On Monday evening I settled down to watch ABC’s Four Corners ‘expose’ of Australia’s World Cup bid. A lot of information came out and even more opinions were stated. Accusations were made about the legitimacy of the bid, about the current state of the game, and about the competence of the Football Federation of Australia itself, but what did we really discover?
Those with an axe to grind with the FFA would argue that whilst the show failed to demonstrate any dishonesty, it uncovered a lot of incompetence and naivety. The over-riding image being of shady European businessmen taking advantage of the almost child-like innocence of mega-rich Chairman Frank Lowy and the lacking-in-soccer-savvy CEO Ben Buckley.
Running alongside the failure of the bid itself, the show suggested that the A-League was directly affected by the obsession with the bid. It’s widely acknowledged that the North Queensland Fury A-League franchise was kept on life-support purely in order to support the bid by maintaining a football presence in the tropics, but the show appeared to imply that the lame-duck franchise was only launched in the first place in order to support the bid – costing naive local business men millions when due diligence should have shown that a franchise in the region wasn’t viable under the current model. Perth Glory owner Tony Sage was on hand to confirm that the FFA are playing games with other people’s money ($7 million of his personal fortune has already gone down the A-League drain).
The FFA and its supporters have gone on the defensive. Ben Buckley, who declined to appear on the show itself, released a statement immediately after the broadcast defiantly stating that the bid had been audited by the government and had complied on all fronts, and listing the massive and undeniable achievements of the FFA over the last eight years. Unfortunately, Mr Buckley appeared to miss the point that whilst the money is all accounted for, there has been no implication of impropriety on the part of anyone at the FFA, only of incompetence. His failure to acknowledge the real issue – whether the FFA acted in the best interests of football in Australia – appears to demonstrate a form of ‘defensive blindness’ or to put it another way, he’s sticking his head in the sand.
I’d say that the beautiful game, already up against so many negative forces in our country, didn’t need a nationally broadcasted and respected show to highlight that in many ways we haven’t progressed since the dark days of Soccer Australia. That’s not critical of the producers of the show – but of the FFA as the show came as a direct result of their bad decisions during the bid, and the lack of communication since.
For football to progress in Australia we need fully accountable people running our game, hopefully the impending government report into the management of the game will forced those in control to conform to the 2003 Crawford Report with a truly democratic system and genuine transparency.
