July 31 – Julio Grondona, FIFA’s senior vice-president and arguably the second most powerful man in world football, has died aged 82 after running Argentine football for the past 35 years.
Reports in Buenos Aires said Grondona, who rose to footballing power during Argentina’s military dictatorship and was nicknamed The Godfather because of his leadership style, died in hospital after being admitted for emergency heart surgery.
Under Grondona’s leadership Argentina won the World Cup in 1986 and finished runners-up twice, including recently in Brazil when they were beaten by Germany. Head of FIFA’s finance committee, he had already announced that we would step down from his various posts next year.
FIFA president Sepp Blatter tweeted that he had lost “a great friend” and added: “It is also a huge blow for FIFA as an organisation, as he was one of its key figures.”
Grondona, a FIFA executive committee member since 1998 and regarded as one of the old school powerbrokers, was never far from controversy.
Critics blamed him for the ongoing problem of fan violence in Argentine football while he famously fell out with Argentine icon Diego Maradona, whom he hired and then fired as national team coach.
During the World Cup in Brazil, his son Humberto was questioned over unconfirmed reports that he had illegally sold tickets for profit, vehemently denying the claims.
It has to be stressed that Grondona was never found guilty of any wrongdoing whilst at FIFA, unlike Brazilians Joao Havelange and Ricardo Teixeira, or Jack Warner and Mohamed bin Hammam.
It was nevertheless an open secret that Grondona was by no means in favour of much of the reform process implemented by FIFA in the aftermath of the 2018 and 2022 World Cup ballots. Earlier this year, this website was one of three media organisations to report that FIFA had side-stepped a potential storm after it emerged that tentative moves were taken by senior FIFA executive committee figures to try and shut down the probe into the World Cup voting procedure led by ethics committee prosecutor Michael Garcia. It is widely suspected that Grondona was one of those figures.
Six months after the December 2010, World Cup ballot, in an interview with the German press, Grondona reportedly said he had voted for Qatar for 2022 “because a vote for the US would be like a vote for England, and that is not possible […] But with the English bid I said: Let us be brief. If you give back the Falkland Islands which belong to us, you will get my vote.”
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