Nobody with any insight will be surprised that FIFA has been labelled the home of massive corruption. No, the real surprise is that someone has gathered together the necessary legal evidence and actually done something about it – fourteen arrests of executives and officials to date no less, with seven senior football officials collared in Zurich, ready to be extradited under a US Department of Justice treaty with Switzerland. God bless America, eh?

Amongst those arrested are vice president of the executive committee of the Cayman Islands (nr Jamaica), South America’s Uruguay’s executive committee vice president and until recently president of South America’s football association and the notorious former member of the executive committee from Trinidad and Tobago.

The American FBI were finally incentified to launch a fraud, bribery, and money laundering investigation into FIFA (and in true US style turned their own crooks into super grasses!), when an unbelievable and bizarre decision was announced by FIFA to award the 2022 World Cup to mega rich Qatar. That was the final straw wasn’t it, after dozens of years’ suspected sleaze, once USA favourites and their strong hosting bid was scuppered without trace losing 14 – 8 to soccer un-omnipotent Middle East Qatar?

The American authorities have only been able to get involved and to bottom it out because the criminals have been using American dollars – if they had been using GBP for example they would have got away with it perhaps?

These arrests are likely nevertheless to be the tip of the iceberg though, as the fingered individuals are the ones who have been easily caught-out because they are the big boys in the massive scale of illegal activities – doubtlessly, there will be countless others operating at a lower level who will never be brought to justice. Oh yes, they will be small beer on the scale of things but nevertheless they will have trouser’d hundreds of thousands of dollars of football supporters’ money, and they will have got away with it.

It is not however just the crimes that are always the greatest evils but the lies and cover ups that follows and that entire perpetration, isn’t it? We have the historic world examples of say US President Richard Nixon and the notorious Watergate scandal whose personal involvement in the cover-up and not the crime brought him down; closer to home we have the Hillsborough football ground disaster with ninety-six fans crushed to death but covered-up by the police to hide their blame; or the illegal mobile phone hacking by British journalists that was rigorously covered-up by Rupert Murdoch’s News International, which when uncovered killed-off the News of the World – the one time world’s largest circulation English language newspaper; or the disgusting cover-ups for decade after decade by the Catholic Church of endemic sexual abuse of children by priests which allowed it to carry on for a generation; and numerous others to boot.

In the case of FIFA, President Sepp Blatter and his henchmen have successfully got away with more than a decade of such cover ups of systemic corruption as scandals have emerged, only to be buried using the classical methods of flat denial, minimalisation of problems, questionalisation of proof, denigration of exposure’s motives and character, withholding of evidence, and delaying tactics, amongst others.

Whether personally implicated in sleaze or not we don’t know, but Blatter, as a man of seventy-nine is probably less interested in money and women nowadays, don’t you think? He may well be satisfied with the aphrodisiac of the power mania that the Presidency provides him with, rather than substantial dollars, but he nevertheless lives an exotic opulent lifestyle and exercises a power of patronage that ancient kings either employed or dreamed of.

As the proverbial hit the fan, Blatter started by saying it was not his fault but the crooks should get their comeuppance. But his tune has rapidly changed to one of criticising the Americans, who have exposed things, claiming it was part of a campaign to unseat him personally – a classic type defence of the cover-uppers surely?

The original ‘internal’ FIFA investigation report on the awarding of the next two Cup venues was shelved and an apparently misleading false summary published by FIFA caused the resignation of the report’s author a former US New York attorney no less – the actual full report is not yet released but promised (again another cover-up by the executive allowed by Blatter?).

Corruption is rife in Africa & South America precisely places where FIFA has injected millions of dollars without any proper controls – how does FIFA justify that?. Anyone who has worked in corrupt environments around the world will tell you that any money not nailed down will be quickly spirited away.

Corruption is a destructively cancer that infects businesses, societies, politics, armed forces, police, governments, and is the major source of poverty in the world

[Some places identified with significant corruption problems includes Pakistan Colombia Mexico Somalia North Korea Sudan Afghanistan Iraq Libya Yemin Haiti Syria Zimbabwe]