By AARON CRANFORD
After recently stepping down from his role as FIFA president amid speculation of his involvement with the ongoing bribery investigation, Sepp Blatter has called for “integrity checks” and more confederations to create their own Ethics Committee.
In a published column titled More Democracy, Blatter agreed with a proposition raised by president of the German football association Wolfgang Niersbach that there should be “an independent integrity check for all members of the most important FIFA committees.”
“In doing so, Niersbach has broached a subject that has so far been blocked by UEFA of all associations,” he continued. “Better late than never.”
Blatter also addressed his desire for more confederations to follow in the footsteps of the Asian Football Confederation, which “has an Ethics Committee like the one introduced by FIFA.”
What do you think about Blatter’s comments? Think ‘integrity checks’ should be implemented?
Share your thoughts below.
Remember that time we were all celebrating because Sepp Blatter had stated he would be stepping down from FIFA?
As usual, his “actual game” could be anything, but the signature tricks, such as turning his enemies against each other until there aren’t enough left to fight back appear to be as timeless as ever.
As Gab Marcotti and others have pointed out…. if FIFA held a special election right now, and Blatter ran, he’d probably be a shoo-in.
I’m not sure this organization should even be remodeled, so much as disbanded and rebuit from scratch, with an interim organization put in place to cover the immediate administrative duties. New constitution. New approach to transparency. New headquarters. And as much new blood as possible.
If this gets done, it will be because the US did all the heavy lifting– nobody else seems to care all that much beyond expressing their scarcely believable surprise and pledging their support in vague terms.. So for us, that’s a huge resource commitment. Begs the question…. what are we truly doing here? Because this is about more than 2022 (which I don’t get the sense we even intend to attempt to recover).
Maybe I don’t even want to know. Probably some long-term political issue involving Russia, oil futures, establishing future avenues of money laundering prosecution….. and all kinds of stuff that should have nothing to do with the World Cup. But given there are only 5-6 things left in the world that people value enough to want to protect (marriage, education, and the survival of the planet no longer sustain much interest), I guess you have to pick your fights.
Well…. I hope we get it right the first time, because a credible governing body for international sport would be our most original and credible contribution to global athletics since we quietly canceled Olympic baseball after determining we weren’t very competitive anymore
If nothing else, FIFA shows you exactly what pure democracy gets you – bread and circuses.
The biggest problem is, there’s really only about 50 truly “impactful” soccer nations in the world…and they all despise Blatter. His support is composed largely of the 159 other nations – some absurdly small countries with populations as small as 6,000 – that will never get World Cups…and yet get votes equal to, and as much of FIFA’s revenues – as the soccer nations that actually will appear in World Cups.
Are we kidding? Why have the big soccer nations allowed themselves to be held hostage by Montserrat? And why is a guy from Liberia running for FIFA president…and nobody’s laughing? Dude. When your nation appears in a World Cup sometime in the next century, then talk about running for president of FIFA. (Of course, we could have said much the same about Prince Ali.)
There needs to be a rational voting formula…and yes, while even the smaller nations should be represented, the notion that Montserrat’s vote counts as much as Brazil’s is…past the point of being absurd. Under the current setup, South America – which produces easily as much soccer talent as Europe – gets just 10 votes out of 209.
Basically, the 50 or so nations that actually control 99% of the meaningful soccer on the planet need to get together, hammer out a formula that makes them all equally unhappy, and tell everybody else how it’s going to be. Why we’re allowing this farce that is FIFA to exist, much less dictate, just leaves me shaking my head.
…and the members of those ethics committees should be women, young women, wearing really tight soccer shorts…
#BOYCOTTFIFA
Septic Bladder is at it again, talking nonsense. He is as good at fighting corruption as he is at making movies.
He’s the last person I’d listen to regarding “Integrity” and “Ethics”
This is sort of like having Bernie Maddoff teach a course in Business Ethics.
GW, or maybe like Putin showing how to love thy neighbor(s) or how to buy a World Cup with a minimum number of rubles.
United Passions is the worst reviewed movie of the year. Hollywood Reporter is calling it one of the worst films of all time. A septic masterpiece; and Golden Razzie nominee for worst foreign picture. United Passions
Not Playing In Theaters
It made less than $900 in the United States. Truth. Apparently had a budget of $30 million.
They wanted to call it Men of Legend.
You literally cannot make this stuff up.
“Hey, all those things that I didn’t want or pretended to want when I was in charge, but stood in the way of or subverted in some way? Yeah, you guys should actually do that now that I’m gone, it’s totally going to clean things up”
What an asshole…isn’t he basically admitting to wrongdoing, or the knowledge of wrongdoing taking place under his watch?
Amazing how he tries to distance himself from the mess. He is the problem and he was captain of a corrupt ship. I hope they get enough to arrest him on all the bribes. Maybe the others already arrested will finger Blatter and he’ll go to jail. I think thats the only thing that will shut him up.
Committees can’t give an organization integrity of the majority of the people in the organization don’t have personal integrity.
Everyone around blatter is going down and if he says I didnt know they were committing fraud or he says he knew about it and is not surprised they’ve got caught. Either one shows a leader who doesn’t demand integrity of those he works with.
So he just realizes this now??????? Large corporations throughout the world have EC’s and typically the top dog of the ethics committee is an executive director whom sits on the board of directors. In the US it really became prevalent after the Sarbanes-Oxley act was made law in 2002 to make sure there was some sort of financial corporate governance.
Thank you Captain Obvious, now go away.
Hysteria!!!!
He’s right. Each confederation should have it’s own ethics committee.
Why is UEFA against it one can only speculate but your first guess is probably correct.
What a tool! I feel bad that we come from the same country, he disgraces all Swiss people with his actions and his words.
I was not aware that the Swiss were particularly keen on either actions or words, let alone verbally expressing a non-neutral position. Though I suppose “recommending more committees” is not specific enough to assume he has totally abandoned his heritage.
dude, what?
what a pig…