The Football Association has rejected the verdict of a Fifa ethics committee investigation that it broke bidding rules in trying to woo the disgraced former Fifa vice-president Jack Warner during its ill-starred bid to host the 2018 World Cup.
A 42-page summary by the German judge who heads the adjudicatory arm of Fifa’s ethics committee of an 18-month investigation by the US attorney Michael Garcia paints a picture of a bid team going out of their way to accommodate ever more unreasonable requests from Warner.
“England’s response to Mr Warner’s – improper – demands, in, at a minimum, always seeking to satisfy them in some way, damaged the integrity of the ongoing bidding process. Yet, such damage was again of rather limited extent,” Hans-Joachim Eckert concluded .
England’s strategy involved targeting the Concacaf president in the belief he controlled a crucial bloc of votes and extended to increasingly desperate attempts to woo him.
Ultimately, England’s £21m bid garnered just one vote aside from that of the former FA chairman Geoff Thompson, who was the British representative on the 22-strong Fifa executive committee. Warner is widely believed to have voted for Russia.
“Relevant occurrences included Mr Warner pressing, in 2009 and again in 2010, England’s bid team to help a person of interest to him find a part-time job in the UK,” said Eckert’s report, a summary of Garcia’s report and conclusions.
“England 2018’s top officials in response not only provided the individual concerned with employment opportunities but also kept Mr Warner apprised of their efforts as they solicited his support for the bid.”
The report states England 2018 also picked up the bill for a £35,000 gala dinner for Caribbean officials, provided “substantial assistance” for a training camp for an under-20 Trinidad and Tobago team in 2009, while Warner also asked for favours for his Trinidad football club Joe Public FC.
The England bid team often accommodated Mr Warner’s wishes, in apparent violation of bidding rules and the Fifa code of ethics.
Warner, who later resigned from all football positions as he came under fire over his role in an incident when the prospective Fifa presidential candidate Mohamed bin Hammam paid bribes to Caribbean officials, was a controversial figure throughout his tenure on the Fifa executive committee.
Warner was involved in ticketing scandals, allegations he had siphoned off Fifa development funds for his own use and claims he ran Concacaf as his own personal fiefdom. The Eckert report states he received a $1.2m payment from Hammam in return for not testifying against him.
Lord Triesman, the FA chairman who led England’s bid until he was forced out in a newspaper sting, later told a Commons select committee that Warner had asked £2.5m towards an education centre in Trinidad and also sought cash to purchase the rights to televise the World Cup in Haiti.
Warner began the campaign as an opponent of England’s bid, saying “nobody in Europe likes England”. As the FA courted him, sending an England team to play a friendly in Trinidad and taking David Beckham on an ambassadorial visit, his attitude softened and he played the various bidders for both tournaments off against one another for his patronage.
Triesman is criticised by the report for not cooperating with the investigation, citing the fact the disgraced Thai Fifa official Worawi Makudi was pursuing a libel case against him over claims he made under parliamentary privilege. Triesman aside, the England 2018 bid team are praised for their cooperation.
In contrast, the Russian bid is criticised for its failure to cooperate and inability to produce any emails related to its successful bid.
The FA rejected any criticism outright. “We were not given any prior notice of the report before publication,” it said. “We do not accept any criticism regarding the integrity of England’s bid or any of the individuals involved.
“We conducted a transparent bid and, as the report demonstrates with its reference to the England bid team’s ‘full and valuable cooperation’, willingly complied with the investigation. We maintain that transparency and cooperation around this entire process from all involved is crucial to its credibility.
“We also note that after a lengthy investigatory process and assessment, the report has concluded that the ‘potentially problematic facts and circumstances identified by the report regarding the England 2018 bid were, all in all, not suited to compromise the integrity of the Fifa World Cup 2018/22 bidding process as a whole’.”
The entire report was labelled a “whitewash” by the Conservative MP Damian Collins, who has long campaigned for Fifa reform and used parliamentary privilege to make allegations about Qatar’s bid in 2011.
“It is a whitewash as it is an attempt to con people that there has been a full and independent investigation when there has not been. The result is that allegations of bribery and serious wrongdoing remain unanswered and they are still suppressing the full report,” he said.
“Fifa are trying to con people that there has been a proper independent inquiry when there hasn’t been. This is Fifa investigating itself and not surprisingly returning a verdict of not guilty. The points being made about the England bid are just a smokescreen to try to hide these facts.”
On his LBC radio phone-in the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, called the conclusion “very surprising indeed, to put it mildly”.
Asked if the FA had damaged the image of the world governing body, its chairman Greg Dyke said: “I think it’s quite hard to damage the image of Fifa. What it tells you is that the people who co-operated the most got criticised and those who didn’t co-operate at all didn’t get anything which seems odd by anybody’s standards.
“As for the criticism of the English bid, obviously I wasn’t involved, but it’s all based on information that we gave to them and that the FA had cleared with the Fifa executives in advance.”
