Football’s elite deserve the foulness of Fifa

My favourite moment in the crisis engulfing football’s governing body, Fifa, came with the intervention of a man called Manuel Nascimento Lopes. Manuel is the Fifa delegate from Guinea-Bissau, an African country which occupies 130th place in the Fifa world rankings but which, far more importantly in this context, punches well above its weight when it comes to institutionalised corruption. Thirteenth in the world, according to the organisation Transparency International — not a bad showing for a smallish sub-Saharan rathole which has been almost permanently engulfed in civil war since the Portuguese got the hell out.

Manuel suggested that to vote against Sepp Blatter remaining as boss of Fifa would be ‘blasphemy’ and added the following observation: ‘If you point three fingers at someone, there is always one you point at yourself.’ I find this a difficult concept to fathom. Why would you point three fingers at anyone? Wouldn’t just one do? And how come one of those fingers is actually pointing at you — isn’t that physically impossible, unless it has been broken by some government thug in a Bissau torture chamber (of which there are plenty, according to Amnesty International)? As for ‘blasphemy’, well, it would not be blasphemous for Manuel and his African brethren to have voted against the hilariously appalling Sepp Blatter. They would instead be ‘pissing on their chips’, to use a phrase which I believe originated in Port Talbot.

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Ross Clark

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Fifa, under Blatter, poured an awful lot of money into the pockets of African delegates, much as it has done with the delegates from the equally corrupt — and in a footballing sense, similarly useless Concacaf nations (that’s North and Central America and the Caribbean). Add to those two another continent which is spectacularly bad at football, but often quite good at corruption, Asia, and you can see how Sepp got his votes.