With fresh leaves on the trees Sepp Blatter had hoped that this week would mark a step on the road to personal renewal and another four-year mandate in the presidential election three weeks today.
Instead, thanks to allegations levelled in Parliament, that election and Fifa’s immediate future, will remain clouded by lingering suspicion and acrimony six months after the bid process brought the game into disrepute.
Six members of Fifa’s executive committee were accused of corruption or unethical behaviour yesterday. With two banned during the campaign for breaches of Fifa’s own anti-corruption code, that means a third of the 24-strong executive committee in place when the contest was launched have been accused of wrongdoing.
Triesman also told the Select Committee inquiry into football that Lord Coe had been a 'great success over a period of time' as chairman of FIFA's ethics committee, yet Coe himself would admit his involvement was a non-event.
However, support for Lord Triesman's veracity yesterday came from an unlikely source, his arch foe Sir Dave Richards, whom the Labour peer described as a 'bully' to MPs.
PL chairman Richards backed up Triesman's allegation that Jack Warner had asked for £2.5million to build an education centre. 'We told him where to go,' said Richards.
As for Triesman, the strongest case is that against Warner. Triesman claims he asked for $4.1 million to build an "education center" in his native Trinidad and another $820,000 to buy Haiti's World Cup TV rights so that he could set up big-screen TVs in the earthquake ravaged island to show the games. Now, Warner has been subjected to plenty of accusations in the past. Anyone with an Internet search engine can find out more. So perhaps the accusation is plausible. But then it's equally true that the English bid -- like many other bids -- had a "global development fund" set aside with hundreds of millions of dollars earmarked for just such projects. Was Warner simply suggesting to Triesman that this would be a worthwhile way to spend the money? Was he trying to skim some of it off for himself? Who knows? What you do know is that it's impossible to prove either scenario in a court of law. Not without any kind of corroborating evidence.
Thailand's Worawi Makudi, according to Triesman, wanted the TV rights to a scheduled friendly between his country and England. Did he personally want the rights to he could then sell them at a profit? Who knows? Not Triesman. He doesn't say. And it might be good to remind ourselves that the FA took the unusual step of organizing a friendly with Thailand in Bangkok. Why? Because it believed England would benefit from playing the mighty Thais? Could it have had something to do with courting Thailand's vote? (Answer: It may well have done. After Thailand did not vote for England for 2018, the FA promptly canceled the friendly.) And since we're talking quids pro quos, if you're willing to come and stage a friendly in my backyard am I not entitled to also ask for a little more, like a bigger share of the TV rights for the game? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on who benefits from it all. But, again, you can't prove much either way.
Such is the infighting at Twickenham over the botched appointment of a performance director that the RFU could restore involvement with the England senior team to the job description to save credibility.
Chief executive John Steele, who is responsible for the recruitment mess, made the sudden changes because of his doubts about bringing back Sir Clive Woodward, who wouldn't want a marginalised position or think much of the £250,000 a year on offer.
