Sport Book of the Week
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Your support makes all the difference.Great Balls of Fire: How Big Money Is Hijacking World Football John Sugden and Alan Tomlinson, Mainstream, pounds 15.99, hardback
HAVE THE men of Fifa sold their souls? Literally, I mean? To Mephistopheles himself? In imitation of their pals in the International Olympic Committee, perhaps? So lush and luxurious is the lifestyle enjoyed by these overblown administrators on their Ambrosial round of gifts and banquets, there seems no other explanation.
This book tells a tale so familiar it is almost one of the template stories of our society - the one in which the accumulation of power becomes an end in itself. Kicking off with brown envelopes stuffed with cash in order to secure the election to the Fifa presidency of Sepp Blatter, the book proceeds by according a chapter to each of the principal villains - and what a rogues gallery it makes.
Sir Arthur Rous is "Colonel Blimp", for example (though in his damagingly obsolete attitudes he was a product of the culture he sprang from); Joao Havelange is "The Big Man" (a product of nothing more than his own megalomania); the American wheeler-dealer Alan Rothenberg is "The Bounty Hunter"; while Dr Mong Joon Chung is "The Big Boss", who has an eye on the Fifa presidency as a means of helping himself be elected the first leader of a reunited Korea.
On initial inspection, one might suspect that even Chung and his chums would need the devil's direct intervention to pull that one off - though some of the shenanigans detailed in this book suggest otherwise.
The catalogue of greed and graft is overwhelming, underlining the hollowness of that old joke about football being "the people's game". It is a pity, then, that, as the authors fear in their introduction, they have not done more to make a fairly dry text more accessible - though things liven up when the colourful Tommy the Tout, a former Manchester United hooligan who found a more lucrative way of leeching off the game, makes an appearance in the chapter dealing with the ticketing fiasco of France 98.
There is scarcely an individual in this repugnant litany of corruption to emerge with his reputation intact. If the rulers of Fifa's global fiefdom have indeed sold their souls, the only consolation is that Old Nick will extract his price and the whole lot of them will burn in hell.
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