Danger in taking Sepp Blatter lineMartin Samuel
OK, so he called one right. It had to happen sooner or later. Speak out on as many issues as Sepp Blatter, the Fifa president, and you are going to come up trumps eventually. Summer football in Europe, wider goals, games split into four quarters, quotas of foreign players, artificial pitches at a World Cup tournament, a competition hosted by two countries that hate each other or an ethics committee that believes Jack Warner has no case to answer - Blatter has had a misguided crack at them all. Now, on the subject of the Premier League’s international round, he has finally tapped one into an empty net. Good for him. The question that remains unanswered is: what if he had backed it?
For, in all the excitement of the coup de grâce being administered to this bogus scheme, what is clear is that whichever way Blatter had jumped, the pursuit of a home World Cup in 2018 means the FA would have followed. “I am determined that our international and domestic relations must be sustained at the highest level,” Lord Triesman, the FA’s independent chairman, said on Friday. In other words: whatever you say, Sepp. For the next four years until the decision is made, it would seem. The wording of the FA statement issued in response to Blatter’s condemnation of the Premier League proposal suggests that it, too, got its judgment right: but for the wrong reasons.
Cravenly seeking the approval of an administrator as opportunistic as Blatter is a dangerous game. We have already had a glimpse of the problem in the FA’s shameless courting of Warner, the Fifa vice-president and special adviser to the football federation of Trinidad & Tobago. Warner’s dealings over matters relating to the 2006 World Cup are at best dubious, at worst odious, and if it really cares about the way fans are treated, the FA should go nowhere near a friendly match in the Caribbean in June while this man is the power broker. Instead, it has accepted Warner’s invitation to play a fixture celebrating a century of football on the islands, in return for Warner’s endorsement of its World Cup bid, which he has now given, performing a 180-degree turn on his previous stance.
Some may regard this merely as realpolitik and argue it is necessary if this country is to land the 2018 prize. Yet what if Blatter had found the 39th game a splendid idea? What if he had embraced it with as much thought as he put into his suggestion that the European leagues should play from February to November (meaning La Liga matches away to Seville or Real Betis could take place in 126-degree heat, the temperature recorded on the streets of Seville in August 2003)? Would the FA have then been prepared to abandon the flawless principle of the symmetrical league that has stood since 1888, for the possible net gain of one hosted tournament?
