by Heidi Blake
So who did pay for the dinner? Samson’s company, with its share capital of just £4,000, could never have afforded it, especially as the tickets were free and there was no visible sponsor. Samson’s lawyer, Magerle, said the meeting with the Qatar bid officials in London had never gone ahead because the deal had fallen through for reasons which were unknown to him. He had aborted the plan to set up a Swiss association and did not know how the dinner was financed, but assumed his client had found some other source of ready money.
A prominent African journalist had been approached by Amos Adamu in March to ask for help identifying legendary footballers to honour at his son’s dinner. The journalist said he was later told by Samson that the event was being paid for by ‘friends in Qatar’. Was this so? If so, which Qatari individual or organisation had picked up the tab dropped by the 2022 bid? Samson also brought in a friend called Nadia Mihindou to help him with arrangements for the dinner. She believed the event was being paid for with ‘private funds’ arranged by Samson, but would not say exactly where the money had come from. When told that her friend had been all set to receive $1 million from backers in the Gulf state, she responded incredulously. ‘If that dinner had cost a million dollars, I think I would have known about it.’
The funding of the African Legends Dinner would remain shrouded in mystery. It was not so much a whodunit as a whopaidit. Two years later, when The Sunday Times published documents exposing Qatar’s $1 million offer to the son of a voter to host the event, Samson’s little deal with the Qatar bid would spark the biggest internal ethics investigation FIFA has ever undertaken. But the puzzle remains unsolved.
Eight
My Enemy’s Enemy
South Africa was braced. The greatest sporting show on earth was about to arrive in Johannesburg, and the whole world was watching. The red-and-gold mosaic cauldron of the Soccer City stadium, built specially for the event, stood empty in an expectant hush as the vuvuzela sellers unloaded their crates on the streets outside. Troops of drummers, dancers and musicians practised their performances for the opening ceremony, while at training camps around the country the world’s football superstars were limbering up for the greatest challenge of their careers.
It was this single month every four years that gave FIFA its true power and purpose: four heady weeks in which the entire planet would be whipped into transports of patriotic fervour and united by the universal language of the glorious game. That pass; that move; that tackle; that save; the painted faces chanting in the crowd; the short roar of delight spiked by instant dismay as the ball hurtles goalwards but glances off the post. The agony and the ecstasy of football. There could only be one winner because there was only one World Cup. Now it had arrived in Africa.
Mohamed bin Hammam knew just how critical this moment was for his own campaign. It would bring together the 24 members on FIFA’s executive committee six months ahead of the secret ballot to decide the hosts of the 2018 and 2022 tournaments. All nine bidding countries would be there, jostling fiercely to win their votes. The official Qatar 2022 bid committee was paying Najeeb Chirakal to handle all the logistics of their own stay in South Africa, while at the same time he co-ordinated Bin Hammam’s movements during the trip. The committee would be there in force, led by Sheikh Mohammed, to press the flesh and promote their campaign at all the glittering events going on around the tournament. While Qatar’s figureheads shone brightly in the public eye, Bin Hammam would be executing big plans of his own in the backstage shadows.
The Qatari football grandee and his entourage flew into Johannesburg days ahead of the kick-off on 11 June. He was accompanied, as he so often was, by Jenny Be and the trusty Mohammed Meshadi. Even Chirakal came along for this trip. Bin Hammam’s bespectacled lieutenant was a home bird who was rarely spotted outside Doha, but the chance to see the world’s greatest tournament was too good to miss even for him. The three aides were good friends, and they made a merry party. Be joked that her male companions looked like Asia’s answer to Men in Black as they reclined on the jet’s cream leather seats in their black suits and dark glasses. The two men had formed a firm smokers’ friendship over many leisurely cigarette breaks outside the AFC building in Kuala Lumpur, and they chatted easily. Be was fond of Najeeb and just as starry-eyed as all the AFC women were about Meshadi, who swanned around with his sunglasses hooked raffishly into the unbuttoned collar of his shirt.
The white winter sun shone brightly as the jet touched down in Johannesburg, but June is one of South Africa’s coolest months, with evening temperatures of around 6°C, and the party were unused to the chill. One of Bin Hammam’s first acts before the tournament began was to visit the city’s branch of Loro Piana, his favourite luxury Italian clothes store, and shell out $3,072 on a cashmere overcoat to keep the cold at bay. It was small change for a billionaire, but he stuck it on his AFC expense account anyway. The four of them checked into the palazzo-style Michelangelo Hotel in the wealthy ‘white flight’ district of Sandton, where all of football’s head honchos would be staying in the best suites while the tournament was in town. Schmoozers like Fedor Radmann and Peter Hargitay would be waiting under the soaring glass ceiling of the vast lobby atrium to buy them drinks and whisper in their ears at the bar.
Amadou Diallo wasn’t travelling in Bin Hammam’s immediate entourage, but of course the Qatari billionaire had paid for his African bagman to fly in for the continent’s first World Cup. He had stipulated that Diallo be placed in the ‘African delegates’ hotel’ and gave instructions to send on the bill for all the guests he entertained there during his stay. Diallo had plenty to keep him busy. It had been a few months since the continent’s football bosses last had their coffers replenished in Angola, and the requests began rolling in thick and fast before he had even had time to unpack.
The opening ceremony on 11 June was a spellbinding display of African culture. It began with a five-plane flypast over the 94,000 capacity Soccer City stadium, built to look like a giant African calabash cooking pot, followed by a flamboyant procession of drummers and dancers, who performed a welcome song introducing the ten cities around the country where the tournament would be played. A giant wicker dung beetle dribbled the Jabulani – the official match ball of the 2010 tournament – around the stadium before performers created an aerial map of the continent and then the world out of swathes of streaming cloth. Hundreds of dancers swirled around a vast, smoking calabash in the centre and musicians and artists from the other African finalists – Algeria, Cameroon, Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Nigeria – all had their chance to perform alongside the locals. At the climax, R Kelly sang the ceremony’s showpiece song, ‘Sign of a Victory’, backed by the Soweto Spiritual Singers to a rhapsodic crowd.
In the stadium, Archbishop Tutu and President Zuma were joined by illustrious guests including the United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon, Prince Albert of Monaco and the vice-president of the United States, Joe Biden. The display was beamed around the world to hundreds of millions of viewers in more than 200 countries. And then came the kick-off of the first match, drawn 1-1 between South Africa and Mexico, and the tournament was underway.
Africa’s first World Cup was a global sensation: the most-watched TV event in history. It was as if the axis of the earth had tilted so that the whole planet spun around Soccer City for those four weeks. But inside, the stadium was strangely empty. It was the same at many of the 64 games at the ten World Cup stadiums across South Africa: the stands were scarred by areas of empty seats. FIFA’s critics said football’s avaricious governing body had priced local fans out, charging exorbitant ticket fees in a country where 10 million people were still living in extreme poverty. The organisation insisted that the tournament was sold out, and blamed foreigners who had bought tickets and then hadn’t bothered to travel for the thousands of vacant places. It was a shame if the people of South Africa couldn’t afford to watch the tournament that had cost their country 40 billion rand ($3.55 billion) to stage, but it didn’t matter much to
world football’s top brass. They were busy sipping champagne inside the stadiums’ VIP enclosures, and being paid handsomely for the privilege.
The World Cup was a jamboree like no other for FIFA’s rulers. The Exco were the luckiest men on earth. Millions of football fans around the world would give their eye teeth to watch just one World Cup match from the terraces, but these 24 men had gold-plated tickets to all the games they cared to grace with their presence. It was a privilege beyond riches, but FIFA’s beneficence towards its own did not stop there. On top of the $100,000 annual honorarium they all received for the handful of committee meetings they were expected to attend in Zurich, every man would trouser a further $200,000 that year as a ‘World Cup bonus’. Just for showing up. That was before they had even sent in their expense forms for the $700 allowance they raked in for each day they spent watching the world’s best-loved tournament – on top of the first-class flights and five-star hotel suites which all came free as a perk of the job. Yes, life was sweet in FIFA’s boss class.
Everyone who was anyone in world football was in South Africa. Here came the clip of Chris Eaton’s cowboy boots: the swaggering new investigator had been brought in to co-ordinate the security for the tournament alongside Johannesburg’s deputy chief of police, Andre Pruis. And there was Jérôme Valcke, stalking through the Michelangelo Hotel in his navy FIFA blazer and his light-blue shirt, with his usually curly hair cropped close to his scalp. This was the secretary general’s big moment. Valcke had played a major role in the organisation of this tournament, overseeing all the preparations, cajoling the local organising committee into action when they fell behind schedule, and leaping to the defence of the host country when the English media criticised South Africa’s shaky infrastructure and high crime-rate. ‘It’s sad that every morning you wake up and there are articles saying people should not fly to South Africa, that it’s a dangerous country . . . that FIFA made the wrong decision to go to South Africa,’ Valcke had protested at the start of the year. ‘It’s insane. It’s definitely completely wrong.’
The criticism had not looked so insane back in December, when the England team visited its base camp at the Royal Bafokeng Sports Campus in Rustenburg and there were cries of consternation from officials at the parlous state of the training pitches. But Valcke had saved the day, persuading the Exco to sign off an increase in South Africa’s organisational grant from $282 million to $349 million to help get the team training camps into shape. FIFA’s $3.5 billion income from the tournament would more than cover it. South Africa was expecting a big payday for its efforts, too – it had been predicted that the tournament would add as much as 0.5 per cent to the country’s GDP that year, a large chunk of which would come in tourism revenues from the hundreds of thousands of foreign visitors expected to flock to the country.
Alas, it wasn’t to be. The 2010 World Cup was a commercial flop for the host country, attracting only 300,000 extra visitors over the whole year. That was far fewer than had been expected, meaning every extra tourist the tournament had attracted came with a price tag of $13,000.13 But for FIFA the World Cup was as much of a cash bonanza as always, and South Africa’s economic disappointments were yet to emerge. Now, everything was looking perfect, and Valcke was receiving pats on the back all round.
No one was more cock-a-hoop about the South African World Cup than Blatter. The FIFA president had promised to bring the tournament to Africa during his very first election campaign back in 1998, and it had taken until now to deliver. Although he had publicly supported the South African campaign for the 2006 World Cup, he had secretly voted for Germany, for pragmatic reasons, when it came to the ballot in July 2000. A tournament in Europe’s economic powerhouse was sure to bring in maximum revenue, and South Africa would have been too high a risk coming straight after the financial uncertainty of the forthcoming 2002 finals in South Korea and Japan. All would have been fine had his treacherous secretary general Michel Zen-Ruffinen not gone on to reveal Blatter’s double dealing to the world. It had been a serious blow to the president’s credibility in his African heartland, but finally he had come good and his image as the continent’s benefactor was restored.
Once the tournament was in full swing, the lobbying and back-room wheeler-dealing by the nine countries in the running to host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups could begin in earnest. The Michelangelo was to be Bin Hammam’s centre of operations during his stay in South Africa, and he had two particularly big meetings coming up.
Sunlight streamed through the atrium’s vast glass roof as Bin Hammam ushered his guest, a smiling Englishwoman, to the breakfast table. The World Cup was now well underway, but the two figures entering the splendour of the Michelangelo’s breakfast room were not thinking about the day’s big games. They both had their sights set on the tournaments of the future. The Qatari’s companion was Clare Kenny Tipton, a glamorous international strategy advisor to the England 2018 bid, and she had been dispatched to breakfast with a mission. She was there to use all her cut-glass British charm to win Bin Hammam’s vote and to roll out the red carpet by offering him an audience with Prince William and David Beckham. Bin Hammam was gracious, but he had his eye on a far bigger prize in exchange for his World Cup ballot than just a handshake with the world’s most famous footballer and the heir to the British throne. He, of course, had his own mission that morning.
Bin Hammam knew Kenny Tipton well. She had worked for him at the AFC in Kuala Lumpur until two years before as his director of marketing, media and communications. The pair had crossed swords several times during her tenure at the AFC. Kenny Tipton had baulked at Bin Hammam’s dictatorial style. She was part of the contingent who called him a pedant; a serious sports administrator who resented the way he micromanaged her work. She had refused to pander to his ego by calling him ‘Your Excellency’ or ‘Mr President’, instead addressing him plainly as ‘Mohamed’. Perhaps she was insubordinate, but Bin Hammam liked this sparky English brunette in her typical pearls and white blouse, with her black jacket nipped in smartly at the waist. She had substance. She had style. He knew a good thing when he saw it. Kenny Tipton was there to trade on that regard. She had been hired by the England 2018 bid for her connections in Asia, and she was hoping to come away from breakfast with her old boss’s vote in the bag. So after exchanging the usual pleasantries over coffee and pastries, she cut to the chase. ‘Will you vote for England to host the 2018 World Cup?’
Bin Hammam’s response caught Kenny Tipton completely off guard. ‘You know in my heart I would want to vote for England,’ he told her smoothly. ‘But I would only vote for the country in Europe that brings me the most votes for Qatar. My job is to win the World Cup for Qatar. As a Qatari, I have to, for my country.’ Therefore Bin Hammam wanted to know something from Kenny Tipton. If he voted for England 2018, how many executive committee members could England persuade to support Qatar 2022 in return? It boiled down to one question: ‘How many votes does England have from Europe?’
Kenny Tipton had no answer. Her bid had been lobbying frantically to win the support of European Exco members, but nothing was in the bag. They knew that Michel Platini, the French president of UEFA, was a crucial ally to win and they had done all they could to woo him, but so far he had given them no reason to expect his support. The team weren’t even sure they could count on the vote of their own surly Exco member, Geoff Thompson, who remained lukewarm towards the campaign even now he was its chairman. England had nothing to offer. After the breakfast, Kenny Tipton got in touch with the leaders of England’s bid to tell them Bin Hammam was prepared to trade his own vote with whichever country in the 2018 race could muster the most votes in Europe for Qatar’s 2022 bid.
Bin Hammam’s offer became a topic of hot discussion among members of the England bid team after Kenny Tipton described her breakfast meeting to her colleagues. They all agreed that the proposal was improper: it was the sort of vote-rigging collusion between bidding countries that was strictly outlawed by the rules of the contes
t. But from that point on, it became clear to them that this was how the race was going to be decided. They reasoned that Bin Hammam was not confident that he had any European votes in his pocket by that stage in the contest, so he was relying on striking a deal with one of the 2018 nations to bring them in.
Kenny Tipton and her colleagues were right. Bin Hammam was casting around for an alliance. He wanted to know which of the European bids for the 2018 tournament could offer him the most votes for Qatar. In return, he would pledge his own vote and those of his closest allies to whichever 2018 bid made him the best offer. He felt confident that his loyal backers Hany Abo Rida of Egypt and Worawi Makudi of Thailand would go along with him and back the 2018 bid he chose. It was clear from the meeting with Kenny Tipton that England would be no good to him, but he had high hopes for the other bidders. The beauty of the secret ballot was that he could strike as many deals for his vote as he pleased, and no one would be any the wiser.
Diallo had reported back an interesting conversation with the Netherlands–Belgium bid earlier that year, in which the bagman said the Low Countries were working hard to secure the votes of Jacques Anouma and Reynald Temarii, and claimed they would give him a success fee if he helped them win. Bin Hammam had already travelled to Belgium and been received in fine style. Perhaps there was an opening there, but he did not believe that the Belgians would have much luck with their two quarries. Temarii was planning to vote for England, who had signed a new memorandum of understanding to send development funds to his Oceania confederation, and the feeble Low Countries bid wasn’t likely to change his mind. In any event, neither bid would be able to trade his 2022 vote because it was pledged to Australia. And Anouma was well known to be in the pocket of the Russia 2018 campaign, so the Low Countries weren’t going to have much luck in their attempts to woo him. Plus, Bin Hammam was counting on the Ivory Coast voter already. There wasn’t much to be gained from an alliance with Netherlands–Belgium.
