by Heidi Blake
It was his next move that came as the really big surprise. Bin Hammam told the delegates that ‘the time has come’ for Asia to put up a candidate to challenge Sepp Blatter in the next FIFA presidential election. ‘We would like to see an Asian as the president of FIFA,’ he told the news conference. ‘I believe that the time has come for an Asian to come forward for this position. And there is more than one potential candidate available from Asia to lead world football. When we have that person, I hope the whole of Asia will unite behind him.’ The media seized on his words and widely speculated that Bin Hammam himself was preparing to enter the presidential race in the election the following year, though he played down that suggestion. All he wanted was to see an Asian at the top of FIFA, and he would swing his support behind any candidate from the region, he insisted.
The AFC president then did something even more overtly seditious. He told the Guardian newspaper that he and ‘colleagues’ on the executive committee planned to call for FIFA presidents to be restricted to serving two terms, just as Blatter had promised him back in 2002. This looked like a clear attack on the FIFA president as he neared the end of his third term. It wouldn’t cut off Blatter’s legs in the next election, because Bin Hammam’s proposal would come into force later, but it was a clear statement about his suitability to rule over world football indefinitely. The president was quick to hit back. He called an impromptu press conference in Zurich to declare his determination to secure a fourth term. ‘Now it is obvious there will be candidates for the FIFA presidency in 2011 – a candidate from Asia,’ he said. ‘I have not changed my position. I am still here, and I hope to still be here in 2011. I have not now finished my mission, and if the Congress will decide so, I will be at their disposal.’
Such a public spat with the FIFA president less than a year before the World Cup vote looked like a kamikaze move, and the lobbyists backing Qatar’s rivals sniggered behind their hands. Bin Hammam had really overreached himself now. Blatter would be furious. The truth was that Bin Hammam wasn’t so sure he could count on Blatter any more, and this was a good way of hedging his bets. Relations between the two men had been strained in recent months, and they had clashed at the previous meeting of the FIFA executive committee on South Africa’s Robben Island. Blatter’s support for Qatar seemed to be wavering, and the word was out that the decade-old alliance between Bin Hammam and the FIFA president was beginning to crumble. So Bin Hammam had to do something bold to turn things around.
Issuing such threats to Blatter’s presidency from within his Asian power-base had two virtues. First, it addressed Bin Hammam’s top priority of the moment: shoring up regional loyalties, which he hoped would ensure that Ogura and Chung transferred their votes to Qatar once the Japanese and South Korean bids crashed out in the early rounds of voting, as he intended they should. The gentle-spirited Ogura was easily pliable, but Chung was a tougher nut to crack. He and Bin Hammam had a long history as sworn adversaries which needed to be remedied. The AFC president’s carefully worded statements in Seoul were the start of an ingenious strategy he had devised to win the South Korean’s loyalty. Chung had his own well-known designs on the FIFA presidency, and this threat to mount an Asian candidate to topple Blatter was a sop to him. The assault on presidential term limits had been devised during private talks between the two men ahead of the AFC congress, and the plot continued by email in the months that followed.
The second virtue of Bin Hammam’s show of muscle in Seoul was its potential to make Blatter rethink his recent frosty treatment of the Qataris. When it came to it, he believed all the FIFA president really cared about was clinging on to power, so if Bin Hammam had any leverage over the old campaigner it was the threat of toppling him from his gilded perch. If Blatter was backed into a corner, he could go one of two ways. He could either try to undermine his rival by destroying Qatar’s bid, or he could attempt to ward off a presidential coup by backing the Gulf state in order to regain Bin Hammam’s loyalty. The public challenge the Qatari had issued in Seoul was a gamble. Would it pay off?
You didn’t mess with a man like Sepp Blatter and get away unscathed. A week after Bin Hammam threw down the gauntlet in Seoul, he received a nasty surprise. A round-robin email arrived from the president, casually informing members of the Exco that FIFA was saddling up a new ethics committee to police the bidding race for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. Qatar’s $1.8 million payment to sponsor the CAF congress had stirred up a hornet’s nest of tensions between the rival bidders, and by February 2010 the tumult had still not died down. Rumours were swirling – no doubt fomented by Qatar’s opponents – that other payments had been made directly to football officials.
Blatter’s email announced that FIFA had finally appointed a new chairman of its ethics committee, filling a position that had been vacant since the departure the previous year of the last incumbent, Lord Coe, to head the organising committee of the London Olympics. The ethics body had been rudderless when the first complaints about the Angola congress sponsorship had been made to FIFA in January, but now something had spurred Blatter into action. The new chairman was Claudio Sulser, a 54-year-old former international football player turned lawyer, part of the Swiss clique that Blatter felt he could rely on. The president wrote: ‘It is high time that the Ethics Committee took up its duties once again. Therefore, I would like to convene a meeting of the committee to address, in particular, the important matter of the bidding procedure for the 2018/2022 FIFA World Cups.’
Why was Blatter doing this? What could be gained from airing such dirty linen? Bin Hammam looked at the letter again. Did the ethics committee really have jurisdiction over the bids for the World Cup? It certainly never had before, but it was a relatively new body and the scope of its powers had yet to be tested. He was not going to take this without a fight. So he instructed Chirakal to send the letter on to the AFC’s lawyers for a legal opinion. ‘President referring the attached letter to you and would like you to verify if Ethics Committee is appropriate body to address the World Cup Bidding procedure,’ Chirakal wrote in an email to Nguyen thi My Dung in the legal department. Nguyen’s response confirmed Bin Hammam’s fears. The ethics committee only acted in cases of misconduct or undignified behaviour by officials, which included ‘discrimination, ineligibility to be official, conflict of interests, confidentiality, accepting gifts, bribery’. Bin Hammam could see this was a dark cloud on the horizon and Blatter had to be squared off.
Bin Hammam had always had mixed feelings about the FIFA ethics committee. World football’s governing body had first introduced an ethics code in 2004 and then, at a meeting in Munich on the eve of the German World Cup two years later, congress had accepted the formation of a committee to enforce the new rules. It had been a laughably toothless body, as Bin Hammam knew full well: he had been one of its initial members. It had no investigative powers and was limited to reviewing the evidence put before it in the form of a written complaint.
Its first and only high-profile case had been four years earlier against Jack Warner, the notoriously rapacious Trinidad and Tobago executive committee member. Warner was alleged to have sold tickets for the German World Cup on the black market through one of his own businesses, Simpaul Travel, when they should have been distributed among members of the Caribbean football associations.
At a meeting to assess the case in Zurich, Bin Hammam was one of the ethics committee members who expressed disapproval of Warner’s activities. ‘What was unethical about the matter was that the company belonged to Mr Warner. As a FIFA vice-president, he should not be selling tickets for the World Cup,’ Bin Hammam told the committee. Warner was found to have committed three ethics breaches, including a failure to declare his interest in Simpaul. Infractions of that sort were deemed so serious that the penalty stipulated by the code was ‘eligibility for . . . removal from office’. But when the ethics committee’s report on the case went to the Exco, they couldn’t quite bring themselves to kick out one of their own. Instead, Warner’s co
mpany was meekly requested to donate $1 million to charity. It was never clear whether it did so, and Warner kept his position.
However, Bin Hammam could see that the newly configured ethics committee might soon have teeth. FIFA had just appointed an investigator for the first time, as its ‘security chief’. He was from the world outside complaisant Switzerland, where crimes like bribery were punishable by imprisonment. Chris Eaton cut an incongruous figure in jeans and cowboy boots as he strolled into the smoked-glass corridors of FIFA’s Zurich headquarters to start his new job in April 2010. A balding 58-year-old Australian, with a greying handlebar moustache, Eaton seemed to be a genuine crime-fighter. He had been head-hunted from Interpol to improve FIFA’s reputation by cleaning up international football and the federation’s executives had great expectations of their new man. If the sleepy ethics committee – staffed by elderly judges and football administrators – was not fit for purpose in the modern era of global sport, Eaton had decades of domestic and international policing experience. Here was someone who could lead serious investigations into corrupt officials and match-fixers, and supply the ethics committee with hard evidence on which to act.
The chance to work at FIFA was a golden opportunity for the investigator who started his career as a police constable in the Melbourne seaside suburb of St Kilda. He had risen up the ranks as an agent in the Australian federal police, and served two stints as the national secretary of his country’s police federation, before joining Interpol at its headquarters in Lyon, France. FIFA was offering him the chance to earn some serious money for the first time in his career. He told friends it was a ‘very well-paid’ job which would allow him to buy a new home for his retirement in seven years’ time.
He had been recruited by Jérôme Valcke, the FIFA secretary general, on the recommendation of their mutual friend Louis Freeh, the former FBI director who ran the Washington-based private investigations company Freeh Group. Eaton had been promised a budget and a team to run proactive investigations. In an email he described his new job as advising Valcke and FIFA on ‘issues impacting or potentially impacting on the World Cup and related events and in protecting the reputation of FIFA with respect to allegations of malpractice’. Bin Hammam did not like the way things were going.
The new ethics committee first meeting was scheduled for 15 March, but Bin Hammam had no time to waste worrying. He was notching up the air miles again that day, this time to Belgium, with Meshadi and his ever-loyal AFC office director Jenny Be in tow. It was a chance to meet up and discuss tactics with the executive committee voter Michel D’Hooghe in the more convivial surroundings of his home country, and further the entente with the Low Countries bid which had developed following Diallo’s visit two months before.
The Belgians pulled out all the stops for Bin Hammam and his entourage in the manner he had so often done for his Exco colleagues. Accompanied by D’Hooghe and several members of the Netherlands–Belgium bid, he was driven through Brussels to meet the Prime Minister Yves Leterme and then given a tour of the Palais de la Nation, the home of the Belgian parliament. He was then taken north of the city to the Chateau de Laeken, following in the footsteps of Napoleon as he crossed the threshold of the royal palace. Dressed in a sleek black suit and shirt with an orange silk tie, Bin Hammam was introduced to His Majesty the King Albert II of the Belgians, who was keen to impress on his guests the readiness of his people to host a World Cup. While very honoured to be in such exalted company, Bin Hammam was equally pleased to have successfully cemented a strong relationship with one of the other bidding countries. Afterwards, his hosts sent him a framed picture of his audience with the King to add to the impressive wall of celebrity photographs in the hall of his Doha home.
In return, Bin Hammam invited the leaders of the Dutch–Belgian bid to the draw for the 2011 Asian Cup in Doha on 23 April. The event was turning into a great opportunity to showcase his country’s World Cup credentials. He had already sent out an invitation to another bid team he was cultivating: the Russians. Alexei Sorokin, the bid chief executive, and Vyacheslav Koloskov, their former executive committee member, were flown in to the Gulf state on a private jet for a five-day visit. Alas, the new Exco member and bid chairman Vitaly Mutko was unavailable to travel, but his underlings sent him a rapturous report of the hospitality they had received. The Qatar Football Association which was officially in charge of the country’s bid was offering all-expenses-paid trips to the event for some of Bin Hammam’s African friends, such as Fadoul Hussein of Djibouti and Said Mahmud Nur of Somalia.
The Qatar FA was also generously picking up the flight, hotel and meal bills for another key Exco voter, Hany Abo Rida. The Egyptian had fast become a close ally of Bin Hammam’s since his election to football’s ruling committee in 2009. Abo Rida had the appearance of a minor North African dictator in his light suits, outsized black shades and close-cropped hair. Having risen from relative obscurity in Egyptian football, his new power at FIFA had made him useful to the ruler of his country, the bloodthirsty President Hosni Mubarak, and Abo Rida was enjoying increased status at home. Football had that kind of exalting effect. The shrewd Egyptian could see that Bin Hammam was a powerful man to cosy up to, and he had given his new ally a cast-iron assurance of his vote for Qatar in the secret World Cup ballot that December. So he received a particularly warm welcome when he touched down in Doha that April.
The most special guest of all at the Asian Cup draw had received his invitation directly from the Diwan Palace and would be spending several days in Doha. Bin Hammam was notified the week before Sepp Blatter’s arrival in a short letter which read: ‘Dear President, I am very pleased to inform you that I will pay a courtesy visit to the Qatar Football Association and the Amir of Qatar’s family next Tuesday, 20 April 2010 . . . Looking forward to seeing you soon.’ Bin Hammam knew that the old fox could never resist a request from the Emir, and this was the chance to rebuild bridges. He instructed Chirakal to make arrangements to receive Blatter and make sure he had the best room in the Sheraton Hotel. Bin Hammam himself went to the airport to meet the FIFA president off his private jet, and the pair were photographed together on the airstrip. Relations between the two men had become increasingly fraught since that dinner with the Emir two years earlier, when Blatter had suggested the World Cup should come to Qatar, and Bin Hammam wanted to know where he stood now. This was an opportunity to test the president’s shifting allegiances.
The immediate crisis dissipated just as the dust whipped up in a sandstorm falls to earth when the wind subsides. Blatter was once again his disarming charming self – impeccably polite to his hosts. Bin Hammam did not mince his words during his talks with Blatter, and the FIFA president would later describe his Qatari friend as having been ‘aggressive’ during their encounters. But his candour had the desired effect, as did the gracious hospitality from the Emir. At the end of his visit, the FIFA president was a fully signed-up supporter of Qatar’s World Cup dream once more. And he didn’t just give pat reassurances in private: he decided to go on record and tell the globe how wonderful it would be to see the tournament take place in the desert country.
At a news conference in Doha, flanked by the president of the Qatar FA, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa bin Ahmed Al Thani, he declared: ‘The Arab world deserves to host the World Cup. We are now nearing the end of the bidding process for the World Cups in 2018 and 2022 and Qatar is the only country bidding from the Middle East. I was an advocate of the FIFA rotation policy. It was important to bring the World Cup to North America and Africa. Now I strongly feel that the World Cup should come to Qatar. I’m a regular visitor to Qatar and every time I land there, I am impressed by all the development.’ The FIFA president said he was certain that Qatar had the organisational abilities to host the tournament and dismissed suggestions that the country’s low ranking in world football would have any bearing on its bid. ‘What matters are the guarantees the bidding country has to offer and on that count I have no doubt that Qatar will put on the ta
ble all that is needed to host the event,’ he enthused.
It was exactly what Bin Hammam and the Emir wanted to hear, but Blatter’s pronouncement caused consternation among the other countries bidding for the 2022 tournament. The Australian press reported that the A$43 million their own bid had so far spent on its campaign had ‘gone up in smoke’ and there was speculation in America that the US bid was dead in the water. Qatar had gone from being a rank outsider to being the country to beat. No one could claim the tiny Gulf state was not a serious and viable contender now. The FIFA president had said so.
Bin Hammam was delighted. He wrote to Blatter after he returned to Zurich in May rhapsodising that it had been wonderful to have the FIFA president back in his ‘home Qatar’, adding: ‘It was really very pleasant moments to my heart that we exchanged brotherhood discussions.’ Blatter was duly rewarded. Later that summer, Bin Hammam neutralised the threat he had issued at the AFC congress in Seoul. ‘Let me be very clear, I will not run against Sepp Blatter: I will be backing him to remain in office for a new mandate. He is my very good friend,’ he told journalists. The presidential powerplay had paid off handsomely, and all was well again.
Keeping the African voters sweet remained a priority for Bin Hammam as the official Qatar 2022 committee prepared to unveil the bid book containing its bold plan for a desert World Cup to FIFA in May. A fortnight after Blatter’s visit, on 7 May, Bin Hammam headed down to Abidjan, the home of Jacques Anouma, the Ivory Coast executive committee voter who had pledged to ‘push hard’ for a Qatar World Cup following the Doha junkets. He was there to preside over the inauguration ceremony for the Ivory Coast’s third FIFA Goal Bureau project to improve the facilities of a football training centre at Bingerville, an eastern suburb of the Ivorian capital.