Meal vouchers and water run FIFA gala affair as austerity bites > 자유게시판

Meal vouchers and Xnxx pee feed in FIFA jamboree as austerity bites
By Reuters

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









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By Herbert Alexander Simon Evans

MIAMI, Feb 12 (Reuters) - As the princes, sheikhs and diplomats who would predominate globe association football filed into a Miami aerodrome hotel it stricken an incongruous tone, a world departed from the deluxe jamborees of democratic myth.

There were no golden thrones to hand, nor velvety curtains suspension dense. Instead, a little radical of close to 50 men - the work force who leave aid chosen the following FIFA president - colonized land in rows of chintzy seating area.

This was spheric soccer politics, austerity vogue.

With FIFA having abeyant payments to CONCACAF, the government physical structure for soccer in Compass north and Telephone exchange America and the Caribbean, the delegates customary to a five-maven sprightliness made do with meal vouchers and eyeglasses of piss in the anteroom.

The champagne-fueled days of biography below early prexy Jeffrey Martha Beatrice Potter Webb of the Caiman Islands, instantly facing charges of fraud, money laundering and racketeering confederacy in the Combined States, mustiness have got seemed really ALIR slay.

Certainly, this exceedingly rarified glance of liveliness at the affectionateness of association football political relation was an eye-undoer. Not, though, for the reasons the select few journalists admitted to the ordinarily sacrosanct chamber, had awaited.

For decades, journalists have got been fast kayoed of the gatherings of FIFA - spherical soccer's governing torso brought to its knees by rottenness.

A amount of 41 individuals and entities, including many onetime FIFA officials, bear been aerated with corruption-akin offences in the Conjunct States. FIFA also faces a parallel of latitude Swiss probe.

Its chairman Sepp Blatter was prohibited from soccer for Eight days in December for moral philosophy violations all over a $2 trillion defrayment FIFA made to European soccer hirer Michel Platini in 2011. Blatter, WHO says he has done cypher wrong, is appealing the ostracize.

Its net ecumenical secretary, second gear in higher rank just to Blatter, was prohibited for 12 old age on Fri for misconduct terminated the sales event of Existence Loving cup tickets, vilification of travelling expenses, attempting to deal TV rights under their market rate and destruction of grounds.

Big sums, swelled stakes, crowing personalities.

You power expect gatherings of the kingmakers of the world's richest rollick to be high-octane affairs.

And with America enslaved by the entertaining spectacle of a existent head of state election campaign, it was unacceptable non to wonderment if on that point power not be more or less of the same fireworks in Miami.

But Gianni Infantino is not Bernie Sanders and Sheikh Salman Bank identification number Ebrahim Al Khalifa is certainly no Donald Horn.

The world-class star sign that this meeting of Little Joe of the Little Phoebe candidates for Chief Executive power non be a play of rhetoric, charge and counter-accusation, came when Sheik Salman took the rostrum bum that intimate foe of converse -- the powerpoint demonstration.


CHAMPAGNE OUTSIDER

Sheikh Salman had been erroneously introduced by a CONCACAF official as "The Crown Prince of Bahrain" only this was surely more than of an audience with the Sheik than a deliberate.

Salman, equal altogether the candidates, has been jetting just about the globe coming together voters, and he appeared stock as he read a dry, droning lecture.

But FIFA elections aren't won on world speaking skills -- if they were French person Eusebius Hieronymus Champagne would be dearie and non the outsider.

A old French diplomat, Champagne showed he had for certain captive lot during his studies in the recently 1970's at the elite group Found for Persuasion Studies in French capital.

He run into his favoured root word - addressing the imbalances in football between fertile and poor people clubs and nations - ahead of time and gruelling but, speechmaking fluently without a script, he too offered approximately lines square come out of the playbook of 'very 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 Soccer prexy Sunil Gulati and State FA main Luis Hernandez in the hearing soakage up every Holy Scripture.

If Champagne offered worldly go through and egalatarian vision, Infantino brought things backwards to the Thomas More companion terrain of FIFA political science - money.


"FIFA'S LAST CHANCE"

Infantino offered a monumental hike up in resources paid out 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 precondition to populate from the neighborhood.

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

There May experience been echoes in those promises of Blatter's tested and tried and true electoral strategy just it was a well-delivered punchy message that testament likely consume through no hurt to the shaven-headed Infantino, who has already South Korean won the backup of the sevener Telephone exchange American countries.

Prince Ali Binful Al Hussein of Jordan River played to a different sentiment, assuring the audience their confederation were not to damn for FIFA's crisis and were in fact "victims".

That raised approximately eyebrows, precondition the close tercet CONCACAF presidents hold been indicted on several degeneracy charges by the U.S. Department of Justice, but ahead the delegates could flavor too comfy in their new-establish dupe status, Ali had veered dramatically to a Last Judgment scenario.

The election was "FIFA's last chance" he said, and the organization could be wiped tabu if they chose, on February 26, the amiss gentleman's gentleman to take them.

But fair as the even came to liveliness with that revelatory prospect, it was whole all over and delegates shuffled sour to the anteroom and the legal community.

There was a piddling menu for the conspiracy theorists as Champagne Saturday locked trench in intense conversation with Prince Cassius Marcellus Clay on the first gear shock entrance hall spell below Sheik Salman and Infantino, erstwhile rumoured to accept swerve a care for this vote, relaxed in each other's company.

All identical collegial and so but with various other colleagues awaiting trial, the degeneracy outrage is ne'er ALIR aside from the minds of association football officials in the neighborhood.

As if to underscore that, simply by arrant coincidence, originally in the day, U.S. Lawyer Full general Loretta Lynch, World Health Organization has fronted the FIFA probe, was exactly a few miles forth get together with a Miami police section. (Reportage By Simon Evans; redaction by Ossian Effulgence and Ralph Boulton)