Fifa fallout may lead to pariah status and hit home nations in pocket

Posted Friday, June 03, 2011 by theguardian.com

• That's the threat, says Northern Ireland's Jim Boyce
• FA may look to strengthen ties with Uefa

FA chairman David Bernstein, right, and general secretary Alex Horne, have not been received well by Fifa.

In his moment of triumph after a Fifa presidential election that was more Pyongyang rally than democratic process, Sepp Blatter played the benign, gracious leader. "There's no bad feeling with any of the associations that didn't vote for me," he said. "You [English] should not worry."

David Bernstein would be well advised not to believe a word of it. The Football Association chairman was the sole dissenter to raise his head above the lectern at the Fifa congress on Wednesday in an attempt to push back the date of the presidential election and find a challenger. President Blatter is unused to challenges.

After Bernstein's speech, one of Blatter's closest allies, Fifa's Argentinian senior vice-president, Julio Grondona, launched a vicious attack on England when he should have been talking about Fifa's 2010 financial report. His bile is even set to spill over to the football pitch: talks that had been aimed at making Argentina England's opposition at the FA's 150th anniversary celebration at Wembley in 2013 look set to be broken off by a furiousBernstein.

Alex Horne, who as the general secretary heads the FA's administration, said after the election he does not crave Fifa's love, considering Uefa a more worthwhile partner. With a £290m bank loan, the FA's focus is understandably drawn to Nyon, not Zurich, because it is from there that the money flows through Uefa's plans to centralise sponsorship and broadcasting rights.

But Horne was not being entirely faithful to recent internal FA discussions. Following a meeting of the FA board on 21 April, Bernstein told FA councillors of a strategic review of England's international engagement. "[We] aim to put ourselves in a position where we are best able to protect and promote the objectives of the FA and English football," Bernstein wrote. "We considered an assessment of our representation in various Uefa and Fifa committees and agreed that we needed the right level of representation in the right places working to an agreed, consistent and coordinated FA agenda."

That will be harder now since it is through Fifa committees that Blatter tends to apply the squeeze on English dissidence. After Adam Crozier, the Scot who then ran the FA, described Blatter's whitewash of criticisms during the 2002 congress as "an absolute disgrace", England lost influence, with seats on Fifa committees culled. Today there are 36 committees and discussions in 24 of them take place without an English accent. (And in two of those where there is English representation, it is solely through the former FA chairman, Geoff Thompson. His silence in the face of Grondona's onslaught has led the FA to believe it would be entirely futile to attempt to use him as a channel of communication.)

So although three major Fifa committees are currently being restructured, with possibly more than 30 places up for grabs on the organising committees for the World Cup and the Confederations Cup as well as at the 2014 World Cup bureau, it is hard to envisage any seats being occupied by Englishmen or women now.

The FA's biggest fear should be that their pariah status may lead to the Home Unions losing their right to a permanent seat on Fifa's ruling executive committee. Much rests with the diplomacy of Northern Ireland's Jim Boyce, to whom Thompson handed over the post on Wednesday. "Obviously the British associations are concerned that following those remarks someone may try to take the issue to a future Fifa congress," Boyce said. "That's the threat and I hope it doesn't materialise but we should be aware of it."

Already rock bottom after the FA's £15m England 2018 humiliation, which yielded a single non-English vote, few expect England's standing in world football not to suffer as a result of Bernstein's boldness. Uefa held a meeting of its 53 members on the morning of the uncontested presidential election and urged the FA not to proceed with its protest. Bernstein ignored the pleas.

It is conceivable that Bernstein's resistance may have some financial as well as political impact. It is hard to see Spain's Angel María Villar Llona – whose rambling speech on Wednesday also angrily denounced English attacks on Fifa – pushing for his world champions to replace Argentina at that 2013 friendly. However, it is likely most other nations would realise that playing England play well at the box office, accepting a friendly fixture in their own financial interest.

Bernstein's principled stand changed nothing at Fifa, certainly. But with the next three World Cup hosts decided and the fourth likely to be in China, his risk analysis would have concluded that international ambitions are secondary to his own domestic agenda. Bernstein intends to persuade reactionary FA shareholders to accept reforms after decades of inertia. After they witnessed his eloquence, decency and courage before a hostile audience in Zurich on Wednesday, rather fewer may stand in his way.