Jens Sejer Andersen on FIFA ISL Case

Writing at Play the Game, Jens Sejer Andersen has an extremely hard-hitting appraisal of the significance of the dossier released yesterday by a Swiss court on the FIFA-ISL bribery case. Here is an excerpt:

Play the Game has consistently argued that a fight against corruption in sport should not focus on persons, but on structures and systems. This position is no longer tenable.
So FIFA does have a range of inconvenient questions to answer, and so do other sports organisations including the International Olympic Committee:

• Can FIFA be governed by a person who knowingly and over many years has allowed tangible values to disappear in a massive, carefully orchestrated system of corruption?
• Can FIFA have an honorary, life-time president whose greed and bribe-taking is now established by court documents?
• Can FIFA live with the fact that more than 100 million Swiss Francs paid out as bribes from its closest business partners are not accounted for, or will FIFA open its archives and the memories of its chief officials and be honest about the past?
• Can other sports federations with business relations to ISL, like ATP in tennis, IAAF in athletics, FINA in swimming and FIBA in basketball, accept that some of their present leaders may have been part of this corruption system?
• Can the IOC tolerate that Blatter has flagrantly violated its code of ethics, or should he be shown the back door like Havelange?

Read the whole thing here.

A further comment: I have seen nothing in the media from any of the members of the FIFA Independent Governance Committee chaired by Mark Pieth. Of course, I may have missed something. However, given the magnitude of the revelations, a sustained silence from this group would speak volumes.