Excerpt from
Foul by Andrew Jennings:
He has been a beneficiary of international football and of the Caribbean in a most audacious way. They've even built a palace for him. It's called the Dr Joao Havelange Centre of Excellence in Trinidad.
It's purpose, according to Jack, is to raise football standards throughout CONCACAF. If the region really needed a football centre, they might have put it near the middle of the region, somewhere like Jamaica or Cuba, but it's in Trinidad, well south of most of Jack's regional football community.
It is a 6,000-seat football stadium with three practice fields, a swimming pool, offices, a conference hall and the 50-bed Sportel Inn for visiting officials.
At the planning stage, Warner calculated he would need US $16million to build his centre. But FIFA's total development budget for the years 1999 to 2002, for the entire region, came to $10m.
So, $16m for one small Caribbean island? Impossible! Not for Jack. There were presidential elections on FIFA's horizon and Jack controlled 35 votes.
Nobody, least of all Blatter, wanted to disappoint him. And so it was that the entire budget went to Warner, along witha $6m Union Bank of Switzerland loan.
Eighteen months after the centre's grand opening, FIFA wrote to Warner to tell him that, since he had yet to repay a cent of the $6m bank loan, FIFA would repay the money themselves.
However much FIFA handed over to Warner, he always asked for more. They had paid for the centre but they'd have to pay again to use it.
In August 2001, Warner demanded $77,000 for four-day refereeing seminars, at Macoya and in Mexico City.
Blatter passed Warner's request to the Goal Bureau, run by his Qatari ally Mohamed Bin Hammam. No way would they agree to Warner's demand for $77,000. He must be given more! Urs Zanitti, secretary of the Goal department, faxed back that they wanted to give him the whole $105,500 cost of the course. Zanitti enthused: "We congratulate you on taking the initiative to organise such useful courses."
He might have been less impressed with Warner if he had known that the FIFA-funded centre was used for regional coaching and football development just three weeks of the year. It was hard to see what all those millions of dollars were doing for the great world family of football.
