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So now we know. The conclave that will assemble next month in Zurich to decide where the 2018 and 2022 World Cups will be played will be at most 22 strong.
Though some might think this appropriate – it is after all the same as the number of players who take to the field for a game of football – the suspensions of Nigeria’s Amos Adamu and Tahiti’s Reynald Temarii will clearly reinforces the reputation for sleaze with which FIFA has long been saddled just as the attention of the world is once again about to descend upon it.
Yes, the severity of the penalties demonstrates that the world’s second-most prominent sports governing body has finally endowed itself with the tools to clean up its act.
But, as we saw with the most prominent – the International Olympic Committee (IOC) – whose reputation was similarly traduced a decade ago at the time of the Salt Lake City scandal, rebuilding a genuinely global and necessarily tradition-steeped organisation’s good name can be a painfully slow process.
FIFA must now fervently be hoping that further allegations of misconduct by Executive Committee members, supported by evidence, do not surface – whether from the BBC or elsewhere – during the tumultuous last two weeks of the competition.
If that were to happen, one of the most valuable races in the history of sport might have to be declared null and void – no doubt to the intense displeasure of the army of VIPs due to descend on the Alps on December 1 and 2 – turning FIFA into a global laughing-stock.
Of course, FIFA made matters more hazardous for itself than they needed to be by deciding to award two World Cups simultaneously.
There was a perfectly understandable commercial rationale for doing this – plus, it might be added, the International Rugby Board managed successfully to stage competitions for the 2015 and 2019 rugby World Cups at the same time.
Nevertheless, this opened the door to possible collusion between bidders for different tournaments in a way that simply would not have been relevant if only one World Cup were up for grabs.
In this context, one of the things that most struck me about this morning’s Ethics Committee media conference was the impression it conveyed that FIFA is apparently powerless to do anything very much about this.
It wasn’t just that the committee said it did not find enough evidence of a violation.
But when he was asked if he was confident that the 2018 and 2022 votes would be free of any deals, Jérôme Valcke, FIFA’s Secretary General, replied as follows.
“I cannot answer this question.
“I don’t vote, so I have no idea what are the discussions between the various members.
“As the FIFA President [Joseph Blatter] said last time, having two World Cups at the same time opened the door to such discussions between Executive Committee members, when eight of them are directly involved in the decision, being directly representing bidding countries as Executive Committee members.
“I hope that again what has happened these last three days shows there is an Ethics Committee and people should be careful [about] entering into any situation which is forbidden either through the bid registration or the Ethics Committee code.
“That’s what I can say.
“We’ll see.”
If I were running a bid convinced that a rival was collaborating with a bidder from the other race to try to maximise its vote, I don’t think I’d find that response – commendably honest as it might be – terribly reassuring.
Valcke does, though, highlight a major flaw in the bidding process: the way that ExCo members retain their votes even in races in which their own countries are running.
This is in direct contrast to the practice at the – now largely rehabilitated – IOC, where members representing countries with cities aspiring to stage any given event are not allowed to vote until “their” city has been eliminated.
With eight of the 22 remaining FIFA ExCo members from countries competing in one race or the other, adopting the same principle as the IOC would leave only 18 voters in the first round of both the 2018 and 2022 contests.
But the built-in imbalance of the present system is underlined if you consider that Australia is the only bidder in either race without “its” ExCo member.
So much for today’s developments.
For the next instalment, we have only to wait until Friday morning, when President Blatter will again assume centre-stage.
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 and 2010 World Cup. Owen’s Twitter feed can be accessed at www.twitter.com/dodo938