SO PARAGUAY’S Mr Football, we are told, wanted a knighthood from England in exchange for his vote for the 2018 World Cup. To Nicolas Leoz, it must have seemed a reasonable enough request. That, he thought, was the way England worked. And who could blame him, since he must have known that he was talking to a beneficiary of a system by which honours are handed out – sometimes for public service, sometimes for campaign contributions.
It was the job of Lord Triesman, part of a delegation including a royal prince and a new prime minister who created more than 100 new peers in his first year in office, to declare with a straight face that this is not the way we go about things in the UK. According to Triesman Leoz listened to the rebuff, then “shrugged his shoulders and walked away”. He may or may not have believed what he had been told.
Leoz is 82. He is a qualified lawyer, a landowner and a businessman who is in his sixth term and 25th year as the president of Conmebol, the South American football confederation. He did not ask England for money.
“He was already a rich man,” Triesman said.
He had simply grown up amid a global sporting culture in which the grandees are showered with decorations. Nevertheless last year, on the eve of the bid decision in Zurich, Leoz was among the three football grandees accused of taking bribes in the 1990s over the distribution of Fifa’s World Cup television rights. His share was said to have been $730,000 (€527,000). The others were Issa Hayatou of Cameroon and Ricardo Teixeira of Brazil.
Teixeira was another who encountered Triesman during the final stages of the bid process. “What can you do for me?” the Brazilian is said to have asked, which could have been taken a number of ways. The “me” might have been interpreted to mean Brazilian football as a whole, over which he has wielded great power in the 20 years since his election to the presidency of his national federation. Or perhaps not.
With Jack Warner and Worawi Makudi, according to Triesman’s testimony yesterday to the parliamentary inquiry into the governance of English football, it was much more straightforward. Warner asked for £2.5m (€2.8m) in order to build the football academy that would be his legacy to the people of Trinidad and Tobago, the money to be paid to him with his personal guarantee that it would be spent on the project. Makudi simply wanted to be given the revenue from the UK television rights to a friendly match between Thailand and England.
It is important to stress that these are only allegations, and are being contested. Nevertheless it was a good day for public-interest journalism and in particular for the London Sunday Times, which – like BBC’s Panorama – was accused of damaging England’s chances by exposing corruption among Fifa’s executive committee just before the voting for the 2018 and 2022 tournaments.
In a saner world, Paris would be hosting the Olympic Games next year and the 2018 World Cup would be coming to England. In both cases the facilities were almost entirely in place.
But common sense takes second place in such matters to ambition, self-interest, greed and, just possibly, a tiny measure of a genuine desire to spread these things around the world.
Guardian Service
