For an organisation which presides over the most popular game on the planet, the ability of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (Fifa) to score own goals is without equal in world sport. The governing body for soccer is well accustomed to controversy, but its handling of its own investigation into the decision to award the 2018 and 2022 World Cup finals to Russia and Qatar has gone beyond the farcical.
Its initial response to demands for an in-depth inquiry into why its executive committee awarded sport’s greatest event to a tiny country with no football history and a totally unsuitable climate was dismissive. That disdain eventually gave way to a reluctant acceptance that corruption charges should be examined, if only to kick the problem down the road, a tactic that Fifa has adapted in the past.
That investigation, which was undertaken by highly regarded New York lawyer Michael Garcia, took the spotlight away from the controversy in the run-up to the World Cup finals in Brazil, but any hope that buying time would play to Fifa's advantage backfired spectacularly over the last two weeks.
A decision to publish only a summary of Garcia’s 400-page report, which exonerated virtually everybody involved in the Qatar bidding process, prompted Garcia to question Fifa’s own ethics director, and call for the publication of his report in full. Attempting to muzzle a figure like Garcia, after he spent 18 months compiling a report that runs to 400 pages and cost €7.5 million, illustrated the lengths Fifa will go to protect its tarnished reputation.
Its president Sepp Blatter, a controversial figure who has dominated the politics of football for over 20 years, then muddied the waters further by lodging a criminal complaint over the suspicious transfer of assets with connections to Switzerland, the country where Fifa is based.
This blatant diversion illustrated just how far Fifa will go in its attempts to deflect attention from core issues like why it ignored even its own technical committee’s advice that playing a World Cup in country with temperatures as high as Qatar’s could put at risk the health of players.
Publishing Garcia’s report in its entirety may now be the only option for Fifa as it attempts to assuage all doubts over the Qatar process and how Russia secured the 2018 finals. Most of the pressure to date has come from the media, but if the level of discontent spreads to sponsors, who bankroll most of football’s great tournaments, Blatter and his executives may be forced into an embarrassing climbdown.
Apparently immune from concerns over human rights abuses in the construction of the Qatar stadiums and indifferent to the results of its own investigation , maybe the language of money is the only one Fifa really understands.