Red Card by Ken Bensinger

Author:Ken Bensinger
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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Webb had been the confederation’s president for only ten months but he was already a star in the soccer world.

In late February, Webb had been named the Cayman Islands’ ”Person of the Year,” and in early March, Sepp Blatter appointed him chairman of FIFA’s new antiracism and discrimination task force.

Still just forty-eight years old, Webb was one of seven FIFA vice presidents and an increasingly in-demand public speaker and ambassador of the sport; rumors began to spread that he might someday replace Blatter as president of the entire organization.

He’d talked repeatedly with the leadership of South America’s confederation about their idea for a Copa América Centenario, and he’d spent several days prior to the Panama congress escorting Blatter and FIFA general secretary Jérôme Valcke on a tour of the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and finally Cuba, where they had a face-to-face meeting with Raúl Castro himself. Everywhere he went, he touted the reforms he was making.

Indeed, Webb had made changes, considerable ones, but rather than cleaning up the sport, they seemed directed at surrounding himself with people who were loyal only to him and would protect his growing book of illicit activities.

Right off the bat, Webb brought in Sanz, his nexus with Traffic and the rich bribes that relationship promised. It was a remarkably brazen choice, one that put Webb’s personal interests ahead of the confederation’s, and a clear indication of how he viewed the role of president: an opportunity to grab as much gold as he could.

Sanz’s opportune placement was mutually beneficial, of course, giving Traffic a massive edge over competitors since Sanz, working with Webb, could shut out all other sports marketing firms. The arrangement eerily echoed the one forged more than thirty-five years earlier, at the dawn of modern sports marketing, when Coca-Cola and Adidas inserted young Sepp Blatter into FIFA as a development officer, ensuring their monopolization of soccer for years to come.

Next, Webb created the Integrity Committee to air out the stench of the prior administration, sending $2 million of the confederation’s cash to Sidley Austin to produce its damning report, an expenditure that came on top of the law firm’s generous monthly billings. In October, he formed an Audit and Compliance Committee, ostensibly charged with the critical task of reviewing the confederation’s books to ensure that no more financial abuses took place, but he made sure natives of the Caribbean outnumbered all others on the panel, among them a close friend from Cayman.

In December, Webb formed a nine-man finance committee, chaired by a Jamaican power broker and a staunch supporter of Webb. That panel, too, had a Caribbean majority, including another of his friends from home.

Webb also created an integrity office, charged with monitoring corruption and particularly with rooting out what was rumored to be rampant match fixing in CONCACAF, particularly in the confederation’s Central American countries, which had been targeted by gambling syndicates. Yet the office’s director soon discovered that Webb had no intention of actually implementing any of her reforms, and eventually he stopped speaking to her altogether.

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