After the latest bust took down a bunch more of FIFA's top brass, we have some questions.
Are FIFA even paying attention? They stayed in the same hotel as the last big bust. It didn't even occur to them to switch hotels! The only difference between this bust and the last one was the police came in a different door to arrest people.
The great Charles P. Pierce once wrote during the whole deflategate thing: "If Bill Belichick is the dark genius that his most fervent detractors insist he is, then he’s goddamn bad at being a dark genius. He keeps getting caught."
This rings true for FIFA, too. After all that's happened with FIFA, we tend to think of it as some kind of terrifying, sinister organization, like Spectre or the Nixon administration. But really, when you look at how easy it's been for the U.S. Attorney General's office to go to Switzerland and arrest basically whoever they want (except for Sepp), the thought occurs to me: are FIFA just a bunch of incompetent fools drunk on power who got away with everything they did only because no one was paying attention?
All signs point to yes.
It's like they're a 12-year-old who stole his dad's car, but after the initial high of getting out of the driveway, he didn't have any idea what to do, so he just drove around for a while, and when he got back he crashed into the garage door.
One of the FIFA officials arrested this last time was Alfredo Hawit, the CONCACAF president. The two CONCACAF presidents before him, Jeffrey Webb and Jack Warner, are also under indictment. Undoubtedly some of Hawit's alleged trangressions came before he ascended to the CONCACAF presidency, and before Webb and Warner were brought under the magnifying glass of the law, but if the two guys ahead of you get in trouble for doing bad stuff while in the job you currently hold, shouldn't you lay low for a while?
At least, don't go to the same hotel where everyone before you was arrested. It's like if you go to rob a convenience store, and the clerk shoots you but you get away, but you go back the next day to rob the same convenience store without changing your plan one little bit.
Maybe I'm reading into this all wrong, and FIFA's plan is to be so incompetent that bribery defenses like "we paid Michel Platini a million dollars nine years after the work he did because we didn't have enough money even though we have more than a billion dollars in cash reserves" actually seem sort of plausible.
The only people more incompetent in this whole mess than FIFA are the European countries under whose noses this was all happening. Shouldn't upstanding citizens like Germany and Ireland have been able to do something about this? (Oh. . . I see. Never mind then.)
This is what happebns when you trust a milti-billion dollar organization to a bunch of people who shouldn't be trusted with any more responsibility than the people who clean the stadiums after games.
People have the FIFA thing all wrong, calling them an evil organization. They are too stupid to be evil, like that kid in Texas who tried to get out of a drunk driving charge by claiming he had too much money and didn't know how the world works. Matter of fact, we wouldn't rule it out if he becomes the next FIFA president. He sounds perfect.
Contact The18 Staff Writer Sam Klomhaus at Klomhaus@The18.com or follow him on Twitter @SamKlomhaus
