[This entry comprises extracts from the beginning and the end of the first chapter of Alan Tomlinson and John Sugden (eds), Watching the Olympics: Politics, Power, and Representation (Routledge, publication July 2011)] [i]
Introduction
In 2012 London will become the only city to have staged the Summer Olympic Games more than twice (the so-called interim Games in Athens in 1906 are largely dismissed from recognised and authoritative records of the Games). For much of the 2012 bidding process up to July 2005, it seemed that Paris would win the race to be a three-times host, especially as its two previous Games were in the first quarter of the twentieth century, in 1900 and 1924. Athens, arrogantly and incorrectly assuming a sentimental vote for the centenary 1996 event, eventually hosted its second Games in 2004, and thereby helped precipitate its country’s economic crisis. Los Angeles, with a half century between its 1932 and 1984 events, is the only other city to have held the Summer games twice. Others have tried including Tokyo and Berlin. Some major cities have sought the Games but without success: New York, Istanbul, Madrid. The latter, along with Chicago and Tokyo, lost out in the final bidding round for the 2016 Games, awarded in October 2009 to Rio de Janeiro. Much has changed since Los Angeles laid down its ultimatum to the IOC for the 1984 Games, effectively rewriting the rules of engagement for any host city, allowing levels of commercialisation of the event not previously seen: the sponsoring of the Olympic torch relay being one particularly controversial initiative. And since then, television rights, sponsorship programmes, and the attraction of hosting an event claimed to deliver the world’s largest-ever television audience have sustained the Olympics through crises of corruption (by officials and administration), cheating (the use of banned drugs for performance-enhancement), and economic volatility. It is remarkable that, for all these problems, the Olympics continues to stimulate bidding wars. What draws cities, states, and corporate allies in to this dynamic and towards this aspiration, and how is the prize won? It is these simple questions that underlie the consideration in this chapter of London’s successful bid for 2012, and the wider mechanics of the bidding process. As a prelude to this it is illuminating, for the purposes of comparison, to reflect on the city’s previous Summer Olympics.
London 1908 and 1948
1908
The first modern Games were held in cities on the basis of the networks of the founder of the modern Olympics as we know them, Pierre de Coubertin, and the pragmatics of innovation: make the event and then document its history. They were small-scale: Athens 1896 involved a mere 245 or so competitors from 14 nations, competing in 43 events. Paris in 1900 had double the number of nations and a little over 1,000 competitors competing in 75 events, but the transatlantic venue of St. Louis 1904 exposed the European anchorage of Olympian internationalism, more than halving the number of competitors, at a Games that spread out over four and a half months and was the least representative of any in the history of the event, with just 7 European countries participating (Wallechinsky and Loucky 2008). Chicago had actually been awarded the event, but the organisers of the 1904 World’s Fair (the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition) gained the support of US president Theodore Roosevelt to get this decision reversed. De Coubertin had little option than to accept this. With such a fragmented, scarcely international event — Tswana tribesmen at the Fair as part of a Boer War exhibition were hauled in to compete in the marathon and add international spice — the Olympic initiative looked to have derailed. Greece organised its own Athenian Games, what has become known as an ‘interim’ Olympics for 1906, with 20 nations and 847 athletes, and planned four-yearly celebrations intended to dovetail with the Olympics. Rome (chosen over Berlin: see Revue Olympique 1904: 72 for an account of this decision at the fourth session of the IOC in London) had been allocated the 1908 Games, but a fragile national economy, competing city factions across the country, and lack of support from the national Italian government in 1906 caused De Coubertin to doubt the strength of the commitment.
British fencer Lord Desborough (see Box 1) had competed in Athens in 1906, doubling up as King Edward VII’s ‘British Representative … on the same auspicious occasion’. With the uncertainties in Rome, and the future of the De Coubertin project in doubt: ‘It was therefore with every prospect of success that the suggestion was made that the Games of 1908 should be celebrated in England … Lord Desborough was able to carry out that suggestion, not only because of the personal influence he possessed, but also because the Central Organisation from which the management of these games might be created had already come into existence in this country’ (Cook 1909: 19).
BOX 1: LORD DESBOROUGH
Beckett (2004) summarises: ‘For all his public duties, Grenfell [Desborough] was probably best-known by contemporaries for his sporting prowess. He had represented Harrow at cricket and Oxford in fencing, athletics, and rowing. He made two appearances in the university boat race in 1877 and 1878: the first was a dead heat and the second a victory for Oxford. He won the Thames punting championships for three successive years (1888–90), stroked an eight across the channel, sculled the London–Oxford stretch of the Thames in a crew of three in twenty-two consecutive hours, and rowed for the Leander club in the Grand Challenge Cup at Henley while an MP. Having won foils at both Harrow and Oxford, Grenfell also represented Britain, and became founding president of the Amateur Fencing Association. He twice swam Niagara, crossing the pool just below the falls, and he ascended the Matterhorn by three different routes. In one eight day period he ascended the Matterhorn, the little Matterhorn, Monte Rosa, the Rothorn, and the Weisshorn. On one occasion he was lost for three days in the Rocky Mountains. He was also a keen horseman, hunter, and fisherman. He went big-game shooting in India, Africa, and British Columbia, and caught tarpon off Florida. He had been master of the draghounds at Oxford and maintained his own harriers at Taplow Court, which had formerly been hunted by King Edward VII as prince of Wales. An excellent whip, he was president of the Coaching Club and the Four-in-Hand Club. One of the conservators of the Thames, he was the founding chairman of the Thames Salmon Association. Three times acting president of the Life Saving Society, he was also president and chairman of the Bath Club from 1894 to 1942. At various times Desborough was also president of both the Marylebone Cricket Club and the Lawn Tennis Association as well as being president of the Olympics held in London in 1908. He was chairman of the Pilgrims of Great Britain from 1919 to 1929 and president of the Amateur Athletic Association from 1930 to 1936.’ See too Rebecca Jenkins (Jenkins 2008: 4-5), on Desborough as a symbol of the contemporary ideal of amateur all-round excellence. He was also a student at Balliol College, Oxford, personifying in its athleticist and sporting version what incoming British prime minister Herbert Asquith called in 1908 the Balliol man’s ‘tranquil consciousness of an effortless superiority’ (Matthew 2004). Baker (2008: 89) notes that Desborough at one particular point of his busy life is said to have sat on 115 committees.
The fourth IOC session in London in June 1904 proved palatable to all concerned: meetings with sportsmen C.B. Fry and W.G. Grace; the Lord Mayor’s reception in Mansion House; dinner at the Corporation of Fishmongers’ splendid hall by London Bridge; visits to the MCC/Lord’s and the Toxophilite Society; a reception hosted by the Prince of Wales in Marlborough House; and a detailed tour of the palace of Westminster. All this made favourable impressions on both sides. In under a year, the British Olympic Association had been formed (May 1905) at a meeting at the House of Commons, with Lord Desborough as its President. This was the ‘Central Organisation’ to which the 1908 report referred. The following year Desborough was lobbying in Athens, Rome was abandoned (the tragic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in April 1906 provided a rationale for Rome/Italy’s withdrawal), lobbying within the IOC for Budapest was proving relatively ineffective (IOC minute, 1905). So London’s first Olympics was handed to it on a silver platter, with the Games planned as a core element of the Franco-British Exhibition, whose ‘organisers … were powerful advocates of the Olympic Movement and intended to make the Games the centrepiece of the festival’ (Miller 2008: 58).
Desborough was a typical champion of the amateur and athleticist ideal. Under his leadership London gained the1908 Games via a combination of networking (three Great Britain members on a small and malleable IOC), backroom diplomacy, get-up-and-go confidence, and a degree of hauteur characteristic of the sporting elite of the time. This aristocratic networking included use of the stateroom in Lord Howard de Walden’s yacht moored in Athens’s Bay of Phlerum (Kent 2008: ch. 2).
1948
Another prominent English Lord played a central role in securing London’s second Olympics. David George Brownlow Cecil, sixth Marquess of Exeter, or Lord Burghley (see Box 2), had been a prominent Olympian in the 1920s (the model for the aristocratic Lord Lindsay in the 1981 Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire), and was chairman and chief executive of the London Organising Committee.
BOX 2: LORD BURGHLEY
Janie Hampton writes: ‘In the chair was 43-year-old Lord Burghley, formerly a Conservative MP and Governor-General of Bermuda, who had won a gold medal in the 1928 Olympics. Educated at Eton and Cambridge, he owned a pack of fox hounds and had recently divorced his wife, the daughter of a duke. “On the maiden voyage of the Queen Mary, for the gratification of H.G. Wells and Lord Camrose he ran 400 yards after dinner, in evening dress, round the upper deck in 58 seconds”, wrote the Observer … Handsome and articulate, calm and genial, Burghley successfully torpedoed opposition to the Games with charm and persuasion’. (Hampton 2008: 27)
Burghley’s words at the closing ceremony of the London 1948 Olympics, displayed on the stadium scoreboard, evoked quintessential Olympic and Coubertinesque ideals: ‘The spirit of the Olympic Games, which has tarried here a while, sets forth once more. May it prosper throughout the world, safe in the keeping of all those who have felt its noble impulse in this great Festival of Sport’ (Organising Committee 1951). Burghley was president of the British Olympic Association for 30 years from 1936, and his idealism was based on the principles of tolerance, understanding, friendship (and an associated cultivation of cross-cultural relations among young people) as essential to the post-war world order. London had in fact been allocated the 1944 Games before the war (Tokyo was to have hosted the 1940 event) and in November 1944 Burghley and fellow British Olympic Association stalwart Lord Aberdare, along with a third member Sir Noel Curtis-Bennett, issued a statement that the first post-war Games should be in London. In October 1945 Burghley travelled to Stockholm to meet the vice-president and acting president of the IOC, Sigfrid Edström, a fellow veteran Olympian and long-term president of the International Amateur Athletics Association. From his base in Sweden Edström had sustained IOC contacts throughout the war, and after the death in 1942 of incumbent president Count Henri de Baillet-Latour, he became IOC president by acclamation in 1946. He had already written to Lord Aberdare, in May 1945: ‘[Avery] Brundage [then president of the US Olympic Committee] and I have agreed that we shall have the next Games in London’ (Phillips 2007: 6). Burghley’s trip to Sweden was mere protocol, and was followed up by a formal letter from the Lord Mayor of London seeking approval to stage the Games; in March 1946 a postal vote formally ‘allotted’ (Burghley’s words, see Organising Committee 1951: 17) the 1948 Games to London.
Forty years on from London’s first Olympics, the second was landed without an open vote (there’s little evidence of voting in the ‘postal vote’ referred to by Burghley); by agreement among networks of elites (McWhirter 2004); with the promise of the restoration of Olympian idealism; and with an assumption that even in the havoc and the austerity of the post-war context (Bolz 2010; Hampton 2008), Britain could do it, could step in and save the day.
London 2012
Sixty years after Burghley’s securement of what he saw as London’s right, the Games had to be worked-for in a completely different kind of bidding process. Soured by revelations of corrupt administration and unethical practices by bureaucrat and official alike (Jennings 1996; Jennings and Sambrook 2000; Lenskyj 2000; Symson and Jennings 1992), the IOC needed internal reform and more transparency in its decision-making processes. Juan-Antonio Samaranch’s successor as IOC president, Jacques Rogge, president from 2001, has established and consistently reaffirmed the restrictions on hospitality and gift-giving that are intended to rid the bidding process of bribery and corruption, and sponsors concerned with the tarnished image of a corrupt IOC at the turn of the millennium have continued their partnerships, though after Beijing 2008 three North American giants — Manulife, Johnson and Johnson, and Kodak — terminated their support. Nevertheless, media rights have held their value, and the outcome of bidding processes can produce responses verging on hyperbole: ‘Rarely in peacetime have Londoners celebrated together with so much emotion at the heart of the city’ (Lee 2006: 192) may be an unsubstantiatable assertion, but there is no doubt that in London and some parts of the UK beyond England’s capital, the announcement by Rogge on July 6th 2005 that London had pipped Paris to get the 2012 Games generated enthusiastic, even joyful, responses. Mike Lee describes the Paris bidding team’s response in Singapore as ‘dumbstruck and dejected’, before the tears started to flow. So how did London do it?
Lee, the London bid’s Director of Communications and Public Affairs, describes factors crucial to the success of the London bid: a united message emerging under inspired leadership; an emphasis on youth — and this was brilliantly and pithily evoked in the London presentational video (Tomlinson 2008: 73-4) — and legacy; and the presence of prime minister Tony Blair in Singapore for several days before the vote. But crucially, regardless of the cleaned-up bidding process, and the restraints on favours and incentives, the London bid was anchored in a sustained and intensive process of lobbying, incalculable in terms of visible or actual costs. It is widely recognised that the Paris bid was weakened by internal divisions in leadership, and by the arrogance and assumptions of the country’s president, Jacques Chirac, who arrived at the last minute in Singapore confident that this third successive bid from Paris/France was won, and would deliver him an international success and legacy to match his internal monument, the Millau viaduct at the southern edge of the Massif Central. London played the bidding game more successfully than many had expected: a member of the bid team asked on the journey from the team hotel to the announcement venue, ‘What the hell are we going to do if we win?’; an experienced member of the administration at London’s City hall has conceded that no real budget was done, it was literally back-of-envelope jobs, so convinced was the Mayor of London’s office that the bid would not succeed.
There are over 100 members of the IOC with voting rights and they constitute a scattered range of individuals, traditionally aristocratic, male, and privileged, though the committee has accepted women members from 1981, and its age-range has been widened by the inclusion of former athletes. The committee is capable of producing surprising results, but at the same time has often rewarded perseverance, awarding the event to a city that has come relatively close in previous bids. In part, this accounts for France’s over-confidence in 2005. But it is widely agreed that the Paris bid took success for granted, neglecting the context of the bidding process. In the central section of the book chapter, I peer more closely at the culture and context of bidding, lobbying, and decision-making relationships and dynamics, on the basis of my discussions with a veteran observer of international Olympic politics.
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Conclusion
There are threats to the mega-event roller coaster: Athens 2004 was a financial disaster, and the Olympic facilities lie neglected and unwanted beyond the edge of the city; the cost of Beijing 2008 can never be known. But the queue to host ‘the world’s longest commercial’ (Payne 2005: 169) still forms, despite the range of charges that could be levied, during Samaranch’s presidency, against the bidding process: these included prejudice, commercial opportunism, and financial corruption via demands or inducements (Miller 1992: 219). Perhaps some of the worst of these excesses have been reined in to some extent, at least those discernible to the public eye. But who really knows quite what offers might be made, for example, by the likes of Roman Abramovich on behalf of his mentor Vladimir Putin, on the 21st century equivalents of Lord de Walden’s private yacht.
The London 2012 bidding victory was rooted in lobbying processes and potentially beneficial mutual interests — or at least networks of likely personal advancement and aggrandisement, and an awareness of the importance of knowledge and communication networks.
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In Olympic circles, decisions and outcomes are less about policy than status, power, and prestige. London’s successful 2012 bid combined the entrepreneurial flair and interpersonal skills of Sir Keith Mills with the naked ambition of Lord Coe, to extraordinarily successful effect. Whether the benefits or impact of the event will justify the costs of its staging will not hamper the career trajectories of such operators: the Athens disaster has not curtailed the international profile of numerous of its organisers and leaders; Billy Payne of the widely criticised Atlanta Olympics is comfortable in his role as chairman of the Augusta National Golf Club and the Master’s golf major tournament, and secure in his knowledge that few are interested any longer in the cost and the impact of Atlanta 1996.
In the aftermath and afterglow of the closing ceremony in Beijing’s Bird’s Nest stadium in 2008, LOCOG’s chairman Lord Coe looked forward to London’s turn (Coe 2008). Asked what effect Great Britain’s Olympic success (4th in the medal table, ahead of Germany and Australia) had on the British public’s support for London 2012, he responded that the vast majority ‘was captivated by Team GB and Paralympics GB’s achievements … the welcome they received during October’s Heroes Parade in London reflected that’. But London is not the ‘vast majority of the nation’. Coe’s abiding memories were of the ‘mind-boggling … spectacular venues’, and the ‘welcome afforded to us by the people of Beijing’. The combination of genuine Chinese hospitality and volunteer grooming will be difficult to replicate in London 2012, when eager volunteers have already been disillusioned by the banal and mundane experiences that it seems might reward their keenness to volunteer. And Coe was most impressed by the ‘attention to detail’ in Beijing, both in the global public eye of the opening and closing ceremonies, and in the background day-to-day business of the athletes’ village; there would be much to oversee in a London with no such command economy and culture on which to depend.
Getting the Games has been motivated by changing motives throughout the Olympic story. London’s three Lords — Desborough, Burghley, and Coe — were all well-networked former top athletic competitors, but the first two inhabited completely different cultural worlds to that of Coe. Desborough was at his competitive peak before the modern Games were really established, while Burghley and Coe share the distinction of being champions and gold medallists of their time. But neither Desborough nor Burghley had need of a prime minister’s presence in their bidding delegations. Coe embodies a different world from that of the earlier Lords, one in which Olympic hosting is not just a part of the sporting calendar, but a key element in a wider social, political, and economic project.
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Sponsors continue to come on board despite world recession and its effects. Joel Seymour-Hide, director of sports marketing consultancy Octagon, trusts in the deep commitment that people have to sports: ‘Sport tends to be relatively recession proof … It’s an irrational love which creates more loyalty and resilience’ (quoted in Black 2009: 40). This is the message from the marketeers, to sponsors ready to associate themselves with the powerful and persistent emotions of such irrationalism. London 2012 had played a memorable game in landing the event, but the burden of delivery is heavy. As Lord Coe gazed upwards, tight-lipped and pensive, at the fireworks at the Bird’s Nest extravaganza that closed Beijing 2008, no prime ministerial heavyweight by his side, he looked as if he were wondering just what he had let himself in for.
References
Baker, K. (2008) The 1908 Olympics, Cheltenham: SportsBooks.
Beckett, I.F.W. (2004) ‘Grenfell, William Henry, Baron Desborough (1855–1945)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, May 2009 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/33566, accessed 23 March 2010].
Black, E. (2009, 7th December) ‘How sports fans can turn defeat into a victory for the economy’, London Evening Standard, p. 40.
Bolz, D. (2010) ‘The 1948 Olympics: The eve of Europe’s reconstruction’, presentation at symposium on ‘Sport and the Transformation of Modern Europe’, Sport in Modern Europe Network, Pembroke College, Cambridge, England, http://www.sport-in-europe.group.cam.ac.uk/symposium3summaries.htm [accessed 26th March 2010].
Coe, S. (2008, October-November-December) ‘Sebastian Coe: LOCOG Chairman’ (an interview) in ‘Legacy’ section, Olympic Review: Official Publication of the Olympic Movement, Issue 69: 87.
Cook, T. A. [‘drawn up by’] (1909) The Fourth Olympiad Being The Official Report of the Olympic Games of 1908 Celebrated in London Under the Patronage of His Most Gracious Majesty King Edward VII And by the Sanction of The International Olympic Committee, drawn up by Theodora Andrea Cook and issued under the authority of The British Olympic Council, Published by The British Olympic Association, London.
DCMS (2001) Examination of Witness Professor Alan Tomlinson, House of Commons Select Committee on the Staging of International Sporting Events, Thursday March 8th 2001, www.culture.gov.uk/pdf/cm5288.pdf [accessed March 23rd 2010].
Hampton, J. (2008) The Austerity Olympics: When the Games Came to London in 1948, London: Aurum Press Ltd.
Jenkins, R. (2008) The First London Olympics 1908, London: Piatkus Books.
Jennings, A. (1996) The New Lords of the Rings: Olympic Corruption and How to Buy Gold Medals, London: Simon & Schuster.
Jennings, A. and Sambrook, C. (2000) The Great Olympic Swindle: When the World Wanted its Games Back, London: Simon & Schuster.
Kent, G. (2008) Olympic Follies: The Madness and Mayhem of the 1908 London Games: A Cautionary Tale, London: JR Books.
Lee, M. (2006) The Race for the 2012 Olympics: The Inside Story of How London Won the Bid (with Adrian Warner and David Bond), London: Virgin Books Ltd.
Lenskyj, H. J. (2000) Inside the Olympic Industry: Power, Politics, and Activism, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
McWhirter, N. (2004) ‘Cecil, David George Brownlow, sixth Marquess of Exeter (1905–1981)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Oct 2005 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/30910, accessed 26 March 2010].
Matthew, H. C. G. (2004) ‘Asquith, Herbert Henry, first Earl of Oxford and Asquith (1852–1928)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2011 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/30483, accessed 18 Jan 2011].
Miller, D. (1992) Olympic Revolution: The Olympic Biography of Juan Antonio Samaranch, London: Pavilion Books Ltd.
Miller, D. (2008) The Official History of the Olympic Games and the IOC: Athens to Beijing, 1894-2008, Edinburgh and London: Mainstream Publishing.
(The) Organising Committee for the XIV Olympiad London 1948 (1951) The Official Report of the Organising Committee for the XIV Olympiad, London.
Payne, M. (2005) Olympic Turnaround: How the Olympic Games Stepped Back from the Brink of Extinction to Become the World’s Best-known Brand — and a Multi-billion Dollar Global Franchise, Twyford, Berks: London Business Press.
Phillips, B. (2007) The 1948 Olympics: How London Rescued the Games, Cheltenham: SportsBooks Ltd:.
Symson, V. and Jennings, A. (1992) The Lords of the Rings: Power, Money and Drugs in the Modern Olympics, London: Simon & Schuster.
Tomlinson, A. (2008) ‘Olympic Values, Beijing’s Olympic Games, and the Universal Market’, in M. E. Price and D. Dayan (eds) Owning the Olympics: Narratives of the New China, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
ULI (2011) Urban Investment Opportunities of Global Events, London: ULI Europe.
Wallechinsky, D. and Loucky, J. (2008) The Complete Book of the Olympics 2008 Edition, London: Aurum Press.
Primary sources
IOC executive and sessional minutes and reports, the Olympic Museum, Lausanne.
[i] This work/chapter draws upon research supported by the British Academy’s small grants scheme for my personal research on “The construction and mediation of the sporting spectacle in Europe, 1992-2004”, Ref. SG47220.
Blatter: FIFA’s Supreme Leader triumphs again
If a week is a long time in politics, 6 months is no time at all in the world of international football politics. FIFA president Joseph ‘Sepp’ Blatter was trained as a young man by timepiece giant Swiss Longines, pedigree watchmaker since 1842. He must have learned a lot about longevity in business and organisational life. But maybe not enough about timing; switching the FIFA Congress to a date a year on from FIFA’s main showcase the World Cup was supposed to take FIFA business matters such as presidential elections away from the limelight and the media glare. But that’s backfired on Blatter, with the storm stemming from the 2018 and 2022 World Cup decisions in December 2010. Blatter was also a protégé of legendary Adidas sport boss Horst Dassler, when world football finances were transformed by Dassler’s dealmaking in the 1970s and 1980s, and FIFA made exclusive partnership deals with Dassler’s organisational baby, International Sport and Leisure (ISL). Dassler trained up Blatter at his Adidas headquarters in Landersheim, in Alsace, France. Blatter speaks of Dassler as a father figure, in unusually hushed respect and awe. Groomed by Dassler, mentored by FIFA president João Havelange, at the heart of FIFA for a third of a century, Blatter knows the arts of survival in the double-dealing world of international football governance.
Here, I look at a couple of Blatter moments from December 2010 on the way to June 1st 2011, when Blatter secured his fourth term as FIFA president, and then comment on the nature and implications of his re-election.[i]
Zurich, early December 2011 ~ In Tokyo in 1964 FIFA’s president, Englishman Sir Stanley Rous, was busy organising the Olympic football competition. He had other matters on his mind too. FIFA’s membership was expanding, and at the FIFA congress of that year 62 national associations cast their votes for a revolutionary plan for allocating and scheduling World Cup finals. By 55 votes to seven the congress authorised that, in future, the executive committee (Exco) rather than the congress would allocate World Cups.
In Rous’s view, leaving the decision to congress was putting a “strain on friendships” and basing the choice of the hosts “on not wholly relevant issues”. In the cosier climate of world football politics of the time, few saw anything at all odd in the change. Patrician Rous could be trusted and in London’s Royal Garden Hotel two years later his committee confirmed that West Germany (1974), Argentina (1978) and Spain (1982) would be future hosts. Dr João Havelange changed many things when he seized the FIFA presidency from Rous in 1974, committing much to emerging football federations in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean in particular. But the power of the executive committee to award hosting rights remained intact. Rous thought that canvassing for votes would end once the big decision lay in the hands of a few honourable committee members. Havelange, his successor Sepp Blatter and their bloated executive committees have had no such qualms, actually encouraging the likes of the FA to spend lavishly within the bidding process. In 2000, this bought England’s bid for 2006 a respectable five votes in the first round, though this dwindled to two in the second-round knockout stage. A decade later, as the UK’s prime minister, heir-to-the-throne-but-one and most glamorous and famous footballer flattered the Exco members at breakfasts and lunches in the swishest hotels in town, they might as well have been blinded by the blizzards blowing outside by the lake. England’s first-round elimination with just two votes was a much worse performance than in 2000: with one low-profile English executive committee member (who unlike his successful counterparts from Russia and Qatar took no part in the final presentation) already in the bag, England’s ill-advised bid for the 2018 World Cup finals garnered just one vote. A relatively conservative estimate of the cost of that vote is £15 million. England's presentation pitched royalty, politics and celebrity to FIFA, and during its presentation its chief executive oleaginously – or was it sarcastically? - congratulated FIFA General Secretary Jérôme Valcke and his colleagues for the “superb way they've managed this complicated bidding process”. The England delegation wasn't congratulating FIFAcrats when Russia’s name came out of Blatter’s envelope. Vladimir Putin was soon en route to Zürich to thank FIFA, and no doubt his faithful mover and shaker Roman Abramovich, who had been with the bid team. When asked which win pleased him most – getting the 2014 Winter Olympics for Sochi or this World Cup – Putin simply smiled and said how much he likes to win. Russia’s bid prioritised development and new football markets, in a post-communist climate, in the biggest country in the world. It fitted a mission that was laid out in Havelange's manifesto of 1974. England's bid was patronising in at least two ways: offering national associations help from English clubs during the finals; and proposing a Football Utd scheme to match FIFA monies that have been committed to grass-roots and world football development, in effect an economic partnership with much-maligned FIFA. The England bid looked even sillier as Exco “promises” were counted. “Given the promises that were made to us”, the England bid boss asked, “how could the vote have turned out the way it did?” You couldn’t get much more naive than this in the world of FIFA politics; it’s not a gentleman’s club. Executive committee members have said to me that you always accept a bit of bad to go with all the good and former International Sport and Leisure (ISL) excutive, and architect of UEFA’s Champions League, Jürgen Lenz told me: “FIFA's now so corrupt” that it no longer knows that it’s being corrupt. English prime minister Cameron’s charm and courteousness doesn't work in this world. Heir to the British throne Prince William was out of his depth in far-from-neutral Switzerland. These could never match Machiavelli’s star pupil Blatter. A “wise prince”, recommended Niccolò Machiavelli, makes sure that his citizens “are always and in all circumstances dependent on him and his authority”, so that they will “always be faithful to him”. Insiders reckon that Blatter has at least 148 faithful dependents among FIFA's 208 national associations and many of these are represented by long-serving Exco men from the continental confederations. Russia was always in the driving seat and a Russian victory could keep the rhetoric intact and the accounts books closed. How could a three or four-day England charm offensive have ended any other way than it did on Thursday afternoon?
Wales, 14 March 2011 ~ “Fayre and Square” isn't the motto of FIFA. It’s the bargain slogan of the pub chain that includes the New Inn, Langstone, just off the M4 at Newport in south Wales. There's a Wacky Warehouse kids’ area, two dinners for a tenner all day and everyday, and rooms at £49 a night for as many of the family as you could get in there. The International Football Association Board (IFAB) was in town for the first weekend in March, but it wasn’t patronising the New Inn.
Just along the road and up the hill is the Celtic Manor Resort, sprawled across 1400 acres. There, you don't see many kids and it’s nearer £152 a night in the Manor Hotel. That’s where IFAB gathered for the much-awaited annual meeting to decide on goal-line technology and player attire, the main items on the agenda of its 125th Annual General Meeting. Football’s Laws of the Game are actually the product of (and authorised by) IFAB, a body made up of the four UK football associations and FIFA. The board began in 1886, FIFA joined it in a fragile alliance in 1913, and in 1958 current voting rights were approved. In decision-making terms, it’s one vote apiece for the UK associations and four for FIFA; for a proposal to carry, a three-quarters majority must be achieved, six out of eight. So while the guest list at the Celtic Manor numbered 61, for whom Friday night fireworks at Cardiff Castle provided a dazzling welcome evening, just eight men were deciding on whether the game would be better for the introduction of goal-line technology. It was no great surprise when FIFA president Sepp Blatter confirmed that tests with selected companies had proved as yet inconclusive. Turning to new FA chair David Bernstein, Blatter expressed much sympathy for the “blatant” injustice of Frank Lampard’s disallowed goal at South Africa 2010 but, pressed by a Sky Sports News reporter claiming to speak for the wronged England fan, asked for “just a little bit of patience”, what actually amounted to another full year’s testing. David Bernstein was smiling diplomatically, saying that the outcome was not perfect but that the principles supporting the introduction of goal-line technology were wholly accepted by the IFAB; we could be positive about its future. Not imminently though. Any IFAB decision cannot take effect until July 1 following the date of the decision, so a 2012 IFAB decision in February or March is already too late for Euro 2012 in Poland/Ukraine. But roll on Rio – Blatter conceded that Brazil 2014 could herald the end of the over-the-line, in-or-out debates and legends concerning what might have been. Of ten companies, including the FIFA president’s former employee Swiss Longines, three “have a good chance” in the extended test period in live games themselves. And a newcomer, Hawkeye, was also now among the invited companies.
IFAB also ruled on snoods – not allowed, quite simply not permitted in the Laws of the Game. I thumbed through Law 4, looking for what would permit goalie’s caps or anybody’s gloves, neither included in the “basic compulsory equipment of a player”. Sepp and IFAB were a bit quick off the mark here, the FIFA president even suggesting that snood-wearers were endangering their own deaths by strangulation. At such absurd moments you can only wonder how IFAB has survived so long. You have to look at the rituals and protocol of the board. Blatter sits amid generally silent and acquiescent football administrators from the British associations, and guests and partners were well catered for – the Ladies’ Day Agenda took in museums, the Millennium Centre and a tour of the Welsh National Opera. All gathered together again for the Gala Dinner on the Saturday night in the Celtic Manor’s Beaufort Suite, where the SFA president, George Peet, toasted the Queen and Heads of State, the IFA president, Jim Shaw, toasted the Ladies, David Bernstein of the FA toasted the IFAB and host president Phillip Pritchard of the Welsh FA toasted FIFA. The UK men had five minutes each for these speeches; keeping the proportional principle going, Blatter was allotted 20 minutes for his response. Whatever their private thoughts on FIFA’s modus operandi, the UK men weren’t going to rock this lawmaking boat. Blatter ranged wide in the IFAB press conference, confirming his determination to lead FIFA for a fourth presidential term: “I'm not tired at all ... just to make it clear, for my next four years I will dedicate my work to the social and cultural impact of football in society.” Nobody laughed. The IFAB is seen as the guardian or custodian of the long-established laws of football. It’s a pseudo-independent body that operates essentially as Blatter and FIFA’s lapdog, but allows Blatter to control access to it from within FIFA. It’s the president and the general secretary who are routinely the FIFA men with voting rights, plus two others – the chair of the referees’ committee and a senior vice-president. There’s no transparent route to these positions, they’re effectively in the FIFA president’s gift. Blatter flatters the UK associations and their historical legacy, bankrolls the IFAB and does, for the most part, exactly what he wants.
1 June 2011 ~ Three months later, back in Zurich, and the little Swiss has done it again. Faced with what commentators and pundits, and opponents, were calling FIFA’s biggest-ever crisis, his Congress gave him his strongest mandate yet, 186 national associations backing him for his fourth term. The Football Association (England) mustered just 16 allies in its clumsy attempt to postpone the election, in the wake of allegations and counter-allegations of corruption emerging from within the FIFA Executive Committee (Exco), and the withdrawal of Blatter’s rival in the presidential contest. Main sponsors issued soft slaps on the wrists to FIFA, image-cleaning was soon in process, and Blatter marched on. In a FIFA FACTsheet issued by the presidency itself in recent years, the president is confirmed as “the supreme leader of FIFA”. There’s mess to mop up, spin to get right. But does Visa really want the global spotlight on how it shafted MasterCard to become a primary World Cup sponsor? Wouldn’t Adidas be a little embarrassed were its close dealings with FIFA Exco personnel past and present – including outgoing committee member Franz Beckenbauer – subjected to close scrutiny? There’s work to be done to deal with the allegations of corruption, without undermining the credibility of, or alienating, powerful continental confederations whose presidents have faced and continue to face investigation by FIFA’s ethics committee. But as Machiavelli wrote nearly 500 years ago, the “wise prince” creates dependencies, and prefers to be feared than loved. Blatter may look like a bit-part actor in a comic opera; underestimate him, though, at your cost.
[i] These pieces were initially written for the WSC Daily in When Saturday Comes: ‘FIFA’s executive committee unimpressed by celebrity’, 6th December 2010; and ‘Sepp Blatter’s archaic British lapdog does his bidding’, 14th March 2011. See WSC.
02 June 2011 in Commentary | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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