Eva Bradley: Small step from boardroom to slammer

Eva Bradley

What's a really naughty four-letter word starting with "f" that you should never use in polite company?

Fifa - once the ultimate old boy's club and reeking of entrenched power and prestige - is now the poster child for an institution fallen from grace.

In fact, as far as institutions go, it is not much further up the pecking order than the sort that sports large locks, thick bars and razor wire.

This should make it a rather smooth transition when vast swathes of Fifa executives eventually move from the boardroom to the slammer.

It may be many years before that happens and, in that time, an army of lawyers will have got fat from the trough that always seems to accompany any combination of high-level corporate scandal and the pursuit of justice.

Although,it may prove hard to recover the millions alleged to have disappeared into the back pockets of Fifa execs, we can take comfort knowing that weighty wads of it will at least be shifted from their purse into the large hands of their team of legal counsel.

Fifa nets around $1.3 billion annually. Presumably those who run the organisation shave off a healthy share of this in above-the-board payments for services rendered. Greed and its evil spawn, corruption, is one of humanity's most ugly characteristics and, sadly, is often found among those who would still be parking the Ferrari in front of the ocean-side mansion, even if they played by the rules.

But I digress.

Before I devoted a few hundred words to Fifa by way of intro, I intended to cut straight to the question that is foremost in my mind over this issue and that is ... how much do we really care about this?

Personally I am not a football follower, preferring instead to focus my limited sport-related attention span on our "national game", rugby.

But I do understand that for many, football is like a religion and the corruption scandal might be to them like finding out Jesus and his disciples have been pinching pennies from the collection plate. It is just that I didn't think the same people who felt this way about football were also the sort inclined to tune in and watch the 6pm news (and every other bulletin, newsfeed, front page, back page and every other page in between). With the exception of that other highly significant news item, ("Caitlyn" Jenner's gender reinvention) the Fifa story is dominating world headlines this week and while I don't deny its merits, I can't help but question the continuing prominence of it.

When I ran this thought past my husband (sorry, I simply had to slip that word in) he energetically assured me that the story was absolutely as big as it was being made out to be. And this from a man who has no interest in football.

But although many hundreds of millions are in question, I couldn't help but wonder if this really is the world's biggest corruption scandal, or just the most glamorous. Without doubt, palms are greased globally with much larger amounts and with money sucked from the souls of the poor in politically unstable nations, instead of from big-budget sponsors who can afford to misplace a penny or two (hundred million).

-Eva Bradley is a columnist and photographer.