Football fans are piling into France this weekend for the start of the game’s month-long festival. They have come to cheer, but it is hard to think of another footballing contest that has started amid so many woes. On Friday they will be singing the Marseillaise at the Stade de France where the host country are playing Romania in the inaugural match, almost exactly seven months since four people – three of them suicide bombers – died at the stadium in explosions timed to coincide with the attacks in central Paris on 13 November last year. If the bombers had got into the game, as they intended, the death toll would have been much, much higher. Over the next four weeks, security across France will be unprecedented. The threat of terror haunts every gathering.
But football has plenty of other headaches for which it can blame no one except itself. It has become another aspect of the culture of greed and entitlement that has been exposed to public view in the scandalous evidence MPs heard this week from Sports Direct’s Mike Ashley and Dominic Chappell of BHS. The impunity of capital finds its echo in the management of the world’s favourite sport.
Last week the Copa América kicked off with Jeffrey Webb, the Cayman Island powerbroker who secured the games for the US, waiting to hear his fate after admitting receiving millions of dollars in bribes for commercial rights from across the Americas. Now the European Championship starts with Uefa’s newly resigned president, Michel Platini, present only as a shadow somewhere in the stands. He was forced out of his job and denied access to the official area after a four-year ban was imposed by the court of arbitration for sport because of a “disloyal” payment of more than £1m he received from Fifa.
Dizzying numbers are pouring out as the secrets of a generation of corruption in global football are slowly unravelled. Last Friday, Fifa lawyers revealed payments of £55m to former president Sepp Blatter, former finance director Markus Kattner and former secretary general Jérôme Valcke. Blatter’s successor as president, Gianni Infantino, has turned out to be slightly less of a new broom than he promised, and football fans hoped, after appearing in the Panama Papers in relation to negotiations when he was Uefa’s legal adviser. On Sunday, he had to deny allegations of greed after a German newspaper reported a row over negotiations for his £1m-plus salary package.
English football has its own unresolved problems. They are on a different scale, but they have one thing in common with football’s supranational institutions. There is a fundamental resistance to confront failings. The FA chairman, Greg Dyke, abandoned a plan to bid for an extra year to see the reforms through and is ending his term without getting agreement on the governance reforms that would make the national organisation more representative of the 21st century game. One of his supporters, Heather Rabbatts, the only woman, and the only BME member of the FA board, is considering resigning because of her colleagues’ resistance to modernisation. The Dyke reforms will be ignored just like the last decade of government criticism, independent recommendations and MPs’ proposals has been ignored. This backdrop to Europe’s football fiesta won’t dampen the excitement. It would be mean-spirited to want it to. But before the next one, the culture must change.
