It was on 23 June 1998 – Sepp Blatter’s 15th day as FIFA President – that it started to dawn on me that the governing body was probably going to have to do something about compensating clubs for players injured on international duty.
In just the fourth minute of what turned out to be a drab group match between Italy and Austria in the Stade de France, Alessandro Nesta, the elegant Lazio and Azzurri central defender, went down and quickly waved for assistance, his World Cup over.
Some days later, an official at a leading European club with several players in action at France 98, summarised the situation like this: “There cannot be many organisations that are willing to give up assets worth millions of pounds without getting anything back and with a chance they may come back damaged.”
The scales dropped from my eyes; I rushed into print, asking: “How much longer will decision-makers at leading clubs be prepared to lay their most valuable assets on the line without adequate compensation?”
The answer turned out to be about 15 years.
But now, FIFA’s so-called Club Protection Programme (CPP) has cranked into action and, as we reported last week, made payments to the first 20 or so club beneficiaries.
I don’t think FIFA had much choice but to devise such a scheme: injuries to key players have been a major factor in ‘club versus country’ tensions, and the players concerned are, when all is said and done, employees of the clubs.
While CPP is unlikely to relax these tensions altogether – the potential damage to, say, Barcelona if Lionel Messi were crocked playing for Argentina probably far outweighs his salary – it should certainly help.
This should thus be seen as an act of pragmatism by FIFA, whose financial health is wholly dependent on the successful staging of a vibrant and memorable World Cup once every four years.
It is, nonetheless, worth asking how much CPP – which initially covers the period from 1 September 2012 to 31 December 2014 – is going to cost.
Based on the $18.368 million in expenses attributed to CPP in FIFA’s recently-published 2012 financial report, you might come up with an answer of about $50m a year.
(That $18.368 million bill was run up over four months, which is one-third of a year; $18.368 million times three equals around $55 million, but it is probably legitimate to expect the injury rate to slow for a month or two over the northern-hemisphere summer.)
I wonder, though, if that is the full story.
I wonder, for example, if all clubs were aware from the outset of the scheme’s existence, and how proficient they are at the paperwork that is no doubt part and parcel of lodging a successful claim.
Also, with the cap for payments set at a lofty €7.5 million per claim, you can see that it would only take five or six long-term injuries to star players to put FIFA within range of $50 million in expenses.
I would not be surprised, in short, to see the annual bill climb higher.
FIFA has a reputation, with good reason, for being one of the richer sports governing bodies.
But actually, based on present margins, it does not have that much room for manoeuvre.
The positive annual result for 2012 was just $89 million, or $107 million if you add back in the $18.369 million of CPP expenses included.
Admittedly, FIFA is at the point where it can ease up on building its reserves, which have climbed steadily in recent years to $1.38 billion.
Even so, it does not seem to me preposterous to imagine a situation in which rising CPP payments threaten to push FIFA into the red, or at least to consume what would otherwise be a healthily positive annual result more or less entirely.
Now some CPP payments will go to poorer countries and clubs.
But it seems to me inevitable that most CPP money will end up with the wealthy, largely Europe-based, elite simply because that by and large is where the biggest player salaries are.
As CPP costs rise, therefore, national associations in the developing world may find, I fancy, that they need to be vigilant to make sure that these new expenses do not eat into funds that would otherwise be used for development programmes.
Yes, it was probably unavoidable for FIFA to implement CPP or something like it; but it may well result in the wealthy getting a bigger slice of the global football cake.
David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 World Cup and London 2012. Owen’s Twitter feed can be accessed at www.twitter.com/dodo938