CHUCK BLAZER:THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Chuck Blazer, the US soccer supremo whose testimony pulled back the curtain on the high level of corruption in FIFA, is online at the Guardian. You can link to it here; it should be in the paper paper soon. Blazer was an interesting case study, and I was lucky in the sense that I knew enough about the situation, and knew people with far more knowledge of it, to be able to see both sides of the equation. It was important to note the impact Blazer had on the growth of the game in America, particularly in terms of the success of the national teams and the added exposure he got for them. The US still suffers from minnow status in the big world of football: they can go into the World Cup ranked a tier below Mexico even when they have beaten the Mexicans and won their group. But as I never tire of pointing out to British soccer moonies, the men's national team has had a success rate in the World Cup very much comparable to England's, the difference being no one in America really cares.

I also was able to speak, or at least write, with experience of FIFA. Since my days at UPITN I had been doing business with them, when Sepp Blatter was the General Secretary and Joao Havelange was the President, and Blatter's reputation was as an 'honest broker' whom you could trust to see a deal through. Times change. In general, however, writing the piece was easy, in the sense that Blazer was a larger-than-life character; I smell the makings of a TV movie, with John Goodman in the starring role. The hardest part was cutting out stories that were entertaining but didn't suit the obit. The macaw, however, made the cut.

Otherwise it is pretty much as I wrote it, with a couple of I think telling omissions.The first came with the mention of Prince William appearing in Chuck's blog. What I had actually written at that point was:  

alongside those (pictures) of Blazer with British royalty and football stars. 'Royalty treated him like royalty,' an anonymous colleague told the New York Daily News, 'because they wanted to host the World Cup and were slavering for the money that could be made buying and selling the beautiful game'.  

This was a reference to the failed British bid for the World Cup, which crashed amidst a 'fury,' as the tabloids would have it, of accusations of bribery. Which turned out to be true, but probably didn't actually take the event away from Britain anyway. But the idea royals could be portrayed as slavering for money was apparently beyond the pale.

The second was at the end, in the mention of his survivors. There I wrote:
Blazer is survived by his son Jason, a physio therapist who served as CONCACAF's head of medicine, and his daughter Marci, a lawyer who served on FIFA's legal committee.

I thought that the mention of their positions within world football was a telling point to make, for obvious nepotistic reasons. It wasn't the only case in FIFA history, that's for sure, including Sepp's nephew the travel agent. The paper also had some doubt about his cause of death. When he was hospitalized in 2015, it was reported as colon cancer. His lawyer's statement about his death said he died of rectal cancer. I didn't think those were contradictory, nor that the colonic confusion was a cause for omission.

A BRIEF NOTE ABOUT SEPP BLATTER AND FIFA

Having recently been researching the FIFA scandals for a piece I was writing, I have a very clear vision of where FIFA itself will be heading come December, when Sepp Blatter is supposedly going to stand down as its President. Oddly enough, as sports editor of the TV news agency UPITN, I had dealings with Sepp when he was the General Secretary of the federation, and considered the 'good guy' to deal with, as opposed to the then-President, Joao Havelange of Brazil (whose in-laws and descendants figure in the current and other past scandals as well). Sepp was, I believe the first of a number of Secretaries General to replace powerful Presidents in major federations, a big step in the transition of international sport from the control of the blazers to the suits (and the aptly-named Chuck Blazer, who was more a suit, symbolises that).

You read it here first: come December, Blatter will be 'spontaneously' asked to remain by a number of federations, & present himself  as the only man who can 'clean up' FIFA & steady the ship. He will be re-elected. He will probably present himself, and the sport, as being victimised by jealous agents of a country whose people do not understand the 'beautiful' game.

Blatter's strategy in dealing with corruption has always been to wait out and ride out every scandal, cover it in a blancmange of committees, reports, commissions and noble sounding panels, and then wait for the game's popularity to once again overshadow their venality. Because the game is venal from pitch to boardroom, built on cheating, corruption, and the domination of money, this will succeed, assuming the US & Swiss prosecutors don't cut through legal machinations, extraditions, and red tape and get straight to the heart of the matter, which they won't. The US investigation will be characterised as a local problem of Western Hemisphere's corruption, the corrupt bidding and elections as Africa's and Sepp will emerge to continue into his 80s as the capo di tutti capi, clean and shining like a dirty piece of schist.