By Simon Kuper
The hotel concierge – der Portier, in German – is a recognisably Swiss type. Some people even say he embodies Switzerland. Der Portier is friendly, multilingual and has no ideology. He always remembers his guests’ names. Above all, he knows which of them have money: in the 19th century, it was the British, later Americans, then Russians and currently Gulf Arabs.
Sepp Blatter, from Switzerland’s touristic Valais canton, is a born Portier. That’s why on Friday he will be re-elected to his fifth term as president of Fifa, the corrupt global football authority. Western countries rightly decry Blatter. However, we ought to recognise his genius. This 79-year-old understood very early that there’s a new world order in which westerners don’t matter much.
I only realised how deluded most of us westerners were on December 2 2010. That afternoon Fifa’s executive committee (Exco) chose Russia to host the 2018 World Cup and Qatar to stage the 2022 tournament. I had followed the bidding campaigns for years. I had had many off-the-record conversations with western bidders. A few had predicted Russia’s victory. Almost nobody foresaw Qatar’s.
Each western bidding country, I now realise, imagined that Fifa thought much like the country itself did. The English and American bidders, instinctive capitalists, thought they could win because they had big soccer markets. The Spanish-Portuguese bidding team probably thought they could win because they had friends inside Fifa. Australia hired lobbyists with other friends inside Fifa. The Dutch and Belgians believed in their green and compact bid. They even cycled into Zurich to present it.
Writing in the Financial Times before the vote, I chastised bookmakers William Hill for making Qatar runaway favourites. Hadn’t Fifa’s own evaluation report called Qatar’s extreme heat “a potential health risk for players, officials, the Fifa family and spectators”? I tipped Russia and the US to win. I was wrong. So were almost all other western observers. Theo van Seggelen, president of the international footballers’ trade union Fifpro, says: “For me – and I was reasonably close to the fire – the vote was a complete surprise.”
It turned out that Fifa cared only about naked power and money. Vladimir Putin twisted voters’ arms. Long-legged Russian ladies stalked football conferences. Qatar funded football projects everywhere. In addition, more than a third of Exco’s 24 members were accused of corruption linked to the vote. Several resigned from football. JĂ©rĂ´me Valcke, Fifa’s secretary-general, wrote in a leaked memo that Qatar “bought” the World Cup. (He later said he’d been misinterpreted.) Last year The Sunday Times alleged that a Qatari, Mohamed bin Hammam, made payments totalling $5m to win support for Qatar’s bid.
Bin Hammam and Qatar have denied wrongdoing, with the country insisting Bin Hammam never had any official role supporting the bid and always acted independently.
Western countries, hopping mad to lose the World Cups, have cried “corruption!” But most non-western participants dismiss them (with some justification) as hypocritical, whining losers. Richard Attias, a French communications consultant who works with Qatar, told me: “Only a microcosm is interested in how World Cups are attributed – a very British microcosm.”
Fifa’s vote presciently recognised the geopolitical rise of Qatar and Russia. Fifteen days after the vote, a Tunisian fruit seller set himself on fire, and north Africans rose in revolt. Qatar, “flush with the success of winning the rights to host the . . . World Cup and with its international recognition soaring as a result,” then helped spark the Arab spring, writes Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, Baker Institute fellow for the Middle East. Qatar funded Islamists across north Africa, and helped unseat Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi. In 2014, Russia’s naked power surprised the west again: Putin annexed Crimea. We live in a new world order.
It suits Blatter. Coming from a small country, he is skilled at accommodating big power brokers such as Putin. Moreover, he thinks like them: Blatter, too, likes legal immunity, motorcades on empty highways, and respectful underlings. The central American football officials who recently compared him with Jesus and Nelson Mandela presumably knew the comparisons were absurd. But the absurdity simply emphasised their loyalty.
Many non-western football officials admire the efficient Portier. Blatter is good at organising World Cups, admits Michael van Praag, a Dutchman who tried to run against him. And the Portier handles people well. “He is charming,” says Van Praag. “He knows the name of every national association’s chairman, even his wife’s name.” Better, Blatter dishes out perfectly legal gifts to national associations. True, he cannot charm western media. But, though their attacks wound his vanity, he knows that media scarcely matter in the new world order.
Western countries are powerless to change Fifa. They could boycott the World Cup but, characteristically, they won’t make sacrifices for their principles, says Roger Pielke Jr, political scientist at the University of Colorado.
Now some westerners are complaining about Blatter’s unfair advantages over any opponent in Friday’s vote. Many national football associations fear their supposedly secret ballots won’t stay secret. But Blatter isn’t even listening. At the concierge desk nowadays, we westerners are last in line. Given waning western power, asks Pielke, “how do you effect global change? It turns out it’s really difficult. If we can’t reform Fifa, my goodness, how can we deal with nuclear proliferation or carbon emissions or trade?”
Simon Kuper is a columnist on the Financial Times of London. You can reach him via [email protected] or on witter @KuperSimon
(c) 2015 The Financial Times Ltd.
