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How Chuck Blazer got rich from – and sold out – the most powerful cabal in world sports
by Mary Papenfuss & Teri Thompson
HarperCollins, £20
Reviewed by Alan Tomlinson
From WSC 353 July 2016
Chuck Blazer: the Father Christmas lookalike whose weight had mushroomed to 450lbs by the time the FBI and the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) nobbled him on the Manhattan pavement outside his Trump Tower base in November 2011. This was just under a year after FIFA’s decision to award the next two World Cups to Russia and Qatar, and while a generation of FIFA powerbrokers and crooks was beginning to shatter the silence of a long-held code of omertà.
Dear WSC
Howard Pattison (Sign of the times, WSC 286) wonders why there are so few official plaques to footballers in London, but goes on to answer his own question: most of the big names from the pre-war era were based in the north-west, and all the more recent players mentioned in the article died less than 20 years ago. The “20-year rule” – which applies to all suggestions made under the London-wide blue plaques scheme – is designed to ensure that the decision to commemorate an individual is a historical judgement, made with the benefit of hindsight. I could agree that Bobby Moore is as good a case as any for making an exception – but where, then, would you draw the line? The blue plaques scheme is run almost entirely on the basis of public suggestions. In recent years, considerable efforts have been made to increase the hitherto small number of nominations that have come in for sporting figures, including footballers. This has brought some success – Laurie Cunningham and Ebenezer Cobb Morley, the FA’s first secretary and author of the first football rulebook, are now on the shortlist for a blue plaque. As time goes on, more outstanding players and managers will become eligible for consideration, and surely join them. In view of this – and, among other projects, the involvement of English Heritage in the Played in Britain publications and website – the charge that “those who administer our heritage simply don’t see football as part of it” seems about as close to the target as a Geoff Thomas chip.
Howard Spencer, English Heritage
Snubbed again. Months after FIFA granted Oceania an automatic place in the World Cup, they have reversed the decision. Matthew Hall writes from a very angry continent
After FIFA’s Oceania World Cup backflip, neither Sepp Blatter nor UEFA’s Lennart Johansson should consider taking holidays in the South Pacific for the next few years. The two Europeans would normally receive excellent hospitality from southern hemisphere hosts, but, as figurehead and architect of FIFA’s turnaround on Oceania’s direct entry to World Cup finals, those days are gone.
It was political arrogance nd clumsiness, not hooliganism, that cost England the chance to stage the 2006 World Cup, says Alan Tomlinson
Brussels is an engaging mix of the old and the new. At one end of Boulevard Adolphe Max, itself littered with seedy sex shops and chambres privées, lies Place de la Bourse, one of the gathering points in the city, and a focus for the riot police when fans were getting out of hand. At the other end is a concrete wasteland of ugly buildings, among which lies the Sheraton, a shrine to the glamour and opulence of postwar reconstruction.