Former Concacaf executive and whistleblower Mel Brennan says football’s governance remains opaque despite the post-2015 promises of reform
Ex-Concacaf executive Mel Brennan reflects on the Fifa corruption scandal, missed reforms and why football’s governance remains stubbornly opaquelooks like from the 17th floor of Trump Tower … I know what it looks like from a grass-strewn field in Trinidad where children cannot play because money that was supposed to maintain it went somewhere else entirely,” he says.
Brennan was also a confidential source for investigative journalists and law enforcement as they looked into the corruption that was rife within the organization for decades. Brennan’s book about his time at Concacaf, “Football survived Sepp Blatter,” he writes, optimistically, in the book.
“It survived Jack Warner. It survived Chuck Blazer. And it will survive Gianni Infantino. ”Were you surprised when law enforcement raided a Zurich hotel and Concacaf headquarters in Miami in 2015 to indict so many Fifa and Concacaf officials?
No. The FBI had stopped and started dialog with me about what was going on at Concacaf. On two separate occasions I was on my way to New York to with investigators and they said “Wait – we’re not quite ready”. I literally turned my car around. So I knew something was percolating.
On the other hand I never really thought there would be comeuppance with this group. Why did you think there would be no accountability for Concacaf bosses after everything you saw while working there? When I was with Concacaf the office was on the 17th floor of Trump Tower. Chuck Blazer lived on the 49th floor.
Before that, Chuck and Jack Warner shared an apartment on the 10th floor across from Donald Trump and Marla Maples. They were all so intertwined and so much a part of the interlocking elite that accountability was a distant dream. I would imagine that Chuck, Jack, and others would do anything to stay out of jail. These were not gangsters.
These were opportunistic cockroaches. They were not tough guys. They would run with any real sustained sunlight. .
The football bubble and the rise in the dollars available for them should have created access. If you are a girl and you play sport, you only have a small chance to go pro but if you play sport and you stay in sport you are more likely to lead an organization as an adult.
But these types of opportunities were lost for so many because Jack and Chuck were too busy acting like they were building fields and programming but Chuck and Jack were actually on a game show called “Who is Stealing Money? ”. And they were on it every week. People like Sunil Gulati were fully present when I was there.
The role that Sunil played under and then as US Soccer president himself felt more like him being a World Bank guy – which is the world he comes from. Admiring this economic engine that Chuck and Jack had built from a distance rather than deploying the power of US Soccer to shine a light on this stuff and make a difference.
In your book Fixing Football you recall an amazing scene at a Concacaf conference in Miami where women, who were not delegates, left the hotel en masse at 5am. There were more than 15 and less than 30 . All from the same floor. And you see how they are dressed and you see the time and see what is going on.
You feel like you want to call somebody because maybe you are crazy. Everyone else who was there and had been was, like, “Well, yeah, let’s get them in the car and get them off …”Transparency International laid out a framework that would have . Fifa could have meetings of the Fifa Council that are broadcast live and minutes that are in real time. We could see the bank accounts in real time if they wanted us to see it.
Some cockroaches have scattered and other cockroaches came in but the overall smell remains the same. Victor Montagliani had an opportunity to demonstrate he was the right person to lead. There was a moment where Concacaf could have gone in a different direction: democratic, transparent, inclusive, diverse. Instead, what Concacaf did was rely on the fact that was not Jack and Chuck to say that this meant change.
In the end, we still cannot see and it is not clear how Concacaf doles out its dollars. The question is, will Montagliani and other leaders step back just a moment to build something that would matter beyond themselves? That would matter for more people. I was naive to think that Montagliani could be this radical change when most of the status quo is still in place.
Any nation state that is murdering journalists has to be marginalized. I would not want to see Concacaf engaging with Saudi Arabia without some sort of weight to the decision-making process of sponsorships and partnerships that included human rights records and human rights abuses. How Saudi Arabia treats women and the most vulnerable matters. If Concacaf is considering a partnership with them then they should have a mechanism that is going to evaluate some of .
They might not get a deal at all but to not have those considerations in the conversation as to whether you are going to partner somebody is an abandonment of the spirit that makes sport matter at all. Does the USA, Mexico, and Canada hosting this year’s World Cup make this tournament a success for the sport in the region? It is an opportunity. who gets left behind? In my local town in Maryland, all youth soccer is white kids.
But a 10-minute walk from my house a park is reserved by Latino communities but these two communities don’t meet. One community is going to the Dallas Cup and the Florida youth soccer tournaments and the other one is not. There is something wrong here and there is an opportunity for us to reshape how this looks or to call for and get better answers from our leaders as to why it looks the way it looks.
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