Lectures on greed from FIFA chief are height of hypocrisy

For a man who does not prioritise money, Sepp Blatter, the FIFA president, does seem to have the knack for accumulating rather a lot of it.

• His salary remains officially undisclosed, although it is estimated at around £1million a year, with bonuses, but it is the funds he has just sloshing around at FIFA head office that are of greatest interest. As of December 31, 2008, the date of the last FIFA financial report, £625m – give or take a few hundred thousand.
• This equity must make its little brother, UEFA, and Michel Platini, the president, quite jealous, what with having only £477m in their reserves for a rainy day.
• Just to clarify. These figures do not represent turnover, or projected income. UEFA’s reserve is the money sitting in their bank account right now, in case of emergency. FIFA’s equity is what the business is worth at the present time: what could be pulled up and spent if Blatter saw fit.
• The irony being that Blatter left a meeting with Richard Scudamore, chief executive of the Premier League, in a state of heightened moral indignation last week, having failed to reach agreement on his proposed six-plus-five rule, which would see a maximum of five foreign players in club starting line-ups.
• ‘Scudamore is working to make a lot of money,’ fumed Blatter, ‘whereas I am working to have football as a social, cultural event around the world, being a school of life, bringing hope, bringing emotions.’
• Indeed. In the circumstances, it is a mystery how Blatter keeps his image from hogging the sunlight in stained glass windows at cathedrals everywhere. And fancy all that fuss about Mother Teresa of Calcutta when dear old Sepp was around.
• Even so, before Blatter goes too far down the road to self-canonisation, it is worth pointing out the reserves held by the greedy Premier League at the end of each financial year equate to precisely nothing.
• Their rules stipulate that all income beyond running costs and contributions to organisations such as the Football Foundation are distributed between the clubs. Unlike the excess of £1bn currently split between FIFA and UEFA, there is no such thing as a Premier League cash reserve.
• It is funny how Blatter’s self-image can be so at odds with the public perception, although he does, as he says, bring emotions.
• ‘Lying, deception and bad faith are standard procedure at FIFA,’ said a clearly emotional Adam C Silverstein, a lawyer operating for MasterCard, who successfully sued FIFA in New York in 2006 for breaching a sponsorship contract to set up another one with Visa.
• It cost FIFA in the region of £63m to settle, but not before their reputation had been trashed by Loretta A Preska, the judge. ‘FIFA’s negotiators lied repeatedly to MasterCard,’ she said. A good job they were not motivated by money, then, or heaven knows what they would have done.
• Blatter’s anger with the Premier League comes after FIFA spent roughly £155m on its new offices in Zurich and after his ally Platini spoke in 2007 about needing to protect the game in Europe from ‘the rampant commercialism which assails on all sides’.
• ‘A serious threat hangs over the development of European football: the malign and ever-present influence of money,’ said Platini. Yet FIFA and UEFA are only too happy to trumpet their success in the financial sphere when it suits.
• ‘We are in a comfortable financial position,’ boasted Blatter in his introduction to the FIFA report, while UEFA stated: ‘The 2007-08 net result is considerably higher than the budget approved.’ UEFA’s new offices in Nyon are coming in at the bargain price of £21m, so no mortgage for them, either.
• This hypocrisy would be comical were it not so dangerous. Blatter and Platini keep straight faces while lecturing English football about greed, all the time accumulating reserves of wealth that, measured against their moral stance, are obscene.
• Maybe Blatter genuinely believes he is the headmaster of a school of life, rather than the ringmaster of a particularly grotesque circus. Perhaps Platini thinks his organisation, with its slavish devotion to sponsorship partners, is genuinely fighting the good fight against rampant commercialism. Maybe they really are that dumb.
• Except nobody ends up with a billion quid in the bank by being dumb. Cynical, egotistical, grasping and opportunistic, maybe: but not dumb.