Tom Lappin: Of course cash was king but English football in no position to take high ground

Published on Friday 3 December 2010 20:24

AND so it begins. English football's war with Fifa started around 3.30pm on Thursday afternoon, when 22 well-fed delegates and Sepp Blatter laughed in the face of the PM, heir to the throne and greatest living Englishman David Beckham.

They made a mistake there, interpreting the bid figureheads' ingratiating urbanity for a general English subservience, not realising that the Fifa decision would let slip the dogs of journalistic outrage. It will be no great surprise if every one of the 20 delegates who had the gall not to vote for England will now have their fiscal probity investigated down to every grubby dollar. Every casual link to the Russian and Qatari bids will be exposed, scrutinised and spun in the most suspicious light. Hell hath no fury like a little Englander scorned.

From the point of view of English football (and the UK's public coffers), it's difficult not to think England dodged a bullet by being so ignominiously rejected. Football supporters would surely have reacted with mounting disbelief and anger as the national game succumbed to Fifa's preposterous demands, its cavalier disregard for civil liberties, freedom of expression, any form of dissent. An English game that has narrowed its focus on the club aspect, particularly the Premier League and Champions League, would be unimpressed by Fifa's power-plays.Conflict would have been difficult to avoid, and ugly.

It has long been apparent the global authority, resentful of Uefa's preening arrogance and England's historical condescension, prefers to hold its jamborees in nations grateful enough to be compliant in the obscene marketing, patronage and tax-exempt exploitation that characterise Fifa's operations. All the better if those countries require extensive construction of stadia and facilities, with all the attendant money-making opportunities. It didn't help that the English presentation looked so much more slick than their ponderous but earnest Russian rivals. It encouraged the impression England is all style over substance. If the respective prime ministers are a former PR man or a former KGB agent... well who would you expect to get the job done, in important matters like keeping the state broadcaster on-message? In England investigative journalists are chided by Gary Lineker; in Russia they wind up dead.

The English delegation were smooth, but given the result, just two votes, one of them from Englishman Geoff Thompson, that was obviously a waste of "creative" energy. Far wittier surely to follow up last year's gift of Louis Vuitton handbags to the delegates' wives by filing on stage in Zurich silently bearing 23 briefcases, flipped open with suitable contempt to reveal stacks of Swiss francs. Dignified exit. Now that would have been a presentation. Instead the English bid team were as hopelessly outclassed as the football team were in the summer. The equivalent of Germany was the Concacaf president Jack Warner, who coquettishly enticed the English to ply his confederation with largesse in the form of a money-spinning friendly and kids' coaching camps, before blithely handing his votes to Russia.

It was unfortunate that Russia's victory came on a day when Wikileaks revelations uncovered US diplomatic assessments of Russia as a corrupt, autocratic kleptocracy, a virtual mafia state where around $300 billion a year exchanges hands in bribes. It was equally unfortunate that recent Panorama and Sunday Times revelations suggest that a similar (albeit on a more modest budget) description wouldn't be too outlandish if applied to Fifa. The problem is that English football cannot, with any credibility, scurry for the moral high ground. English football sneers at the venality of Blatter and his cronies, but spawns a figure like Garry Cook, the chief executive of Manchester City, who thus described Thaksin Shinawatra: "Is he a great guy to play golf with? Yes. Whether he's guilty of something over there, I can't worry too much about....Morally, I feel comfortable in this environment."

English football's most sensible option would be to accept those two votes as the calculated insult that Fifa intended, adopt a detached policy of disdain for a generation of administrators that has become risible, while partaking of some rueful examination of their own complicity in football's malaise.

There are more pressing concerns than spilling gold into Fifa's vaults anyway, not least developing a generation of footballers capable of better than embarrassing themselves every four years. The best riposte to such rejection is remembering how to play football, remembering the joy in the game itself.