“I’LL tell you a true story,” says Jim Boyce, former vice-president of Fifa.

Given the public perception of football’s governing body, perhaps his association with it prompted the emphasis on his credibility, even though his own integrity has rarely been in question throughout his long administrative career.

“The week before I finished at Fifa, I met the president [Sepp Blatter].

“I said to him, ‘President, in my opinion, there are a lot of people in this organisation who should have been booted out of it years ago. In fact, they shouldn’t have been allowed through the door.’

“And he said to me, ‘Perhaps, you’re right’. I thought, enough said.”

Fifa, despite Boyce legitimately pointing out that the organisation has done a lot of good in the past, and continues to do so, has become a byword for corruption. The World Cup in Qatar is therefore the ultimate showcase of where their greed and malfeasance has led football - to the gutter, via the desert.

The story of how the game’s governing body descended into arguably the most widely reviled sporting organisation in the world - only LIV Golf, perhaps, may have a competing claim – is complex, and so too is Blatter, the man who led Fifa during that descent.

Blatter would dispute his role in much of the problems Fifa has faced. The suppression of the Garcia Report – an independent investigation by respected American lawyer Michael Garcia into the awards of the 2014 and 2018 World Cups to Russia and Qatar – was the decision of judge Hans Joachim-Eckert, chairman of the Fifa ethics committee’s adjudication chamber, after all.

Blatter himself didn’t even want the World Cup to go to Qatar in the first place, recently branding the decision as ‘a mistake’. The ubiquitous photo of him announcing Qatar as the winning bid as he pulled their name from an envelope, was, he says, delivered through gritted teeth.

Most importantly, when seven officials were infamously arrested on corruption charges as they prepared to attend Fifa’s Congress at Zurich’s Hotel Bar au Lac in May 2015, Blatter was not among them.

If Blatter himself cannot be directly accused of corrupt actions though, with no charges ever brought against him, then his inaction on corruption can certainly be cited as a contributory factor in Fifa’s downfall. That inaction is inextricably linked to where Fifa, and football, now finds itself.

For Boyce, who served under Blatter as vice-president from 2011 to 2015, the former president’s willingness to turn a blind eye to what was going on within the organisation – or perhaps his personal ambition clouding his view of it – is a personal frustration.

The votes that would preserve Blatter’s place as head of Fifa, ultimately meant more to him than any desire to protect its integrity, and its reputation.

“Sepp Blatter’s life – his life – was Fifa,” Boyce said.

“He did an awful lot of good things. But Sepp wanted to be president of Fifa. That was his big aim. He wanted to continue doing it even when I finished in 2015, he was standing again at 81 years of age.

“There is no doubt in my mind though that the problems in Fifa arose from not getting rid of these people [who were involved in corruption] a lot sooner than they ultimately did.

“A lot of these people from the various confederations, it wasn’t Sepp Blatter who nominated them. They were sent by CONCACAF or whoever, as I was by the British, which was a great honour for me.

“He would argue to me, ‘Jim, I didn’t choose these people, they were given to me’. But at the end of the day - and I said this to him - as president of the organisation, he should have removed these people.

“But these guys were the people who controlled the voting rights for these confederations. Do you understand what I mean?

“My understanding is that Jack Warner [disgraced former Fifa vice-president and former president of CONCACAF] controlled something like 38 votes for the Fifa presidency. He wasn’t the only one, there were others, but these people controlled the vote. Therefore, in my opinion, yes, a blind eye was turned where it shouldn’t have been.

“You can’t say Sepp personally has been involved in any impropriety, because it has never been proven that he has been.

“Personally, in my dealings with Sepp, I didn’t have a problem with him. I was never involved in any of these major controversies with him, but I was also never afraid to speak out and to speak openly if things needed to be said at Fifa.

“I’ll give you one example. I was on the disciplinary committee at Fifa, long before I became an executive. At the World Cup in Germany in 2006, Jack Warner was caught red-handed selling tickets on the black market. His sons were involved and everything.

“I’m told he got a slap on the wrist, fined $10,000 or whatever the hell it was, and that was the end of it. That man should have been out. It’s only one of them, but certainly he should have been dismissed, there is absolutely no question about that.

“Sadly, I think Sepp will be remembered as someone who was president of an organisation who had many members – not them all, there are a lot of good people at Fifa and I knew many of them – but an organisation who had many members who were corrupt. It’s as simple as that.”

The Herald: Former Fifa vice-president Jim Boyce says that Sepp Blatter should have been stronger in dealing with corruption.Former Fifa vice-president Jim Boyce says that Sepp Blatter should have been stronger in dealing with corruption. (Image: PA)

 

Blatter’s fifth term as Fifa president was brought to an end over a payment of 2m Swiss Francs made to then UEFA president Michel Platini in 2011, a transaction which both men still insist was back pay for work the French icon had carried out for Fifa.

Ironically, Blatter subsequently blamed Platini for the World Cup being awarded to Qatar, saying that the votes he withheld from the USA bid after an infamous lunch with French president Nicolas Sarkozy and the emir of Qatar was the driving force behind the award.

For Boyce though, the prospect of the World Cup going to Qatar should never have gotten as far as a vote, arguing that their human rights record should have automatically disqualified them from hosting the tournament in the first place.

“I’m not sure that the issue of human rights has been addressed,” he said.

“The various controversies that we’ve had since the tournament started for instance, where players have been wanting to wear rainbow armbands and things like that, my own personal opinion is that all of that should have been addressed before the tournament got underway.

“Going back to my time at Fifa, I was a very outspoken critic about what happened regarding the awarding of the World Cup to Russia and Qatar.

“As things went on, there were obviously various discussions going on between the hierarchy of Fifa and the hierarchy of Qatar about what was going to happen once it was decided the World Cup was going to be held there. But I think there are still many, many issues that haven’t been addressed.

“There are various reports about how many migrant workers - who were paid a paltry salary - have tragically lost their lives in the building of the stadiums. I don’t think we’ll ever get to the bottom of it and find out just how many of them did lose their lives, but one is one too many, in my opinion.”

The quashing of dissent by Fifa in threatening players who do wish to protest around such matters is also a bad look for the organisation, in Boyce’s view.

“In my humble opinion, absolutely,” he said. “There are a lot of people who say that the players should have defied Fifa and worn the armband, but it’s a World Cup. They want to try to bring the World Cup back to their respective countries.

“I think they were frightened by Fifa. If you take Gareth Bale, for instance, if he had worn the armband in Wales’s first match against the USA and had been booked, he was later booked in the game, so he would have been sent off and would have missed their next game.

“So, I think it was a very, very difficult decision for those countries to make, and quite honestly, I can’t judge them on whether they made the right or the wrong decision. That is entirely a matter for them.

“But it should never have come to that. The issue should have been addressed before the tournament started.

“The whole Fifa message is about inclusivity! My own personal opinion, and this goes for any sporting organisation, not just Fifa, to take a major event to countries where there are issues over human rights, I don’t think they should be awarded it until all of those human rights issues are cleared up and we are satisfied that they don’t exist.

“The world is united in this, and organisations have to be very careful where they award such events, so that the things that are happening in Qatar can’t happen somewhere else.

“It’s not just football, any major sporting organisation have to look carefully at it. It’s Fifa that are getting all the bad publicity at the minute, but there are other major sporting organisations that have done very similar things, and there hasn’t been that publicity.

“In saying that, football is the biggest thing in the world, and the World Cup is the biggest thing in football.”

So, what now for the future of Fifa? In his previous life, Boyce knew current president Gianni Infantino well, and found him to be a ‘first-class individual’.

“I was more than a little surprised by his speech before the World Cup, mind you,” Boyce admitted, in reference to Infantino’s sprawling ‘Today, I feel gay’ diatribe against Qatar’s critics.

For all that he rates Infantino as a person and a president, Boyce concedes he has a heck of a job on his hands to shift the perceptions of Fifa which have now taken hold, and to waft away the stench of corruption that now clings to it.

“As a person, I can only speak for someone that I knew, and I personally found him to be a very upright individual at the time I had dealings with him,” he said.

“I don’t think he can be accused of being part of what you might call the old guard, there are very few of them, if any, left.

“In the eyes of the public though, and in the perception of football supporters, because of the things that were allowed to happen - the Russian situation and the Qatar situation, these people being arrested and being found to be corrupt - it’s going to take a long, long time for Fifa to overcome the damage done by those individuals.

“I know though because I was involved that there is a lot of good work done by many people at Fifa. There are a lot of children throughout the world at the moment who wouldn’t have the benefit of the facilities they have without the money that has been put in by Fifa.

“It’s a shame that will all now be overlooked.”

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