The Big Fix E-Book

Ray Hartley

• Herausgeber: Jonathan Ball
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 308

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Between June and July 2010, 64 games of football determined that Spain was the world's best team at the World Cup in South Africa. South Africans – and the world – celebrated a brilliantly hosted tournament where everything worked like clockwork and the stands were packed with vuvuzela-wielding fans. But the truth was not yet known. Behind this significant national achievement lay years of corporate skulduggery, crooked companies rigging tenders and match fixing involving the national team. As late as 2015 it was revealed that the tournament's very foundations were corrupt when evidence emerged that South Africa had encouraged FIFA to pay money to a bent official in the Caribbean to buy three votes in its favour. As Sepp Blatter's FIFA edifice crumbled, a web of transactions from New York to Trinidad and Tobago showed how money was diverted to allow South Africa's bid to host the tournament to succeed. In The Big Fix: How South Africa Stole the 2010 World Cup, Ray Hartley reveals the story of an epic national achievement and the people who undermined it in pursuit of their own interests. It is the real story of the 2010 World Cup.

Leseprobe

The Big Fix

How South Africa Stole the 2010 World Cup

Ray Hartley

JONATHAN BALL PUBLISHERS

JOHANNESBURG AND CAPE TOWN

To Sylvia, queen of words

Introduction

‘Who could doubt that sport is a crucial window for the propagation of fair play and justice? After all, fair play is a value that is essential to sport.’

– Nelson Mandela

On 27 May 2015, at a luxury hotel in Switzerland, the unthinkable happened. The plush world of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (Fifa) abruptly imploded. In an investigation led by the US Department of Justice, Swiss police officers arrested several top Fifa executives and raided their suites, taking away boxes of documents and computer hard drives in the most serious criminal action ever taken against a sporting body.

The indictment before a grand jury in New York named 14 officials involved in an elaborate global web of corruption, kickbacks, bribery and fraud. It detailed how the body that governed the beautiful game had been burrowed hollow from the inside by the worms who occupied several key executive positions.

Lucrative media and branding rights for Fifa’s major tournaments had been bought with bribes paid through a string of foreign bank accounts in the US, Switzerland and the Caribbean. Officials had feasted on the sale of illicit tickets purloined from the governing body.

Presiding over all of this was Fifa’s president, Sepp Blatter, a man deemed to be untouchable, who could arrange to see a head of state as easily as if he himself were the head of a major power. Blatter inhabited a world of unsurpassed luxury and privilege, ferried about in limousines from one flattering host to another as he presided over the distribution of the greatest prize in world football – the World Cup.

By the end of 2015, Blatter’s executive team had been dismantled as, one by one, his loyal lieutenants had been stripped of their powers and given their marching orders. Among them was his closest aide, secretary-general Jérôme Valcke. Eventually, in December, Blatter himself fell victim to Fifa’s ethics committee and was banished from the organisation’s headquarters, in Zürich, from where he had ruled so ruthlessly.

Five years before this series of hitherto unimaginable events played out, Fifa had its last hurrah. Between 11 June and 11 July 2010, it held the World Cup tournament in South Africa.

And what a last hurrah it would be. When all the marketing spend, sponsorship and ticket sales had been tallied up, Fifa was richer than it had ever been, with over US$4 billion in the bank. Brazil’s 2014 spectacle was yet to come, but by then Blatter would be a beaten man and the writing would be on the wall for Fifa’s corrupt empire.

South Africa, it turned out, had been the perfect host country. Eager to please the world, it had more than bent over backwards for Blatter. Stadiums costing billions of rands had been constructed for the tournament, with little hope that they would ever recoup the money spent, never mind pay for their maintenance without taxpayer support.

Huge swathes were cut through South African law as acts and amendments were shuffled through Parliament, exempting Fifa and its sponsors from tax obligations, from foreign currency regulations and even from the local competition law, ensuring that the Fifa entourage would vacuum up every loose dollar on offer before leaving town.

The South African people, crazy about football, spent their savings on tickets and thronged to stadiums, ensuring that even the most trivial match between the most inconsequential of teams would be played before a cheering full house.

It was a time of national fever. The South African flag was flown from car windows and draped over car mirrors. Office spaces were adorned with strings of multinational flags representing the competing countries. Every Friday, the nation became a sea of yellow as replica jerseys of the national team, Bafana Bafana, were worn. Grave warnings were issued that only official merchandise was to be purchased. There were dollars to be made from these strips for sportswear companies and the officials who rode on their coattails.

The opening game at Soccer City was the scene of almost religious fervour. The stadium, designed to look like a giant African calabash, had risen Phoenix-like from the ashes of the old stadium where Nelson Mandela had addressed the people of Soweto on 16 December 1990, after his release from prison. I remember the heat that day as we sat in the stands. His final line was: ‘Gird your loins for the final assault. Victory is in sight! As a united people no force on earth can defeat us!’

After democracy was ushered in four years later, there was a return to international competition for South African sport, which had been isolated for many years because of apartheid. In 1996, I sat in the same stands to witness Bafana Bafana win the Africa Cup of Nations by defeating Tunisia 2–0.

On that opening day of the World Cup, played in a place so rich with history and before a people as free and loud as any in the world, football began its greatest party.

So exultant was the cheering and the blowing of vuvuzelas that when Bafana midfielder Siphiwe Tshabalala drove the ball into the corner of the net with a curving shot off his left boot, the stadium threatened to lift off the ground.

Even when Bafana were eliminated in the group stages – the first time that this had happened to a host country – the fervour remained undimmed. South Africans simply switched their support to Africa’s most likely champions, Ghana. And when the Black Stars were eliminated by Uruguay in the quarterfinals, the fans looked for their favourite league and club stars and supported their teams.

In my case, it was a no-brainer. As an Arsenal supporter, I had to go with Spain because of Cesc Fàbregas, then still loyal to Arsène Wenger and the red and white strip.

I watched Spain beat Germany 1–0 at Durban’s magnificent Moses Mabhida Stadium, its unique arch stretching high into the night sky as Carles Puyol headed home to secure Spain a place in the final.

Then came the final at Soccer City. Former president Nelson Mandela had missed the opening game due to a family tragedy – his great-granddaughter Zenani had died in a motor accident after the opening concert. But, to the surprise of the fans gathered in the stadium, Mandela took to the field before the final in a golf cart, waving at the near-hysterical fans and beaming his trademark smile. For an old man mourning the death of his great-granddaughter and beginning to be plagued by the illnesses that would bring about his end, it must have been an enormous act of will to brave the chilly temperatures. It was to be the last occasion on which the public he adored – and which adored him – would see him in person.

The final was a bad-tempered affair. One red card was issued, but there could have been several more if the referee had applied the law properly. Eventually the artful dodger, Andrés Iniesta, secured Spain’s place in history with a goal in extra time.

The celebrations were loud and went on into the night.

And then the players, the foreign fans, the legions of reporters and the Fifa bigwigs left town and South Africans, who had been on their best behaviour for a month, returned to their normal ways.

The question that South Africans asked most frequently was why the organisation, efficiency and good cheer displayed by government, business and the people during the hosting of the tournament could not be applied to solving the country’s pressing problems – getting water and electricity to the people, creating jobs and cutting down crime. The answers given were that we had a clear mission with clear timeframes, that there was national consensus and that we were being closely watched by Big Brother, Fifa, which would brook no slacking.

The World Cup, it seemed, had been a golden moment for the country, a special time when things had worked and we had done ourselves proud.

After the party, as they say, comes the hangover.

Hardly was the tournament over than the ruling party, the ANC, announced a clampdown on the media with a new ‘media tribunal’ to replace the self-regulation of the press and a ‘Protection of Information Bill’, which proposed to protect a wide range of information labelled ‘security’ and prevent its publication.

It was telling that the announcements, contained in a discussion document, were timed for after the departure of thousands of international journalists, who had filed thousands of reports mostly praising the way in which the World Cup had been organised.

No mention had been made of media controls during the thousands of hours of interviews on global television networks or in the thousands of column centimetres of coverage during the tournament, but then it all came out.

The discussion document read: ‘Freedom of expression needs to be defended but freedom of expression can also be a refuge for journalist scoundrels, to hide mediocrity and glorify truly unprofessional conduct. Freedom of expression means that there should be objective reporting and analysis which is not coloured by prejudice and self interest.’1

Of course, all of this was being done in the interests of saving the press from itself: ‘The tendency of dismissing any criticism of the media as an attack on press freedom results in the media behaving like a protection racket and leaves no space for introspection. For its own credibility, and in order to be at the forefront of determining the agenda for change and not against change, we have a responsibility to assist the media to shape up.’2

The tribunal idea would eventually be placed on the back burner, but only after the press agreed to tougher self-regulation. The worst aspects of the law aiming to protect information were altered after months of high-profile campaigning by civil society.

Crime, which had hit an all-time low during the tournament, spiked again as criminals sought to make up for lost time. The national police commissioner was found to have signed off on the procurement of new offices without following procedure and was eventually dismissed.

Imagine the shock, then, when the World Cup’s dirty laundry began to pile up. The May 2015 Fifa indictment included a section that described how South Africa had bribed its way to hosting the tournament, paying Caribbean football supremo Jack Warner for three crucial votes, which turned out to be the difference between winning and losing.

The South African government and local football officials strongly denied the charges. There are several chapters of this book dedicated to trying to establish exactly what happened. It is a tale worthy of a thriller, with bank accounts in the Cayman Islands, secret emails and corporate intrigue in the corridors of the grand hotels of Zürich.

More dirty laundry came in the form of business collusion around the stadium contracts. It turns out that secret meetings were held to divide these contracts up among the big construction firms, and the exact profit margin each would earn was calculated and agreed on.

Then came revelations that the games played during Bafana Bafana’s mercurial run prior to the tournament had been fixed by an Asian syndicate, which had somehow managed to persuade the national football association to use its referees. They proceeded to blow their whistles as often as their paymasters demanded, awarding dodgy penalties and even, on one occasion, insisting that a penalty be retaken when it was missed.

Behind all of this lurked a great human tragedy. In Mpumalanga, a council official who blew the whistle on corruption related to the building of a World Cup stadium had been gunned down in 2009. Pieces of an elaborate jigsaw puzzle of fraud and thuggery would be found in the years after the World Cup, pointing to more tender-rigging and an attempt to rob a community of its land without compensation.

When World Cup fever was at its height, stories critical of some aspects of the event were published, but they were overshadowed by the ‘good news’ story of progress in meeting the demands of Fifa and the economic boom that the tournament was supposed to ignite.

In 2010, I became editor of South Africa’s largest newspaper, the Sunday Times. We published stories exposing hit squads and corruption around stadium tenders, but these stories were drowned out by the clarion call from government, business and civil society to ‘get behind the World Cup’, and for the nation to show the world its best side. As the national fervour grew, it became almost treasonous to question the World Cup. It was seen as the media’s duty to support the staging of the event, helping to spread the word that the ‘Afro-pessimists’ were wrong and that an African country would put on a great tournament.

Stories raising awkward questions simply didn’t get off the ground. They were sometimes seen as evidence that the press was not ‘patriotic’. What dominated was the coverage of milestones, of the release of the World Cup mascot and of the great countdown. I was determined to tell, one day, the full story of this glorious but flawed event.

Years later, in December 2013, I found myself once more on the hallowed ground of Soccer City. This time there was no celebration. The good and the great had gathered to bid farewell to Nelson Mandela. It was an awkward moment for the nation.

Amid the solemn orations delivered by the likes of US President Barack Obama and the UN’s Ban Ki-Moon, the crowd was restless, especially when President Jacob Zuma made his appearance. He was booed.

How had it come to this? How had the beautiful green turf of the World Cup, where Siphiwe Tshabalala had fired home his epic goal three and half years before, become the staging ground for a divided country tired of its leadership and angry at the state of the nation?

It occurred to me that what we had witnessed in 2010 was the grandest of illusions. We had projected ourselves as a united nation with an efficient and effective government. The truth was that we were fractured and unable to confront the massive challenges of poverty and unemployment.

This book represents my effort to understand what really happened when we put on the greatest show on earth. It is never easy to challenge the conventional wisdom, to cast doubt on certainties and to shine a light on the dark spaces where the truth is hidden.

As the layers of tinsel are stripped away from the World Cup, the somewhat less glamorous truth begins to show itself.

There is the glorious game of football with its stars on display, dazzling the world with a great sporting spectacle. But when you peek behind the World Cup curtain, your senses are astounded. Crawling about in shiny suits are every species of corruption, graft and greed imaginable as money is siphoned off the sport’s fanbase to feed the game’s elite.

Nobody can take away the joy, the celebration and the hope that was born when the World Cup came to South Africa. But we need to remember that it happened despite the greed, vanity and callousness of politicians and football administrators who saw it as just another feeding ground.

1. African National Congress, ‘Media Transformation, Ownership and Diversity’, discussion document, 29 July 2010. Available at www.anc.org.za. Retrieved 19 February 2016.

2. Ibid.

CHAPTER 1

A whistleblower sings

‘You and I were buddies on the street and we agreed to sell marijuana and we meant it. We were going to go into the marijuana business. We committed the crime of conspiracy to distribute marijuana, whether we ever distributed a single gram.’

– Judge Raymond Dearie

It was a cold November morning in Brooklyn, New York, in 2013. In the United States District Court on Cadman Plaza East – an imposing glass and concrete structure – Judge Raymond Dearie was presiding. On his bench was a docket marked 13-MC-1011.

Grey-haired and with blue eyes that had seen it all before, he was about to start the ball rolling on a story that would rock the world of football to its core.

Before him was a motion to seal proceedings in a case that had been years in the making. Driven by the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Loretta Lynch, the motion sought to seal a plea bargain, making all but those in the courtroom privy to its secrets.

Lynch’s representative before the judge was Assistant US Attorney Evan Norris. Representing the defendant was attorney Eric Corngold.

Dearie, then 69 years old, was a former head of the District Court in the Eastern District. Ronald Reagan had appointed him to the bench in 1986. Now edging towards retirement, he had relinquished his job as head of the court to serve as one of its senior judges.

After identifying the small band of clerks and attorneys before him, he said: ‘Somewhat to my surprise – but perhaps the situation will be corrected momentarily – we are in an empty courtroom although a very public courtroom.’1

He went on: ‘For the record other than court personnel, pre-trial, my law clerk and the Court Security Officer, and the representatives of the US Attorney’s Office, the Court Reporter, and my staff we are otherwise alone in this public courtroom.’

Dearie looked up at Norris and Corngold and ordered that the minutes of the hearing be sealed, authorising two copies – one for the government and another for Corngold. He ordered ‘the safeguarding of all or any computers or other Court Reporter source material relative to the preparation of these minutes’.

The matter was one demanding high security – perhaps as high as the day Dearie had heard the guilty plea of Najibullah Zazi, an al-Qaida member who admitted in February 2010 to planning bombings on the New York subway system.

Dearie continued: ‘I find that a public proceeding in this matter including but not limited to the identification of the defendant, would severely if not irreparably prejudice an ongoing investigation by the United States Attorney’s Office and presumably the Grand Jury sitting here in the Eastern District of New York.’

The sealing of the yet-to-be-written record secured, Dearie turned to his clerk: ‘Elie, seal the courtroom.’

Elie replied: ‘Judge Dearie, the courtroom is locked.’

An afterthought struck the judge: ‘Was it locked before I made the findings?’

The court security officer replied: ‘I did, your Honor.’

Dearie had one more request: ‘Will you do me a favor and just open the door, and see if there is anybody lurking about in the hallway yearning to get in here.’

While the security officer went to check the hallway, Judge Dearie squinted into the empty room and muttered, ‘Monday morning at 10 after 10 – you would think we are in the middle of the night.’

The hallway was empty and the courtroom was sealed.

The judge said: ‘That brings us to Mr Blazer.’

At that point, Charles ‘Chuck’ Blazer entered the courtroom from the secure area reserved for the accused. Although confined to a wheelchair, he was still a large, imposing presence. Not for nothing had he earned the nickname ‘The Belly’ from an investigative journalist. And by the time he had finished testifying, his other nickname – ‘Mr Ten Percent’ – would make perfect sense.

Blazer did not have the opportunity to furnish the court with his full biography. If he had, he might have told of how his journey to the apex of American soccer had begun when his six-year-old son, Jason, had joined a soccer team in New Rochelle, New York.

As his son moved up the team ladder, Chuck Blazer became increasingly involved. Blazer made his fortune early as the owner of the business that manufactured the yellow, ‘smiley-face’ button that took off in the early 1970s.

At the age of 27 he cashed in his stake in the business, earning enough to enter a state of early retirement. He spent more and more time hanging around soccer and became a junior coach.

A photograph that Blazer liked to show visitors to his office in later years showed him as a trim young football coach, staring into the middle distance with hope and confidence.

Blazer’s big break came in 1990 when his friend Jack Warner, who had just become the head of Concacaf – the football federation governing North and Central America and the Caribbean – appointed him general secretary.

The two built an empire on the back of bribery, extortion and money laundering, and by the time Blazer agreed to cooperate with the authorities he had foreign bank accounts and two Trump Tower apartments overlooking New York’s Central Park.2

Blazer was living the life and he wanted the world to know it. He published a blog with the title ‘Travels with Chuck Blazer and his Friends ...’ in which he documented his brushes with the rich and famous.

There were pictures of Blazer with Nelson Mandela, with Prince William, and with any other famous person he could attach himself to, but most frequently, there were pictures of Blazer with Jack Warner, sitting somberly at some or other Caribbean football board meeting or at a press conference.

It goes without saying that the blog painted a rosy picture. Blazer was giving of himself to foster the beautiful game, enduring tedious meetings and the like with good cheer because the cause of football was a worthy one.

Then, one November evening in 2011, Blazer – by now morbidly obese – was driving his mobility scooter to New York’s exclusive Elaine’s restaurant when he was confronted by agents from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

He had a choice: he could cooperate with their investigation into money that he had illicitly moved in and out of the US banking system, or they would cuff him and book him. Blazer had no choice but to concede that the game was up.

Back in the Brooklyn courtroom, Blazer and Dearie exchanged greetings. Blazer raised his right hand and was sworn in. Then Dearie explained in painful detail the agreement that had been reached under which Blazer would relinquish an appearance before the grand jury and enter a guilty plea.

Dearie then set about putting Blazer at ease.

Dearie: ‘Let me begin first of all, sir, by asking you to state your full name.’

Blazer: ‘Charles Gordon Blazer.’

Dearie: ‘How old are you, sir?’

Blazer: ‘68.’

Dearie: ‘You are the second person I know, I being the first one, to actually stop on that question. I guess it is some kind of Freudian block.’

Blazer: ‘It is’.

The exchange set the tone. Blazer was cooperating and there was no need for hostility.

Blazer told Dearie his education had taken him partially through graduate school in New York.

His health was poor – worse than poor. By then wheelchair-bound, Blazer suffered from colon cancer for which he had undergone 20 weeks of chemotherapy. He tried to put a gloss on it by stating: ‘I am looking pretty good for that. I am now in the process of radiation, and the prognosis is good.’

There were other ailments – Type 2 diabetes, coronary artery disease. Again Blazer tried to be cheery saying he was ‘holding up reasonably well’.

This was not the whole truth. Blazer was by now a shadow of his former self. In his prime, he had been a bold, large-bodied man who dominated any room he entered with his physical presence, his thick curly grey hair framing a bearded face. In those days, his smiling eyes staring over his spectacles, he came across as a perspiration-beaded Father Christmas who had spent the night in a club and got lucky.

Dearie responded to Blazer’s account of his health with ‘good luck’.

The court’s copy of Blazer’s 19-page typed account was placed before him.

Dearie: ‘The first question, did you read it?’

Blazer: ‘Yes, I have.’

Dearie: ‘Did you read it carefully?’

Blazer: ‘Yes, I did.’

Dearie: ‘Would you agree that this is an important 19 pages in your life right now?’

Blazer: ‘Extremely so.’

Finally, the doors closed, the minutes sealed and the courtroom empty but for the essential players, it began.

Dearie: ‘There are ten charges, if I am not mistaken, ten charges in total ...’

Blazer: ‘That is correct.’

Dearie: ‘The charges related to events involving an exchange of [illicit] payments for one purpose or another. They identify Fifa and its attendant or related constituent organization as what we call an enterprise, a RICO enterprise.’

RICO, Judge Dearie informed Blazer, was an acronym for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization. That was how football’s governing body was being described on this winter’s morning.

The charges, said Dearie, alleged ‘a conspiracy to corrupt this enterprise through the anticipated payment of funds pursuant to various criminal schemes’.

Dearie then asked Blazer: ‘Tell me what your understanding of a conspiracy is, what is a conspiracy?’

Blazer replied: ‘That it is an activity conducted by a group of people for a specific aim and objective.’

Dearie adopted a schoolteacher’s posture: ‘That is a B-Plus.’ He explained: ‘It is an agreement to do something that the law forbids.’

Blazer replied: ‘Okay.’

Dearie searched for a metaphor. ‘You and I were buddies on the street and we agreed to sell marijuana and we meant it. We were going to go into the marijuana business. We committed the crime of conspiracy to distribute marijuana, whether we ever distributed a single gram. It is an agreement itself. Any questions about that?’

Blazer replied: ‘No, sir.’ He listened as Dearie explained that the charges included money laundering, tax evasion and the violation of financial reporting laws.

For each of counts one and two, racketeering conspiracy, Blazer could face 20 years in prison or a fine of up to US$250 000. Count three – money laundering – could result in a further 20-year sentence or a fine of US$500 000. Counts four to nine, for tax evasion, each carried a maximum term of five years in jail. Count 10, the failure to file information on foreign bank accounts, carried a potential ten-year sentence or a fine of US$500 000. If given the maximum sentences to run consecutively, Blazer would spend 100 years in jail – the rest of his life, a very uncomfortable prospect for a very ill man who loved his freedom.

Finally, Dearie asked: ‘Are you ready to plead?’

Blazer: ‘I am.’

Dearie: ‘What is your plea to Count One through Ten inclusive, guilty or not guilty?’

Blazer: ‘Guilty.’

Dearie: ‘Mr Blazer, tell me what you did.’

In clipped legal language, Blazer told how he had been employed by Fifa and Concacaf: ‘From 1997 through 2013, I served as a Fifa executive committee member. One of my responsibilities in that role was participating in the selection of host countries for the World Cup.’

The full extent of Blazer’s involvement in the corruption of ‘the enterprise’ was placed on the record in a voice familiar with reading legal contracts.

‘I agreed with other persons in or around 1992 to facilitate the acceptance of a bribe in conjunction with the selection of the host nation for the 1998 World Cup. Beginning in or about 1993 and continuing through the early 2000s, I and others agreed to accept bribes and kickbacks in conjunction with the broadcast and other rights to the 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2003 Gold Cups.’ (The Gold Cup is a regional tournament held every two years and organised by Concacaf.)

‘Beginning in or around 2004 and continuing through 2011, I and others on the Fifa executive committee agreed to accept bribes in conjunction with the selection of South Africa as the host nation for the 2010 World Cup.’

He continued, explaining how he had used email, telephone and wire transactions in a scheme to defraud Concacaf and Fifa, and how money had been illegally shifted from the US to the Caribbean and in the opposite direction: ‘I agreed to and took these actions to, among other things, promote and conceal my receipt of bribes and kickbacks. I knew that the funds involved were the proceeds of an unlawful bribe.’

He had failed to pay tax or to file tax returns; he had run an illegal bank account in the Bahamas.

Dearie rounded off proceedings: ‘I find that the defendant is acting voluntarily, that he fully understands his rights, the consequences and the possible consequences of his pleas, and there are a factual basis [sic] for these pleas of guilty. I therefore accept the plea of guilty to Counts One through Ten inclusive of the information bearing docket 13-CR-602.’

It was 11 am. The courtroom emptied.

* * *

Once Blazer had been ‘flipped’ and had agreed to cooperate, he began to collect information for the authorities. Continuing with his Fifa duties, he helped the FBI build their case.

The FBI issued him with a keychain containing a tiny microphone that Blazer took with him to the London Olympics. He placed the keychain on a nearby table while entertaining visitors and chewing the fat over various corrupt schemes.3

On the same day that Chuck Blazer agreed to cooperate with the US authorities, across the world in Geneva, Fifa president Sepp Blatter had just won a minor victory. A Swiss initiative to cap top executives’ pay had just failed. He called a press conference to announce that he was fighting match-fixing. He was blissfully unaware that a senior judge in a US courtroom had just described the body he had ruled for 17 years with an iron fist as a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization. He did not know that it was the beginning of the fall of Fifa’s house of cards.

1. All the courtroom quotes in this chapter are taken from a transcript of the sealed proceedings, United States District Court, Eastern District of New York, United States of America against Charles Gordon Blazer, 13-CR-602 (RJD) 13-MC-1011, 25 November 2013.

2. Teri Thompson, Mary Papenfuss, Christian Red and Nathaniel Vinton, ‘Soccer Rat! The inside story of how Chuck Blazer, ex-US soccer executive and Fifa bigwig, became a confidential informant for the FBI’, New York Daily News, 1 November 2014.

3. Ibid

CHAPTER 2

The 2006 bid: So this is how it works

‘On the opening day of the World Cup, Germans should dedicate the games to Charlie Dempsey of New Zealand. More than any other man, Charlie assured the hosts that this day would finally come. Interestingly, enough, Charlie didn’t do it by casting his vote for Germany six years ago; rather he succeeded by not voting at all.’

– Chuck Blazer

Only eight countries have ever won the World Cup – Brazil (5 times), Germany (4), Italy (4), Argentina (2), Uruguay (2), France (1), England (1) and Spain (1) – reflecting the total domination of Europe and South America over the sport. For the 60 years between the first World Cup, in 1930, and the 1990 edition, a European or a Latin American country had hosted the tournament.

In 1994, the cosy tradition was broken when the United States staged the event. Fifa took firm aim at the lucrative US market, with its massive television revenues and sponsorship money. The move was richly rewarded. Despite the fact that the US lacked a quality national soccer league, new attendance records were set as Americans piled into stadiums at an average of 69 000 spectators per game. Unsurprisingly, South America and Europe dominated the competition, with Brazil beating Italy in a penalty shoot-out in the final.

But the face of the competition had changed forever. From now on, Fifa would seek to make it a ‘global game’. In exchange, it was hoping for a much larger global television audience that would generate higher revenue from the sale of media and branding rights.

South Africa’s then football boss, Solomon ‘Stix’ Morewa, returned from watching the US tournament determined to take advantage of Fifa’s global ambitions by getting South Africa on to the Fifa map as a host nation. He wrote to Fifa offering the country as a host.

Morewa would eventually be dragged down by scandal after the Pickard Commission of Inquiry (1996) found that he had presided over financial mismanagement. But back then ‘Bra Stix’ was the mover and shaker in local football. He had been at the helm of the South African Football Association (Safa) when it hit its all-time peak in 1996. That year, South Africa hosted the Africa Cup of Nations as a late replacement for Kenya.

The year before, South Africa had hosted the Rugby World Cup and the national team, the Springboks, had beaten the All Blacks at Ellis Park in the final. On that occasion, Nelson Mandela won over white South Africa by taking to the field in captain François Pienaar’s number six jersey before the game. Rugby had become an entrenched part of white South African culture, and Mandela’s appearance was a deeply symbolic act of reconciliation.

By contrast, football was the sport of black South Africa, with massive radio and television audiences following the local league, dominated by the Soweto giants Orlando Pirates and Kaizer Chiefs and Pretoria’s Mamelodi Sundowns.

The national team, recently dubbed ‘Bafana Bafana’ – the boys – was new to international football. At home that year, they were to prove a formidable side under coach Clive ‘The Dog’ Barker.

In the first round, they demolished the fancied Cameroon 3–0 and beat Angola 1–0 before losing a dead rubber to another continental superpower, Egypt, by a solitary goal.

In the quarterfinals they faced another continental giant in Algeria, winning a tight game 2–1. In the semifinal they demolished Ghana 3–0 to book their place in the final against Tunisia.

It was as if it had all been scripted. Nelson Mandela took to the FNB Stadium in Bafana captain Neil Tovey’s jersey before the game, and what had become known as the ‘Madiba magic’ worked again as South Africa won the tournament 2–0. Striker Mark Williams came off the substitutes’ bench to score both goals.

After the trophy presentation, Mandela and Tovey raised the cup together, a carbon copy of the image from a year earlier when Mandela and Pienaar had done the same with the rugby trophy.

There was a sense that South Africa’s stars were aligning.

More than that, it was a bold statement that South Africa was a serious footballing nation. If it was to host a World Cup, it would not only be because of its substantial infrastructural advantages over other African competitors but also because it could justly claim it was the continent’s best on the field.

The door had opened to a previously unthinkable African hosting of the World Cup and Fifa took note.

The idea of a South African bid now had real momentum, and with Mandela in its corner, how could it lose? In 1997, the country established the South Africa 2006 World Cup Bid Committee. A 46-year-old MP of the ruling African National Congress (ANC), Danny Jordaan, was asked to head it up.

Intelligent, articulate and understated, Jordaan had a long history in the struggle for racially integrated sport. He had played cricket and football in an era when strict racial segregation applied. Jordaan had been a frontline activist in the fight against apartheid and against segregated sport.

Jordaan came from Port Elizabeth in the country’s Eastern Cape province – a region known more for its rugby than its football. He joined the militant Black Consciousness student movement, the South African Students’ Organisation (Saso), which had been founded by Steve Biko, who was to die after brutal torture while being held in detention by the security police. Nine of Saso’s leaders would be sentenced to up to ten years’ imprisonment on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela and other ANC leaders were being held.

Jordaan was also a member of the South African Council on Sport, which actively sought to have South Africa’s whites-only sports teams excluded from international competition under the slogan ‘No normal sport in an abnormal society’. Under apartheid, only white South Africans represented the country in international sport, although this was amended in later years to allow a limited number of black participants. Apartheid ensured that whites were well financed and enjoyed the best facilities.

Jordaan, along with many other leading Black Consciousness activists, shifted his allegiance to the banned and underground ANC and the United Democratic Front, a broad coalition of student, civic and religious bodies that acted as the ANC’s internal front. The ANC disagreed with Biko’s Black Consciousness doctrine, embracing a more inclusive non-racialism, a policy that was to become epitomised by Nelson Mandela’s reconciliation policies.

Jordaan rose to prominence in the party’s regional structures and when Mandela’s party won the first democratic election in 1994, he became an MP in the first truly representative South African parliament.