Sepp Blatter’s gone – are FIFA’s troubles over?
With FIFA’s president of 17 years Sepp Blatter quitting overnight amid an ongoing corruption scandal Andrew Woodward says the organisation still has to address reputational issues.
Last night (Tuesday) Sydney time, I spent 45 minutes on the phone with a journalist from Reuters in Berlin discussing the FIFA and sponsors issue.
I awoke this morning at 5.30 Sydney time and by habit reached for the iPhone as I always do. There was an email from her asking “What’s your reaction to Blatter’s resignation?”. After checking that I wasn’t dreaming, I sent her a two word response “problem solved”.
It is simple as that.
Third article from Woodward in four days? Getting a bit lazy with the op-eds, Mumbrella.
Hi sub,
While we wouldn’t normally run something from the same person quite so frequently it’s been an interesting and evolving story which Andrew has been adding an interesting perspective to from a very relevant standpoint for our readers.
Cheers,
Alex – editor, Mumbrella
Maybe Mr Woodward is trying to justify his incredibly cynical “The people don’t care about corruption” in his last article. The people do care, ethics does matter and that’s why Blatter resigned. Doh!
As for his interesting, but impractical, prediction that Qatar will not proceed. No way! Sadly, as long as Sep hangs around FIFA will not have the guts to take it away from one of their small country members, their power base – where the votes are.
Last week, and again earlier this week, Woodward insisted that the public doesn’t care about corruption in FIFA.
Today he says that public pressure was one of the reasons why Blatter resigned, and that now the public and media “have, quite rightly, got their scalp”.
I find these two positions hard to reconcile.
Blatter got 133 votes….so there are clearly people in FIFA who think he is good for the organisation…they have to go next because they cannot be trusted to think for the “greater good of the game”.
Before the arrests in Switzerland it was reported that Lowy / FFA were going to vote for Blatter as they had in the past and in line with the Asian Group. Then when the vote took place post FBI bust Lowy takes the moral high ground and announces that they had voted against Blatter (implying that they had intended this all along).
When is the media going to call out Lowy and the FFA on this?