The Fall of the House of Fifa by David Conn review – a long tale of corruption and seediness

A Guardian journalist’s study of Sepp Blatter and other football officials is full of startling material and has cumulative power

From 1996 to 2013, one of the members of the executive committee of Fifa, the body that runs world football, was an American businessman and former manufacturer of smiley-face badges called Chuck Blazer. For most of that time, Blazer was also general secretary of the Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football (Concacaf), one of the half dozen international federations that Fifa helps fund. At Blazer’s instigation, Concacaf rented offices and apartments in Trump Tower in Manhattan. One of the apartments was for the sole use of Blazer’s cats. They “peed all over the floor”, Guardian journalist David Conn records, “and made the place stink”.

When it comes to the moral shortcomings of modern football, writers are not exactly short of metaphors. The challenge is more the opposite: how to make people who love the game despite everything want to read another catalogue of its off-pitch horrors. Since 2010, Conn writes, “seven members of that 22-man Fifa executive committee have been charged or accused by the US authorities of criminal wrongdoing; another, Franz Beckenbauer, is under criminal investigation in Switzerland and Germany over … Germany’s 2006 World Cup bid [he maintains his innocence]. Six more members, including [Sepp] Blatter and [Michel] Platini, have been sanctioned by Fifa’s own ethics committee.” For many years now, Fifa has been associated with corruption, bribery, cronyism and seedily close relationships with corporations, dictatorships and repressive governments – and all the while football has carried on expanding regardless, becoming not just the world’s favourite sport but arguably its dominant mass culture. What difference will another anti-Fifa book make?

Related: Fifa opens corruption case against Sepp Blatter and Jérôme Valcke

Conn wants 'to be fair to Blatter', but underlines 'the rottenness did set in from the top'

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