Report: Germany paid FIFA members bribes to host 2006 World Cup
And down topples another domino.
After serious questions were previously asked about the legitimacy and legality of FIFA's awarding of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar, respectively, and recent revelations that at least one bribe was paid in the bidding for the 2010 World Cup that went to South Africa, the 2006 edition in Germany is now alleged to have been bought as well.
On Friday, German magazine Der Spiegel claimed that a slush fund of some $6 million had been set up to bribe four Asian members of FIFA's Executive Committee. Earlier allegations by German paper Die Zeit alleged that Saudi Arabia's support had been won with a favorable arms deal. In 2000, Germany was awarded the tournament over South Africa by a 12-11 margin in the final round of voting.
FIFA itself appears to have at least been complicit in the transactions of the funds. The money apparently came from Adidas. And when it called in its loan by 2005, the funds were repaid by funneling them through FIFA. The money was officially earmarked for a gala that never happened and was then apparently moved on to a Swiss bank account controlled by the then-CEO of Adidas.
German soccer federation officials have acknowledged the payment to FIFA, but claim it wasn't connected to the 2006 bid, according to Der Spiegel.
This latest episode on FIFA's ongoing corruption crisis comes on the very day when suspended president Sepp Blatter claimed his $2 million payment in 2011 to suspended heir apparent Michel Platini was kept off the books because it was a "gentleman's agreement." The nebulous explanation doesn't do anything to dispel the widely held belief that the payment was actually compensation for Platini staying out of the presidential race so that Blatter could be re-elected to a fourth term.
The two have claimed the money was for work done between 1998 and 2002, when Platini was an advisor to Blatter, even though neither has managed to explain why it took nine years for the payment to come through.
And so the most powerful governing bodies in the world's favorite game dodder on, smashing whatever shards of integrity they had left into even finer pieces.
It seems now that nothing that's been done by the upper echelons of soccer power in the last few decades is entitled to any credibility at all. The entire steaming heap of immoral institutions and laughably sticky-fingered officials has become a punch line.
Off the field, the sport has become a joke. Soccer's governance has become the sporting equivalent of some military junta's puppet congress and its elections have all the integrity of a show trial on a trumped-up charge.
The news that yet another World Cup was possibly bought was as shocking as it was unsurprising. Because in international football, nothing merits the benefit of the doubt anymore.
It's the sad, black-hearted and incorrigible soccer world we live in now.
Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.
