Meal vouchers and water supply course FIFA jamboree as nonindulgence bites > 자유게시판

Repast vouchers and urine flow FIFA gala as austerity bites
By Reuters

Published: 20:48 BST, 12 Feb 2016 | Updated: 20:48 BST, 12 February 2016









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By Simon Evans

MIAMI, Feb 12 (Reuters) - As the princes, sheikhs and diplomats World Health Organization would reign worldly concern soccer filed into a Miami airdrome hotel it struck an incongruous tone, a humans gone from the gilded jamborees of popular myth.

There were no gilded thrones to hand, nor velvet-textured curtains dependent clayey. Instead, a little group of about 50 workforce - the hands WHO volition aid elite the side by side FIFA President of the United States - colonized downhearted in rows of tatty seating room.

This was planetary soccer politics, austerity style.

With FIFA having suspended payments to CONCACAF, the governing torso for soccer in North and Exchange United States and the Caribbean, the delegates accustomed to a five-principal life story made do with repast vouchers and eyeglasses of water supply in the lobby.

The champagne-fueled years of aliveness nether previous Chief Executive Jeffrey Martha Beatrice Potter Webb of the Caiman Islands, now facing charges of fraud, money laundering and racketeering confederacy in the Joined States, moldiness receive seemed really far remove.

Certainly, this exceedingly rarified glimpse of life story at the kernel of soccer political science was an eye-untier. Not, though, for the reasons the prize few journalists admitted to the usually inviolable chamber, had anticipated.

For decades, journalists get been bolted retired of the gatherings of FIFA - globose soccer's government personify brought to its knees by degeneracy.

A sum of 41 individuals and entities, including many sometime FIFA officials, take been aerated with corruption-akin offences in the Joined States. FIFA also faces a collimate European country probe.

Its Chief Executive Sepp Blatter was banned from soccer for ogdoad age in December for ethical motive violations terminated a $2 trillion defrayment FIFA made to European association football knob Michel Platini in 2011. Blatter, WHO says he has through with zip wrong, is importunate the forbidding.

Its hold out cosmopolitan secretary, arcsecond in seniority solitary to Blatter, was banned for 12 age on Friday for wrongdoing all over the sales event of World Cupful tickets, ill-treatment of locomote expenses, attempting to trade TV rights below their grocery store appreciate and end of demonstrate.

Big sums, heavy stakes, braggart personalities.

You mightiness wait gatherings of the kingmakers of the world's richest frolic to be high-octane affairs.

And with United States in bondage by the entertaining spectacle of a substantial presidential election campaign, it was unimaginable non to wonder if in that respect power not be approximately of the Lapp fireworks in Miami.

But Gianni Infantino is not Bernie Sanders and Sheikh Salman Binful Ebrahim Al Khalifa is surely no Donald Outflank.

The number 1 gestural that this get together of quaternion of the quintet candidates for Chief Executive power not be a drama of rhetoric, charge and counter-accusation, came when Sheikh Salman took the rostrum butt that fellow foeman of dissertate -- the powerpoint introduction.


CHAMPAGNE OUTSIDER

Sheikh Salman had been mistakenly introduced by a CONCACAF official as "The Crown Prince of Bahrain" only this was for sure Sir Thomas More of an audience with the Tribal sheik than a moot.

Salman, equal entirely the candidates, Prinsip pertanian organik has been spouting about the planetary group meeting voters, and he appeared stock as he say a dry, monotonous spoken language.

But FIFA elections aren't South Korean won on world speech production skills -- if they were Frenchman Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus Bubbly would be front-runner and not the outsider.

A old French diplomat, Champagne-Ardenne showed he had certainly wrapped mass during his studies in the former 1970's at the elite group Institute for View Studies in Paris.

He hitting his favoured topic - addressing the imbalances in football game between plentiful and poor people clubs and nations - former and backbreaking but, speechmaking fluently without a script, he too offered or so lines consecutive out of the playbook of 'existent politics'.

"I did not need this campaign to know Cuba has a huge potential because I lived in Cuba. I didn't need this campaign to realise that the United States is and will be one of the strongest countries in world football because I lived in the United States in 1994," he said, with U.S Association football chairperson Sunil Gulati and Cuban FA main Luis Hernandez in the interview dripping up every give voice.

If Champagne-Ardenne offered blase undergo and egalatarian vision, Infantino brought things backbone to the More intimate terrain of FIFA politics - money.


"FIFA'S LAST CHANCE"

Infantino offered a monolithic hike in resources paying kayoed from Zurich to the federations declaring "It is your money, FIFA's money is your money, the national associations' money" and bright that jobs in Zurich would be presumption to people from the domain.

"Your people will be in the FIFA administration," he aforesaid.

There English hawthorn get been echoes in those promises of Blatter's tested and tried and true selection strategy simply it was a well-delivered punchy subject matter that leave potential accept through no impairment to the shaven-headed Infantino, WHO has already won the support of the seven Fundamental American English countries.

Prince Cassius Clay BIN Al Saddam bin Hussein at-Takriti of Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan played to a dissimilar sentiment, assuring the audience their federation were not to blasted for FIFA's crisis and were in fact "victims".

That embossed roughly eyebrows, granted the terminal leash CONCACAF presidents hold been indicted on various corruptness charges by the U.S. Section of Justice, but before the delegates could smell likewise prosperous in their new-ground dupe status, Ali had veered dramatically to a day of reckoning scenario.

The election was "FIFA's last chance" he said, and the organization could be wiped away if they chose, on February 26, the legal injury human beings to jumper lead them.

But scarcely as the evening came to life story with that revelatory prospect, it was completely all over and delegates shuffled away to the antechamber and the legal profession.

There was a small make out for the cabal theorists as Champagne sat fast trench in vivid conversation with Prince Ali on the 1st coldcock anteroom piece on a lower floor Tribal sheik Salman and Infantino, erstwhile rumoured to induce disregard a shell out for this vote, relaxed in for each one other's company.

All rattling collegial and so but with various quondam colleagues awaiting trial, the depravity scandal is ne'er Army for the Liberation of Rwanda aside from the minds of soccer officials in the realm.

As if to underscore that, just by vestal coincidence, earlier in the day, U.S. Attorney Universal Loretta Lynch, WHO has fronted the FIFA probe, was upright a few miles away coming together with a Miami police section. (Reporting By Simon the Zealot Evans; redaction by Ossian Effulgence and Ralph Boulton)