The Fall of the House of FIFA

CHAPTER 1

The People's Game

All the people who love football, the uncountable, ever-expanding millions or billions of us, will forever remember their first World Cup. For children, watching on television the faraway stars and splendours of the rolling matches, it is greater than entertainment and remembered with more than fond nostalgia: it is a formative experience. At the risk of blurting out a near-religious affinity for football, a simple, natural sport, so early in this account of how its world governing body, Fifa, crumpled into a mire of corruption and lies, I do believe there is in the World Cup something transcendent.

My first was 1974, the tournament played in the west of divided Germany, won finally by the host country whose strong and capable team, helmed by the visionary and rarefied skills of its captain, Franz Beckenbauer, overcame the fabulous, elaborate Holland of Johan Cruyff.

I was nine. I watched the whole spectacle, transfixed, on a big wooden lump of a colour telly in the living room of our house in north Manchester, where football was all around, woven into childhood. One of my earliest memories is of walking to infant school with my friend Anthony, and seeing the big boys in the junior school thundering through a mass game in the playground. As we passed by, a boy scored a neat, side-footed goal between the lines in the tarmac which passed for goals, and he wheeled sprinting away with an arm in the air and all his team running after him. I always wanted to be in the thick of that tumult, to play the game, and to be good at it.

Being taken to see United at Old Trafford and City at Maine Road, my head waist-high to the enormous crowds gathered there, connected our scamperings in the playground, park and garden to a much wider experience. I remember a friend of my dad's pointing to some mass synchronised singing, swaying and clapping on the Stretford End at United, and I instinctively understood there was a deep swell of passion and tradition formed for football long before I was born into the swim of it. When it came to the challenge every Manchester boy faces, sometimes demanded with menaces–City or United–my dad, a lapsed Bolton Wanderers supporter, gave no direction to follow, and with my freedom to choose I opted for City. The club was not the corporate, mega-wealthy, Abu Dhabi-owned, multinational City Football Group of today, nor were City the underachieving poor relations of United then; in the early seventies City had international stars and were the superior Manchester club. Bobby Charlton, the great engine of United's recovery as a football club from the human tragedy of the 1958 Munich air crash, star for England in the 1966 and 1970 World Cups, was exhausted by then. The bright-eyed Belfast boy George Best, who unfurled his playground skills in the grandest stadiums, was already being scooped up in drinking basements in town. Denis Law, the other maestro in United's triumphant trio, was a City striker for a final season or two by the time I emerged into football consciousness.

The gruff, tough pride Manchester men had for football was stamped into the city's character, and I think I was dimly aware of the general impression that we, in England, even 'invented' the game. I never gave that much credence because the people who made a point of it only seemed to do so when they were angry, in bad-tempered exasperation at a modern game or world gone wrong, and with some implicit hostility to 'foreigners' thinking they owned it.

It was only as an adult, a journalist researching the roots of football to understand its hyper-commercially exploited modern incarnation, that I read into the game's history properly and discovered that this claim of British national pride is actually, remarkably, true. Football, its proportions, layout of the pitch and rules, which allow for its endlessly thrilling expression, were indeed first established and agreed at the historic meetings of the newly christened Football Association at the Freemason's Tavern in London's Lincoln's Inn, in 1863.

Now I believe that these fascinating and cherished origins should be taught to young people as a valuable part of learning football, and history, but they are not, and many of football's adherents love the game all their lives without ever knowing how it all began. Growing up, we experienced these roots not as explicit history lessons but as a received sense of heritage, with innate values, from teachers at school and the dads who ran our clubs in the Sunday leagues. They strove to impart the understanding that along with the human instinct to get hold of that ball and run with it, dribble, boot it into the goal, came a necessary teamwork. When I started to play the game properly, on an actual grass pitch, I was quite startled to discover the degree of effort and fitness it demanded, and the challenge of sustaining it. There were the obvious rules of the game itself, against fouling, bullying, cheating and other thuggery–not always observed in the snarling confrontations, which passed for football, we grew up to encounter in some of Manchester's badlands. There was a decency we all soon understood in not lording a victory too cockily, and in having to scrape ourselves up after a defeat and shake hands with the boys on the other side. There were, to acknowledge the words now proclaimed as global commandments by Fifa and Uefa, fair play and respect, inherently required in the essence and conduct of the game.

Before the World Cup magically turned up on television in the summer of 1974, I am not sure I knew much about it at all. I can remember watching only two international matches before that tournament, both famous defeats for England, who were sinking into what would be a prolonged hangover following their victory at Wembley in their home World Cup of 1966. The first match was a 3–1 evisceration by Beckenbauer's West Germany at Wembley, in which Günter Netzer seemed to play uncontested in midfield, and which I did not even realise was the quarter-final of the 1972 European Championships, ultimately won by West Germany. The second was the generation-defining 1–1 home draw with Poland in October 1973, which meant England had not even qualified to play in the World Cup finals, when their goalkeeper Jan Tomaszewski was extraordinary and ours, Peter Shilton, let their goal through his legs. I couldn't quite take in what it all meant at the end, but remember running out of the lounge, crying in dismay.

I could, of course, regret that timing now, wonder what it might have been like had my first World Cup experience been the self-congratulatory national glow of England's 1966 triumph. Or 1970 in Mexico, the first World Cup on colour television, illuminated by the golden, trophy-claiming brilliance of Brazil. I educated myself about it years later, watching repeatedly the wonder of that goal in the final scored by the captain Carlos Alberto, surely still the greatest team goal ever scored. It is decorated by the short square pass played into his stride by Pelé, so easy looking, which somehow encapsulates the very beauty football can craft from its simple elements. There is the picture from that tournament which Fifa itself used as the signature image for its 2004 centenary publication, as the essence of football's achievement: England's Bobby Moore and Pelé, embracing and congratulating each other after Brazil's 1–0 win in the group. A white man and a black man, both great stars, united through sport in mutual admiration.

But I never really thought that at all; a child doesn't: you grow into the era which is yours. The 1966 triumph was bored into us with a load of other landmarks from before our time, which, we were endlessly told by our elders, showed why things weren't as good as in their day. England's absence was all we knew, so we accepted the World Cup without them; Pelé had retired from international football, Brazil were famously and jarringly stolid in 1974, and my generation had to wait until the 1982 World Cup in Spain to see a Brazil of marvellous talents.

So the 1974 tournament came on television, and I just watched it, agog, all this splendour laid out, on school nights in north Manchester. The memory of it is somehow draped across years of general impressions from my childhood: often I picture myself watching it in the next house we moved to, but that is not possible because we didn't go there until 1976. I watched the historic East Germany versus West Germany group game, which east won 1–0, as a football match, without any understanding of the profound political meaning with which the contest was freighted. I always remember seeing live the arcing, swerving volley from the edge of the penalty area scored by the centre-forward Ralf Edström, for Sweden, and the way the raindrops fell off the back of the net as the ball bulged into it.

As a nine-year-old I was strangely and somewhat ungratefully underwhelmed by Cruyff. Of his forever celebrated backheel swivel turn against Sweden, I pronounced myself unable to see what all the fuss was about. My uncle Stephen, fourteen years younger than my dad and still playing Sunday league football when I was a boy, had taught me a similar move in the back garden not long before that. The Conn turn involved putting the sole of your foot on top of the ball, rolling it backwards, then turning round and running on with it. I got it into my head that what Cruyff had done was as basic a trick as that. When Cruyff died in March 2016 of cancer aged sixty-eight–a smoker's premature age, two months after David Bowie, another icon of my generation and another smoker, died aged sixty-nine–the Cruyff turn was shown endlessly with the tributes, and I gazed on what I had failed to appreciate as a kid.

It was truly a feat of wonder. It was elegant beyond imagining. It was conducted in front of a live, global television audience of hundreds of millions, on the highest platform of the world's most popular sport. You can see that Cruyff knew exactly what he was going to do. He disguised the turn with an extravagant swing of his right foot, as if to pass long across the penalty area. His drag back was just a little more finely wrought than the sole-on-ball trick Uncle Stephen had shown me to bamboozle my friends in the playground. But watching the turn now, with an adult appreciation from a life of playing and watching football, understanding how deceptive the game's simplicity is and how infinite the task of mastering it, I love most what Cruyff did next. It is his emergence from the turn, how he runs on so effortlessly, controlling the ball so easily with his left foot, the perfection of his balance, which gets you every time.

The Sweden defender caught as the bemused foil for this brilliantly executed sporting achievement, which was done in a couple of seconds and is still being watched all around the world forty-two years later, gave a lovely interview about it after Cruyff passed away. Jan Olsson said he knew when it happened it would become famous, that there was nothing he could have done in the face of such genius, that he remembers it every day, that he was 'proud to have been there'.

'After the game,' Olsson said, 'I thanked [Cruyff] for the match and said congratulations. Even though it was 0–0, it was right to say congratulations.'

Beckenbauer, the other great player of that tournament and era, was different. He was class in footballer form. He had carved out the exotic role of sweeper and shaped it into a means of controlling the pace and direction of the whole game from the back. He was always upright, never under any pressure, forever in space. The game seemed to stop and form itself for him. Even at nine years old, I could not get enough of the way he stroked the ball with the outside of his right foot; it was so unnecessarily exquisite. I have since seen the film of him playing in the World Cup of 1966, up to the final defeat to England, and scoring against England in West Germany's 3–2 victory in 1970, and it still seems odd to see him in midfield, young, dribbling, attacking at speed. In 1974, his bouncing black curls were receding a little; he was wearing the captain's armband, he calmly played and prodded Germany back into the final after the shock of Holland's first-minute penalty, won by Cruyff. His authority looked effortless. At the end of the final, he even lifted the schlock golden trophy–newly forged because the old Jules Rimet version was given permanently to Brazil in 1970 after their third victory–with style and poise; his smile the consummate combination of pride and humility.

As many football lovers of my generation have said, partly we were so entranced because we were watching live, full football matches on television. There were no live matches besides the FA Cup final and internationals because of the authorities' fear that this would reduce the numbers of people going to the matches, when supporters' money was more necessary to each club than the small sums paid by the broadcasting companies. Then the World Cup came on and suddenly we were served up the greatest football which could be played, by these astounding stars, in colour, on television, night after night. My dad had grown oblivious and borderline hostile to football by then, and neither of my brothers was interested, so I watched it all on my own, just me and the telly, opening out to an altogether more splendid world.

The World Cup, I think, was transcendent because it connected the local efforts we made playing football and the grand feats of our proud Manchester clubs and their national contests, and broadened them, showing us that this game was beloved worldwide. We were graced by being part of something much bigger than we had imagined, greater than ourselves.

If pushed, I would say that the name Fifa did seep to some extent into my perception of the tournament, even then. The organisation was branded into the World Cup which it organised and in effect owned, and I think I was faintly aware of that, just as I understood that the FA was there as a disembodied presence in England, somehow overseeing the sport. Of course I did not know anything as a nine-year-old boy, captured for life by football and the World Cup, of Fifa's structure, its committees, or the ambitions of the men seeking to inhabit them. I didn't know anything and never gave a second's thought to money in football; I would have been quite baffled if told that the broadcasters had to pay Fifa for the right to beam the football into our homes.

Yet now that Fifa, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, has been brought low by proven corruption on a dizzying, entrenched scale, it is ever clearer that 1974 was, coincidentally for me, the year of seismic change for the organisation. In the contested election of the president at the Frankfurt congress just before the World Cup, the Brazilian businessman João Havelange finally and controversially supplanted the seventy-nine-year-old English administrator, Sir Stanley Rous.

Contemplating the major and surprising influence we now know was brought to bear on the politics of Fifa and other sporting organisations by the boss of the sportswear firm Adidas, Horst Dassler, it is startling how dominant the brand is when you see the 1974 World Cup again. The sponsorships worked on me as they did on millions of others, as Dassler intended them to, subliminally: I found as I grew up that the three stripes of Adidas denoted coveted style and glamour, without noticing consciously that Beckenbauer was wearing their boots. Holland, too, were wearing Adidas, although famously Cruyff himself had a deal with Puma, the rival company created after a Dassler family split, and he wore two stripes on his shirt rather than the Adidas three. In the game played between East and West Germany, Adidas transcended the political divide, the wall between repressive communism and socially enlightened capitalism, and managed to have both teams wearing their boots. Even Zaire, the single representative of Africa's growing and restless football-playing countries, wore Adidas.

In 1974, as a child, I fell like so many other people for the miracle of football, the World Cup, which Fifa had organised and delivered impeccably. Of course I was not to know that the election of that year, and that tournament, was a watershed, marking the beginnings of the culture which would culminate forty-one years later in Zurich, in arrests, indictments and Fifa's traumatised, toxic implosion.