Foul!

"Like a lot of sports, football has become incredibly more commercial over the past 30/40 years. This World Cup in South Africa is a world away from the World Cup in England in 1966. There were no sponsors, there were no official partners, no sponsored ball-boys, none of this. Football began to change in the 1970s and FIFA is now an incredibly rich and powerful body, but incredibly corrupt as well and, for all its talk about transparency, it’s actually one of the least transparent organisations in the world. Andrew Jennings is a top investigative journalist and has done all sorts of things that people would consider more serious, but he has really lifted the lid on how corrupt some parts of the modern-day game really are. He is the only journalist who has ever been banned from FIFA press conferences. Sepp Blatter absolutely hates him. Blatter has been the president of FIFA since 1998. Football is incredibly undemocratic. You get people who have been in power for years and years and years and they nobble their opponents so they get to carry on. No. And it’s our game. It’s not theirs. These men are making millions and millions of pounds out of our game and, at the same time, claiming that everything’s going back into the game and that they love football. They are getting incredibly rich out of the game. It’s one thing for Ronaldo to earn a quarter of a million pounds a week, though I do have a problem with that. But you can argue that he’s one of the best footballers in the world and he’s providing something and earning that money. But the people who run the game are getting lots of money that they really shouldn’t. We don’t know how much because, for example, Sepp Blatter refuses to reveal what his salary is. It’s supposed to be the people’s game. Yes, it matters. It’s about the game’s soul and these guys have sold that soul. And they are quite happy about that. Not really, no. Apart from shedding light on it, it’s very difficult to see what can be done about it. FIFA officials are elected by individual Football Association officials and they are often as corrupt as FIFA officials. The other problem is that a lot of football journalists would rather not get involved because if you start doing it you aren’t going to be able to cover the World Cup. It’s tricky, to say the least."