Qatar 2022 is about to start with massive labour and human rights challenges. The sports integrity industry has had little effective effect. Sports integrity is, now, an industry. It needs clear rules of disclosure.
It was the best of trials. It was the worst of conferences. Lets start with the best. In Paris, last week, a proverbial rocket hit the world of sport. The former head of the International Athletic Association Federations (IAAF) - Lamine Diack - was convicted of collecting millions of dollars in bribes and kickbacks.The actual scheme was shocking. Diack, along with many of his top aides - including his ‘thug’ son (his words) - was running a racket where athletes,...
Its over. It cannot possibly stagger on with any belief. The credibility of that awful walking, talking oxymoron of the Qatari-funded agency for ‘sports integrity’ - the International Center for Sports Security (ICSS) is dead. Yesterday, in an extraordinary Football Leaks investigation the credibility of the ICSS was not just killed. They blew it up, collected the ashes, burnt them and scattered them to the winds… (That's enough far-fetched poetic analogies! Ed). The organization was set up to ‘protect sports integrity’ a...
There are all kinds of examples of inappropriate blindness. There was Captain Smith of the SS Titanic not seeing the iceberg. There was Admiral Nelson putting the telescope to his eye patch not to see the signal to retreat. There was Johnny Papalia the mafia thug who beat up the head of Toronto’s illegal gambling racket in front of two-hundred people in a crowded restaurant and when the police arrived none of the patrons said they saw anything. Then there...
Below is the confidential paper on building an investigative culture in a corrupt sports world that I wrote for the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) Think Tank held in Lausanne on September 20th. It was supposed to be secret but some craven twit leaked it to his pals in the media within 24-hours of it being circulated. Now that a number of journalists have read it, I have no hesitation in making it public. The headlines are: 1) World Anti-Doping Agency is not...
On the eve of FIFA’s executive committee meeting that is expected to rubber-stamp the decision of their ‘ethics committee’ (sic) to ban Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini from the international football world, four points: 1) Is the internal FIFA reform - a believable process? No. It is a Potemkin village of a battle against corruption. From far away, it seems good. Once you get close, the obvious conflicts of interests emerge. What is occurring now is a frantic effort by FIFA...
No independent, intelligent or credible person should have anything to do with the International Centre for Sports Security (ICSS) – the Qatari sponsored organization on sports governance and integrity. The ICSS is like the great Yiddish joke: what is the definition of chutzpah? The man who kills his mother and father and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan. To review: the Qataris are the people who ushered in yet another chapter of FIFA integrity...
To my American colleagues who went to the seminar on ‘sports integrity’ at the National Press Club on June 24th, You saw a presentation by a man with little credibility in sports integrity and two other men who have failed. You attended a presentation sponsored by the Qatari sports establishment. This is a group that is suspected by sports fans around the world of corruption in securing the rights to the World Cup tournament of 2022. This is a group that...
1- So it begins.I write of the mad scramble for cover of the silent sports journalists, the creepy academics and the cringing consultants who said little against FIFA or CONCACAF over the last three decades. My least favourite are that gang of academics who gathered around the Sorbonne/ICSS to “research match-fixing”. Almost incredibly they linked themselves with both FIFA (via Interpol) and the Qatari sports establishment. It is difficult to find organizations with less credibility in the public's eyes...
