\/a>\u00a0that this was colonialist resentment towards a developing football power.<\/p>\n Still, the doubts could not be dispelled. There were persistent suggestions that FIFA Executive Committee members and host bidders exchanged more than just technical data and business cards. Things became more complicated when Qatari Mohammed bin Hammam, president of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC),\u00a0challenged Blatter<\/a>\u00a0for the FIFA presidency.<\/p>\n Bin Hammam found himself\u00a0charged<\/a>\u00a0by FIFA\u2019s Ethics Committee with trying to bribe voters. He\u00a0withdrew<\/a>\u00a0from the election, was\u00a0banned for life<\/a>\u00a0from FIFA,\u00a0successfully appealed<\/a>\u00a0to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (which found insufficient evidence), only to be banned\u00a0again<\/a>\u00a0for life on grounds of \u201cconflicts of interest” while AFC president.<\/p>\n Blatter was\u00a0overwhelmingly re-elected<\/a>\u00a0as FIFA president in 2011. After this, Jack Warner, FIFA vice-president and president of the Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF), who was also being investigated by the Ethics Committee,\u00a0resigned<\/a>\u00a0from all his official positions in football. An alleged anti-Blatter presidency conspirator with bin Hammam, Warner was now off the scene.<\/p>\n This did not mean that all had gone quiet on the FIFA front. Blatter was dogged by court proceedings and investigations by FIFA and the Council of Europe concerning his knowledge of corrupt payments to FIFA officials by its collapsed marketing partner, ISL. Although the Council of Europe found it improbable that Blatter \u201cknew nothing\u201d about the\u00a0millions of dollars<\/a>\u00a0that changed hands, the major casualty of the scandal was former FIFA president and later honorary president Jo\u00e3o Havelange, who\u00a0resigned<\/a>\u00a0for \u201chealth and personal reasons\u201d after it exposed him.<\/p>\n Yet the rumblings over Qatar 2022 continued, with\u00a0revelations<\/a>\u00a0of ill-treatment of foreign workers building the stadiums and suggestions by Blatter \u2013 who had\u00a0admitted<\/a>\u00a0that the decision was \u201ca mistake\u201d \u2013 and others that it might be moved to the\u00a0Middle Eastern winter<\/a>.<\/p>\n Pushback<\/a>\u00a0from the major European and South American club competitions and\u00a0threats to sue<\/a>\u00a0for compensation by losing bidder Australia followed, as well as a senior FIFA official\u00a0declaring<\/a>\u00a0that the World Cup would not take place in Qatar.<\/p>\n The ground continues to shift, and likely still will despite the new report.<\/p>\n Football Federation Australia, which voted for Blatter in 2011, still has questions to answer. As the ABC\u2019s\u00a0Four Corners<\/a>\u00a0and the FIFA report have highlighted, the bid cost more than A$45 million and used consultants with dubious reputations in an attempt to garner votes.<\/p>\n So, is there any prospect of finding an exit from the FIFA labyrinth \u2013 or even of sending the bulldozers in? Blatter\u00a0promised<\/a>\u00a0to reform the organisation but, at the age of 78, has\u00a0confirmed<\/a>\u00a0that he will stand for a fifth term as FIFA president in 2015. He will almost certainly win. If he does so, the labyrinth will become even less navigable.<\/p>\n The author of the Bond novels would surely have found continuing inspiration in FIFA\u2019s outlandish plot turns, which would have beggared even his fertile imagination. For FIFA, it seems, Scandals Are Forever.<\/p>\n Previously published by\u00a0theconversation.com\/au<\/a>\u00a0(Academic rigour, journalistic flair).<\/em><\/p>\n Copyright \u00a9 David Rowe 2014<\/strong> Hans-Joachim Eckert, chairman of the independent Adjudicatory Chamber of football governing body FIFA\u2019s Ethics Committee, announced on Thursday that his committee had\u00a0exonerated\u00a0Qatar and Russia over the controversial bidding process for the 2018 and 2022 World Cup hosting rights. A report to Eckert\u2019s committee also criticised England and Australia, whose respective bids for the 2018 and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[26,34,35,33],"class_list":{"0":"post-1315","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-okategoriserade","7":"tag-fifa-world-cup","8":"tag-qatar","9":"tag-russia","10":"tag-scandal"},"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2JbBl-ld","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1315\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}A recent history of scandal<\/h2>\n
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\nEmail:\u00a0d.rowe@uws.edu.au<\/a>
\nTwitter: @rowe_david
\nWebsite:\u00a0http:\/\/www.uws.edu.au\/ics\/people\/researchers\/david_rowe<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"