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 bright side, he has never actually been convicted of fraud, racketeering or money laundering. He has also never been arrested for corruption. No has ever caught him on hidden camera offering bribes or election gifts. Ummmm... well, thats about it really. The news that Canada's own Victor Montagliani was elected president of CONCACAF, the continental confederation in FIFA representing North, Central America and the Caribbean, is another underwhelming sign of the lack of reform inside FIFA. For international readers here...
The FIFA presidential election will take place on Friday in Zurich, giving the game's power brokers a golden chance to affect change. But there's a catch. The 207 eligible presidents of the national football federations wield the power to vote, yet these officials are, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, steeped in a world where brazen criminals have repeatedly milked the sport for their own personal profit. ** This is a feature article for Bleacher Report. You can read below or at...
Now that Sepp Blatter has been driven off into the sunset from FIFA, it is time to reflect on the long-sorry, scandal ridden years of his reign. Seven things then that we have learned: 1) The Watergate of Sports Stories: It was not ESPN, nor any of the other big sports channels or well-established sports journalists who broke the FIFA story. The real heroes are a small collection of journalists who are largely outsiders. As the big sports media empires frantically...
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...
