2023-09-10 08:00:59
BarcelonaLess than 10 years ago, in 2017, the president of the Italian Football Federation, Carlo Tavecchio, was asked about the role of women in football. “They need to be dignified. Until recently everyone thought that women were a disabled subject compared to men in terms of endurance, time, athletic expression. Now we need to dignify and improve their image, also from a point from an aesthetic point of view”. And it stayed so wide. Tavecchio would resign in 2021 after the men’s national team failed to qualify for the World Cup in Qatar after years of scandals and disrespectful comments. His replacement, Gabriele Gravina, has so far not caused any fire when he speaks and his beginnings in football, when he married the daughter of the owner of a very small team, Castel di Sangro, have been half-forgotten. The father-in-law would put him on the board of the club of the smallest population that has become professional, in Italy. The money, apparently, came from the Mafia.
Sports federations have always been a space where people with little soul and little morals grow strong. Football federations, the most popular sport, too. The Rubiales case has served to elevate the debate beyond the events of Sydney, when the president of the Spanish Federation (RFEF) kissed Jenny Hermoso without her consent. Now the debate is about how football works. About who rules and how. “This is the most popular sport, the most loved. But it has been organized in a way that few people can command. People who know that they will have power and money, and they entrench themselves in positions,” explains the British journalist Johnny Wilson, who has investigated several cases of corruption in European football. State football federations always work the same. The presidents are elected in assemblies where the presidents of the regional federations have a vote, as well as the representatives of players, tournaments and disciplines. “Few votes to elect someone who commands a lot. A system of vertical patronage, where whoever is in charge takes care of those who vote for him,” explains Wilson. The result has been that it is difficult to find federations without corruption scandals. Cases of ethically reprehensible behavior are also normal, such as those of Rubiales or Tavecchio.
The man who buys his books
Tavecchio, a businessman who had been tried five times for tax evasion in the 1970s, worked his way up the ranks of Italian football by doing favors, betting on winning managers. When he was elected president of the FIGC in 2014, he defeated former player Demetrio Albertini, who wanted to renovate the structures. He didn’t make it. He opted for Tavecchio, who had been a member of the Christian Democracy, a right-wing party, and had become mayor of a small town near Como. In fact, he would enter football presiding over the local club, from where he would jump to presiding over the Italian Amateur Football Federation. His years in office serve to explain how many federations work: thanks to investments from UEFA, FIFA and television and advertising contracts, he was able to manage a large budget through which the local federations that voted for him received more money Tavecchio handed out charges and salaries while stoking fires, such as when he said of a black player who “ate bananas in Africa”, or when he said “I have nothing against the Jews, but it’s better to keep them at bay”. About homosexuals, he said: “Let them live their lives, but far away from me.” Tavecchio explains his worldview in a book titledI’ll tell you… the kickor (I explain football), of which the federation bought 20,000 copies.
In world football, a common pattern is repeated many times: the presidents of the federations are men who, if they were players, did not succeed much, like Rubiales. And if they were managers, they were in small clubs, such as Gravina at Castel di Sangro or the man who has controlled years and locks in the French federation, Noel Le Graët. Thanks to this Breton, Guingamp, a club with a population of less than 10,000 inhabitants, managed to win the Cup and play in Europe.
Complaints by workers against the president
Le Graët is the son of farmers. And with great effort he built a small trading empire, a food group that bought fish, seafood and produce from the Brittany countryside to sell in the cities. As in the case of Tavecchio, he also entered politics and was mayor of Guingamp from 1995 to 2008 with the Socialist Party of France. Being also president of the local club, which he took playing in the Seventh Division and promoted to First, he entered the French league as a manager. He gradually rose to become its president, from 1991 to 2000, and put in place a financial control plan to monitor club spending. In 2011 he would become president of the Federation, after years as vice president. A self-made man, he has always stood out for inappropriate comments. About the Paris Olympics he said he cared “a hell of a lot”. Of FIFA leaders sanctioned for corruption, such as Joseph Blatter, he said that “they are good people”.
What would cause the Breton’s downfall would, however, be masculinity and homophobia, as when in 2019 he justified the homophobic chants in the fields by saying that “homophobia in the stands is not the same as racism in the stadiums”. Le Graët would claim that “women’s football is improving, but I find the players unattractive” and would assure that touching a co-worker’s ass is not a serious matter. Indeed, I would. He would be removed from the position when it was known that he had received complaints of sexual harassment of female workers of the Federation. Le Graët sent sexually suggestive messages, made live comments about female workers’ physiques and used to arrive drunk at the offices. After a few months of instability, the Federation is now led by Philippe Diallo, a political science graduate son of a Senegalese boxer who came to football to coordinate the association of professional clubs. A young face to modernize French football.
“The players don’t like to be hit by the ball in certain parts”
Across the channel, the oldest federation in the world, the English FA, has also experienced similar cases. The FA, which until 1971 had a rule expressly banning women’s matches in stadiums where men also played, spent many years in the hands of Greg Clarke, who would resign in 2020 after being caught making sexist and racist comments . “Clarke had arrived to renew football and did nothing but perpetuate sexist and racist stereotypes. Despite leading an era to bring about improvements in women’s football, he continued to joke and protect the women’s national coach, Mark Sampson, when it became known that he had made racist comments,” explains Jonathan Wilson. Clarke, who had been in charge since 2016 and had become vice-president of FIFA, would claim in front of some politicians that “young players don’t like to be hit by the ball in certain places” and that if there are few players ‘Asian origin is because “they prefer other careers; if you go to the IT department of the Federation it is full of them, but there are few people of color,” he would say. The pranks ended up costing her the post and, determined to modernize a conservative organisation, the British elected a woman as president for the first time, Debbie Hewitt.
One of the few European states where they seem to have peace in the Football Federation is in Portugal, despite having a long history of corruption cases between club presidents and the league, with match-buying and administrative relegations. The Federation, however, seems stable enough. “It works well and, during this World Cup, when the national team made its debut in the final phase, there was a very good atmosphere. Maybe because Portugal has bet very late on women’s football, and, starting so late, things have been going well “says journalist Pedro Barata. “One of the few scandals was in 2021, when the coach of Rio Ave, Miguel Alfonso, was reported for abusive behavior. Despite this, he found a job at a powerful club in the women’s league, Famalicao, until the pressure of the players managed to get him suspended for three years”, adds Barata, who suspects that “having few cases of behavior like this in the bodies of power may mean that they happen and are not talked about, which is still scary to say”.
Five presidents in less than 15 years
Where it is not scary to speak is in Germany. It will now be a decade since an investigation forced the consecutive resignations of two DFB presidents, Wolfgang Niersbach and Theo Zwzinger, over their role in buying votes to bring the 2006 World Cup to Germany. It was a major scandal, as the Germans discovered that bribes had been paid to win the process to host the tournament. Reinhard Grindel, a former journalist and conservative politician who was in the federation because he had been manager of a modest club near Hamburg, Rotenburger SV, was to become president, but resigned in 2019 when it emerged that he had lied about his personal fortune, as well as for having received 78,000 euros before the start of the mandate, as a member of the supervisory board of a subsidiary of the DFB, which is illegal. In addition, he had accepted a watch worth more than 10,000 euros from a Ukrainian oligarch. Grindel, who had made some controversial comments about German players with Turkish roots, would leave through the back door. After so many complicated years, the federation seemed to find calm when Fritz Keller, a wine producer who presided over Freiburg, was elected as president, considered a model of good management. But Keller wasn’t the only one who wanted to rule. His vice president, Rainer Koch, was also ambitious, and the fights began. At an assembly, Keller lost his papers and claimed that Koch was a “Freisler”, referring to Roland Freisler, a Nazi judge known for his cruelty and for playing a key role in the Holocaust. when The mirror vto report the facts, Keller had to resign. In 15 years, they have seen five different presidents and a few female managers. Worse than Spain, almost.
If you look beyond the big European federations, the situation worsens, instead of improving. From positions close to undemocratic politicians, such as in Russia, to cases of corruption and typical attitudes of chiefs. In such important federations as Brazil or Argentina, cases of corruption, insults and cross interests have been frequent. Football attracts all kinds of people to the stadiums, but in the offices where it is sent the profiles are almost always the same.
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