There’s good money in ethics, really good money. More than you can get for crawling up the greasy pole to a position on FIFA’s executive committee if you are clever. And when you think you have trousered enough of it, you can time your exit with maximum effect, champion the high ground (doubtless standing on your own wallet stuffed full of other people’s cash/stash/development grants) and leave with a fantastic reputation.
An enhanced reputation infact. The one good guy in the whole piece.
The $5.5 million Garcia banked to become the most famous non-football man in football (he did apparently once pick his daughter up from practice) has to be classed as a good feed, even by FIFA’s standards. An ethically good feed.
But then this is a FIFA that, like Christmas, just keeps on giving to the ‘deserving’. Or so media folklore would lead us to believe.
Garcia’s exit in a blaze of ‘loss of confidence’ was not a surprise. After all, with all the law enforcement agencies currently camped in the woods around FIFA’s Zurich HQ, from the FBI and MI6 to the local Swiss fraud police, there is scarcely room left to conceal a microphone or fly a drone.
If Garcia learnt anything from his time in football it is how to make a spectacular exit. Like the small child fed up with the way the game is going, he has taken the ball and gone home, telling everyone left behind that they are rubbish.
And that is a disappointment isn’t it? Great story for us disaster junkies, great news for any villains and villainy that needs chasing down, but ultimately a pointless act if driving a progressive agenda was ever on the agenda (remember that Eckert summary – seems like months ago – that everyone was so upset about? Still plenty there to chase down by all accounts and not just unfortunate roadkill like D’Hooghe and Chilean Harry, but proper naughty boys).
When it comes to agendas, the growing feeling was that Garcia came with one. An FBI man who had gone straight, or so many had hoped. When FIFA opened the door to the hen coop they let a fox in.
And the fox did a pretty good job of starting the clean up, feasting on the low hanging fruit of the exco members who resigned, ran, became ill or were too senile or stupid to see the writing on the wall and got caught before they could resign, run or get a sick note.
And then on to the big one – the 2018 and 2022 bid investigation, marching to the background tune of a brand new Cold War and the threat of global Islamic overthrow (terrorism at least) – the global soft politics of soccer had attracted the world’s biggest players.
But this is perhaps where the real problem for Mickey ‘the fox’ G became ethical. Could he have been under pressure to get the right result for the good side? The men with the hidden microphones putting the fear of allah into the whistleblower, his old chums relying on him to deliver. The right result would have meant incontrovertible evidence that even the blundering German judge, so clearly in the pocket of a soon-to-be-Octogenarian world leading despot, would have been able to recognize.
And if the evidence doesn’t stack up, then so the problem grows. What next? Thank goodness for that quaint European concept of confidentiality so conveniently railed against earlier in the process. So the escape plan comes together to get out of a tricky and messy situation.
It goes along the lines of make a noise, get out quick, let pals in the FBI know that you did what you could, let the rest of the world surmise that the evidence was there but is now buried under a strict and quaint adherence to an old-world principle of confidentiality, and return to normal life chasing Russians and Islamic terrorists in the real world. Oh, and pocket the cash but make a note to declare it to the IRS as you can get into difficulty otherwise – poor old chubby Chuck.
It’s just an idle line of thought.
And if you are FIFA what do you get for $5.5m? Obviously, the whole ethical house of cards pulled down behind him as one of the key players (hopes for the future) exits the game in a huff. Is that what they call legacy in the ethics world?