“The ball doesn't get stained”, cried the linguist Diego Armando Maradona in one of his famous phrases. But boy does it get dirty. She is usually muddy. And not in the fields, where drainage and climate change have helped to make those images of soccer players with mud up to their teeth and playing fields more brown than green. The ball gets stained and the man Maradona stained it a lot (not so much the player), but above all it is in the offices where the football business has become a fishing ground for sharks waiting for any bite. A sector where ethics is scarce and where corrupt or directly embarrassing behaviors occur, such as those recently carried out by Luis Rubiales, provisionally suspended by FIFA as president of the Spanish Federation.
A FIFA that has lived through stormy modern times, with the awarding of the World Cups to Russia and Qatar, with all the goings-on that took place around it and with the tumultuous departure of the organization of two characters from the entity of the former president of the same, Joseph Blatter, and the former top manager of UEFA, Michel Platini.
But these shadows in the Big House of world football are also a reflection of what has been happening in many of its satellites, read in different federations. And not only in countries that may be picturesque or less traditional on the soccer planet, but also in places of the supposed first world, as the editor of Panenka magazine, Aitor Lagunas, underlined this week.
From Germany to Italy, passing through Spain, France, Greece or other European countries, all have had controversial cases within their federations.
Germany always seems like a model of organization, serious and rigorous. Its football, especially the Bundesliga, is an envy in terms of schedules, prices and public attendance. However, the last four presidents of the German federation had to leave office early for different reasons. All four resigned. The last of them, Fritz Keller, submitted his resignation in May 2021, almost a month after he compared one of his vice presidents to a Nazi-era judge. His apologies were useless, they mounted an internal motion of censure and before being expelled he left. Nor did his predecessor, Reinhard Grindel, who resigned after accepting a luxury watch from an oligarch amid suspicions of irregular management, have a decent end. The two previous German presidents, Wolfgang Niersbach and Theo Zwanziger, left the forum amid serious accusations of corruption in the great cake of the German bid for the 2006 World Cup.
More recent is the scandal that occurred in France with the president of the FFF, Noël Le Graët, in the eye of the hurricane due to accusations of sexual harassment. The leader resigned in February of this year. He left two weeks after the results of a devastating audit commissioned by French Sports Minister Amélie Oudéa-Castéra were published. The report questioned the centralist management and, above all, the completely inappropriate behavior of the federation president towards women. The Paris prosecutor's office also began to investigate him for sexual and moral harassment. Among those who denounced his behavior was the federation's general director, Florence Hardouin. Aged 81, Le Graët was in his fourth term. Shortly after, the president of FIFA, Gianni Infantino, offered him the position of director of the office of this organization in Paris.
Nor does Italy escape controversy in contemporary times. Without a doubt, among the most recent presidents of the Federazione Italiana Giuoco Calcio (FIGC), the most controversial was Carlo Tavecchio, who died in January.
In 2014 he was elected president of the Italian federation in an election in which he defeated former Barça footballer Demetrio Albertini. Tavecchio won the elections despite unpresentable statements of racist overtones. “England studies whether the footballers who arrive in the country meet the professionalism necessary to play. Here, on the other hand, comes a certain Opti Poba (name invented for a hypothetical African footballer) who used to eat bananas and now plays as a starter for Lazio”. Between 1970 and 1998 he had been convicted five times for corruption, tax evasion and abuse of power. As president of Italian soccer he was also accused of having the federation buy a total of 20,000 copies of his own book.
The cradle of football, England, is not spared from controversy among its leaders. Thus the president of the FA, Gregg Clarke, resigned in November 2020, after branding black players in a parliamentary committee of colored footballers, an offensive term in the United Kingdom. It was not the only sentence from him that was out of place, since he also commented that the players do not like to receive balls.
In countries with less soccer pedigree, the case of Greece stands out, always very busy at the level of leaders. In the 21st century there have been seven presidents of the Hellenic federation who resigned and FIFA had to take direct control of the organization for some time. The ball is not stained. It's that it's very dirty.
