Europe’s footballing elite does not hold the moral high ground – France should know

England boycotting the World Cup alone would achieve little. Together, England, France, Spain, Germany and Italy could kill off Fifa overnight

May 2015: the phone rings not long after dawn and, after a brief exchange of profanity-laden surprise, I am sprinting from my bed in one of the cheapest hotels in Zurich to the car park of the most expensive, just about in time to see the last of Fifa’s corrupt blazerati hiding behind a bedsheet and being led into the back of a waiting police car.

That moment marked the end of the road for the Fifa crime family who, five years earlier and in a frenzy of pocket-lining, had handed the World Cup to Qatar – quite possibly by accident. But it was not quite the end of the road for the Godfather himself, Sepp Blatter.

Arguably the most remarkable aspect of that absurd tale was that, barely 48 hours after large numbers of Fifa’s most senior executives were led away by police on racketeering charges, Blatter was re-elected for a fifth term, with the backing of 133 of Fifa’s 209 member countries.

The vote is a secret ballot, but secrets are hard to keep. In the wake of the decision, the English FA’s chair, Greg Dyke, said that boycotting future World Cups to force reform of Fifa was an option. That hasn’t happened.

What seems so odd about this World Cup, played in winter in a business class lounge disguised as a country, is the seeming ease with which the biggest, richest, most powerful football players and leagues can be told what to do by a clique of corrupt and shameless football administrators. England boycotting the World Cup alone would achieve little. Together, England, France, Spain, Germany and Italy could kill off Fifa overnight.

So it should be clearly understood that it is not merely that they lack the courage or the self-sacrifice to rock the boat. For the most part, they do not want to. They are themselves too steeped in blood to return.

Blatter’s fifth term as president lasted about five days, after yet more corruption allegations and resignations made his position entirely unsustainable. He spent the rest of 2015 giving bombshell interviews in which he argued, with some credibility, that he hadn’t wanted the World Cup to go to Qatar, and that he had been told that both the French and German football federations had been pressured by their governments to vote for it.

It is not disputed that in 2010, the then French president Nicolas Sarkozy, the then Uefa president Michel Platini and the Emir of Qatar all had a meeting. It is also not disputed that shortly after, Qatar bought the French football club Paris Saint Germain, as well as a large number of French fighter jets.

Qatar’s TV network BeIn Sports has ever since also paid vast – and arguably vastly inflated – sums for TV rights to the French football league. And according to Platini, he was also pressured to vote for Qatar to host the 2022 World Cup.

Blatter has also claimed the German president, Christian Wulff, applied similar pressure to the German football legend – and, at the time, Fifa Executive Committee member – Franz Beckenbauer (Beckenbauer has never admitted who he voted for.)

Blatter’s demise in mid-2015 was meant to herald change, and if it is possible to be sympathetic to Fifa, it is difficult to reform an organisation that had little choice but to exist in an impossibly long 12-year twilight zone between its terrible decision in 2010, and the consequences of that decision, which are happening now.

Blatter was replaced by Gianni Infantino, but he has taken everyone by surprise by revealing himself to be even more of a pocket megalomaniac than his predecessor. His speech at the start of this tournament is likely to be remembered as among the worst ever given by a vaguely important global figure.

In four years’ time, the World Cup will have 48 teams, playing in 16 groups of three. It will undoubtedly be a far worse spectacle (Blatter, for his part, was also against this expansion). It is being done purely for commercial reasons.

For most of this World Cup, football players and football managers have been relentlessly asked to make a public stand on Qatar’s human rights record and its treatment of LGBT+ communities. Some of them have, some of them haven’t.

It is, in most cases, a slightly preposterous situation, expecting a clique of hyper-wealthy young people to be furiously angry about laws which are absolutely no different from neighbouring Dubai, where most of them go on holiday every few months (and why shouldn’t they?).

But they have been put in this thankless position because the organisation that runs their sport, Fifa, have failed them in every imaginable way. It may be unreasonable to expect Phil Foden, Gareth Southgate (and whomever else) to criticise a country that is hosting them, and which their government does billions of pounds worth of business with. Remember London 2012, the supposed high point of British cultural life? Don’t look up which sovereign wealth fund owns the athletes’ village.

If we dare imagine that football might not come home in a fortnight’s time, there are a trio of alternative images to pick from. One involves Lionel Messi lifting the trophy. Another Neymar. A third involves the tournament’s outstanding player, Kylian Mbappe (that honour belongs to France’s Hugo Lloris, who pointedly refused to wear the OneLove armband, even before Germany, England and the rest decided against it too).

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All three of those men have their wages paid by the Qatari state. Any of them winning would be a huge victory for what Qatar is seeking to achieve, and you’d have to be reasonably brave to bet against the three of them lifting football’s other storied trophy, the Champions League, in six months’ time.

None of this would displease Mr Infantino either. Football is being eaten from the inside by unimaginable amounts of money. And by all means despair of it, but don’t be under any illusions about who is and isn’t on your side. When France play England on Saturday, it will be a contest between one country who has arguably done more than any other to bring the World Cup to the desert winter. And another, England, who via the Premier League, doesn’t care where the money is coming from as long as the numbers are big enough.

Football hasn’t become the way it has without the acquiescence of the rich and powerful. Europe is not some innocent bystander. It is up to its elbows in it and has been since the start.