Fifa's red report card
Fifa's President, Sepp Blatter, is somewhat effusive in giving South Africa a score of nine out of ten for its efforts in relation to the staging of the 2010 World Cup football tournament. He justifies holding back on that elusive perfect score because, as he puts it, "nobody's perfect". Such imperfections as may have surfaced, largely in the transport arrangements around the bigger games and in the ACSA aerial traffic jam for the semi-final at Durban's new King Shaka Airport, are trivial if compared to the apocalyptic predictions of the doomsayers. The negatively oriented pundits are still eating their words because the scenarios they sketched were swept away on the spring tide of ubuntu which enveloped the country for the duration of the tournament.Apart from improved infrastructure hastened into existence to accommodate the fans who thronged to the eight venues around the country at which the 64 games were staged, the lasting legacy for South Africans is the sense of national togetherness which the tournament's "gees" (spirit) engendered and with it the enhancement of our self-belief and self-esteem as a people. The "unity in diversity" envisaged by the founders of our new constitutional order, but seldom experienced by the ordinary people of the nation, is again in evidence; long may it last. It is fervently to be hoped that these intangible benefits will swamp what may or may not be an incipient up-surge of post tournament xenophobic violence in the impoverished townships around some urban centres. It is also in prospect that tourism and investment spin-offs from the world wide publicity the tournament has created for the country will materialize. It is however well established that adherence to the rule of law rather than our manifest success as party animals (and hosts) is more likely to attract serious investors and security conscious tourists.
The general euphoria and feelings of thankfulness have seemingly precluded anyone from now assessing the role of Fifa in the finals of the World Cup. Gratitude for cracking the nod from Fifa should not however blind the South African public to the less attractive features of the tournament, those for which Fifa is actually responsible.
On the field these manifested themselves in palpable unfairness in the decision making processes for which Fifa's match officials are responsible. Fifa claims they got it right 96% of the time. The problem is that when they got it wrong, they did so spectacularly and unnecessarily. As a consequence of refereeing errors it can be argued that England's fancied team bowed out early and Mexico lost a match it could have, at least, drawn. Mr Blatter apologised, but whether corrective action is taken remains to be seen. The most egregious example of error is undoubtedly the failure of two officials (both closer to the action than the England management, which started celebrating a goal) to notice that the ball crossed the line off the crossbar in the German goalmouth at a critical stage in the round of sixteen. While it is so that the Germans went on to win the match by a comfortable margin of 4-1, who can tell what the effect would have been of the boost to the spirits of the England players had the scorers been called upon to note the goal. It is now history that the goal was not seen by the two people in the stadium who counted but was seen, repeatedly, by all the rest of the watching world in slow motion replay.
Had Fifa put in place a simple review system using modern technology or even an additional official at each goalmouth to assist the three officials required to cover the entire field between them, a far fairer outcome was easily achievable. After all, the purpose of the game is to score goals, yet there was no official within about 30 meters of the German goal at the critical time. Neither the referee nor his assistant in the German half appeared to notice that the ball crossed the goal line. An easily avoidable injustice was done, giving rise to a chorus of criticism of the antiquated way in which the process of adjudication of the matches is still carried out ten years into the twenty first century. If Fifa does not take steps to improve this situation soon, one can expect to hear cynics claim that there are murkily suspicious reasons for keeping the current system of refereeing in place.
It is however off the field that the role of Fifa is open to even more criticism. Quite apart from the fact that had Charles Dempsey of New Zealand not inexplicably ignored his Oceania instruction to vote for SA four years earlier, the previous tournament would have been in SA and not Germany, the process by which Fifa selects the country in which the tournament is held every four years is both opaque and unaccountable.
The Institute for Security Studies has commissioned a study of the workings of Fifa which is appropriately titled "Player and Referee - Conflicting Interests and the 2010 Fifa World Cup". In it Collette Schulz Herzenberg characterises Fifa as "the official organizer of the World Cup [which] has long been plagued by allegations of lack of transparency and corruption." She draws attention to "the serious allegations of greed, nepotism and corruption that include scandals involving vote-rigging, cash-for-contracts and dodgy ticket sales - all of which allegedly involve, and benefit, Fifa officials."
The response of Fifa has been to revise its code of ethics for officials and to appoint an ethics committee. The British "Daily Telegraph" dismissed these moves, describing the ethics committee in less than glowing terms:
"Conceived as a fig-leaf against the torrent of misconduct allegations against the Fifa members, Blatter rendered the committee toothless by preventing any substantial allegations from being heard."
It is a matter of public record that the sale of tickets for the 2010 tournament was plagued by computer crashes and questionable practices. Fifa's accommodation arm, Match, hardly covered itself in glory by overbooking hotel rooms and then belatedly dumping the considerable excess back in the laps of the hapless hoteliers.
The gyrations around the choice of venue in Cape Town may turn out to be the most memorable piece of 2010 chicanery for which Fifa bears responsibility. By means of pressure and influence brought to bear, which could arguably amount, in law, to duress or undue influence vitiating the contracts involved, Mr Blatter used his position to force a change of the decision of the City of Cape Town to have a relatively inexpensively upgraded Athlone stadium as its venue, instead foisting upon the long suffering taxpayer a disproportionately gross, bed-pan shaped stadium in Green Point that was never quite filled during the tournament and is unlikely to be filled in the future.
While the heavy handed approach of Fifa to ambush marketing fades to an orange tinged memory and Mr Blatter's sycophantic musings about Durban as an Olympic host city are soon forgotten, it remains to be seen whether there is any political will left in South Africa to stand up to the shenanigans of Fifa. The legal options around the stadium in Green Point are worth considering on the basis of the details set out in "Player and Referee". Expect Fifa to get away with it all, as is its wont. The event's organizers trump proper regulation through the generation of a warm and amiable glow that masks the stench beneath the surface of Fifa's untaxed empire. Transparency and accountability are conspicuously absent.
Paul Hoffman SC
13 July 2010.
