FIFA was facing fresh bribery claims Sunday after a whistle-blower accused two executive members of the international soccer body of striking deals worth $1.5 million for their votes ahead of last week's contest to host the World Cup

Bribes look to be cheap these days

Hey, look what we found in Jack Warner's trash...
SUPER SECRET FIFA INTERNAL MEMO
This document has been created for the purpose of identifying and assisting the FIFA executive committee in addressing any and concerns that may have risen during the recent FIFA World Cup in South Africa.

Well, I've narrowed down the pronunciations for Qatar. I can't decide between "catarrh" and "gutter."
Oh, and I see I have a brand-new all time least favorite team. Terrific.
So in the interview/rant I did with Derek's interview I touched briefly on one of the reasons I thought FIFA had two bids at once.

Images via Gunnersgirls

Doesn't this photo of lush Dutch striker Robin Van Persie and his family outside a hotel in the Netherlands make you want to call for some urgent butler service? Nothing screams relaxing family travel like 1,800 kilos of luggage, baby blankets, toys, car seats, candy bribes and bags.

For someone like me who has ties to both England and the United States, the decision by FIFA to award the 2018 and 2022 World Cup tournaments to Russia and Qatar respectively hurts.

I watched the announcement Thursday morning on BBC World News from my cabin aboard the Norwegian Dawn cruise ship while sailing north west of Cuba on unusually stormy seas.

Images via Gunnersgirls

Doesn't this photo of lush Dutch striker Robin Van Persie and his family outside a hotel in the Netherlands make you want to call for some urgent butler service? Nothing screams relaxing family travel like 1,800 kilos of luggage, baby blankets, toys, car seats, candy bribes and bags.

In light of the Times of London article implicating FIFA Executive Committee members in a potential votes for bribes World Cup bidding scandal, FIFA held a special emergency Ethics Committee meeting on Wednesday. The committee suspended Amos Adamu and Reynald Temarii, the two members implicated in The Times article.

The most famous tournament in the world brings all together with the same understanding – a festival of football that unites and inspires across all social and racial boundaries...except it's not anymore really is it. It's long been accepted as a multinational company cash cow, whored out to any nation willing to fill its trough for FIFA's officials to snout around in.

On Wednesday, as I sat in the studio with two microphones clipped to my tie and makeup on my face, I was put in the position of acting as a defense witness for the U.S. bid. It was all very good natured, but it revealed some of the biases against, and criticisms of, the effort to bring the 2022 World Cup to America.

It's tempting to claim that bribes, favours, politics and financial opportunity determined the fates of World Cups 2018 and 2022 long before the staged drama of bid presentations yesterday and today.

It's easy to say that Blatter is taking the World Cup to Russia to make money, or that Qatar got the World Cup to build Blatter's legacy.

Ian Wright said in the Sun newspaper on December 3rd: "I would love to see some proper investigations into FIFA rather than this Jennings bloke shouting at people." And Wright has been calling for such investigations for hours, going back to 4pm on December 2nd. Instead of just shouting at people, investigative journalist Andrew Jennings should have delved deep into the workings of FIFA.

Mmmm - look at all these big, juicy grapes! There must be enough for years! I wonder how they taste?
Before we start tossing around suggestions - and there have been some good ones - we need to get on the same page as to what actually happened.
There has been a lot of talk that the technical superiority of the England and the US bids hampered their campaigns.

Not cool dude.
But apparently it has been happening in China, according to a newspaper report. Players there have allegedly paid bribes to get spots in training camp. The fees increased, the bigger the match.

The allegations this week in Shanghai's Oriental Morning Post are the latest to rock the scandal-plagued Chinese Football Association, whose top official was replaced this month after he and two others were questioned by police about match fixing.

What Or Who Decides The Outcome Of Football Matches?
Roberto Martinez refers obliquely to "third party decisions" and the astute Spaniard is more than correct.
But the loci of those third parties are both disparate and interlinked dependent upon the murky circumstance.

By Tony Attwood I have, from time to time, let slip that I feel that corruption is rife in football in England and indeed elsewhere. The little affair of Lord Triesman and his allegations about bribes in the world cup didn't come as a surprise, nor did it that it took FIFA just a week [...]

Throughout a season when Liverpool have been consistently crap on the field, their fans have been consistently mental off the field. More specifically, on an internet forum called Red and White Kop (RAWK).

For the members of of RAWK, their season has been dire for a combination of reasons, the most ludicrous being that there's a conspiracy within the FA and Premier League to stop them from winning anything.

On Friday, we published a piece on the price of Australia's 2022 World Cup bid: 11.37-million Australian taxpayers' dollars being paid to two shady international lobbyists, Peter Hargitay and Fedor Radmann, to grease FIFA's wheels. That piece focused on Hargitay, a globe-trotting consultant once arrested by Interpol for fraud, indicted by the US government for cocaine trafficking and heading up a consultancy network that boasts of doing "military and government level surveillance" for its clients.

Something is rotten in Chinese football.

Gambling and max fixing surround the nation's biggest soccer league, the Chinese Super League, and the corruption has turned feelings towards the most beautiful game sour in recent months.

And the biggest reason why is because the league was state-run by government officials who were directly put into their posts to keep the corruption out of the sport.

BEIJING (AP): The former head of the Chinese Football Association has been arrested and accused of bribery amid a match fixing scandal.

China's Ministry of Public Security announced on its website that Xie Yalong was arrested along with former national team leader Wei Shaohui and former referee committee director Li Dongsheng.

British Sunday Times recently reported in a shocking revelation that FIFA executive committee members Amos Adamu and Reynald Temarii both offered to sell their FIFA 2018 and 2022 hosting nation secret ballot votes away for millions of dollars of cash and other gifts from the undercover reporters that were posing as lobbyists.

So was the US World Cup 2018 bid a huge waste of time? Only if you believe there wasn't some sort of deal made between the FA and the USSF, which, come on. The two associations announced their withdrawals on the same day, for crying out loud. If they didn't want people to read between the lines, Sunil, David Dein and Andy Anson could have at least waited a couple of days.

When the United States dropped its bid for the 2018 World Cup, it was seen as a move to placate FIFA's desire to have the World Cup held that year in soccer's birthplace (literally, if England wins the bid). By doing so, it also allowed the U.S. to be seen as the prohibitive favorite to win the 2022 bid when the vote is held December 2, in part due to a weak pool that includes Australia, Japan, Qatar, and South Korea.

If you're looking for a hero who hasn't been shackled by the tragic bout of boring political correctness from which most footballers currently suffer, Wang Dalei is your man.

And really, though we joke, every little guilty pleasure in football the fights, the bribes, player candor, etc. seems to be emanating from China.

Ahem. Gentlemen, ladies, transgendered individuals, and mammals of all colors and stripes, please pay attention and lift your glasses of champagne. The end of the year fast approaches and the awards for soccer bloggers proliferate. Naturally, I have quit my day job based on the success of this highly profitable soccer link directory, errr, website.

By FRANCO PANIZO

And then there were 22.

FIFA suspended two of the 24 executive committee members from voting on the 2018 and 2022 World Cup hosts on Tuesday after finishing their corruption investigation.

Nigeria's Amos Adamu was suspended from all soccer activity for three years after admitting to taking bribes from undercover reporters who acted as lobbyisted trying to buy votes.

Controversy A word that seems to constantly mar football is again ever present as FIFA draw a close to deciding on a venue...

For the Game.For the World Irony?

With only two days to the bid, our chances appear considerably slim. The Lord Treisman debacle as well as early allegations that three FIFA committee members took bribes to sway their decision towards England, didn't make good reading.

Have we completely missed the point?

I watched investigative journalist Andrew Jennings' Panorama programme on extensive bribe-taking among high-ranking FIFA executive committee members (unlike England 2018 bid chief Andy Anson, it would seem). So I find it hard to imagine that any of those named would vote for England to host the 2018 FIFA World Cup, and I doubt whether England will "get" any World Cup in the lifetime of Sepp Blatter or his fellow-travellers in the FIFA hierarchy – present and future.

They may be almost a decade or more away, but the 2018 and 2022 World Cups have become the most important topics in the world of soccer this week.

More specifically, the subject of which nations will get to host those tournaments.

FIFA is set to vote on both tournaments, and which nations will get to host them, and while accusations of corruption and bribes is casting a shadow on the process, the fact remains we will find out in less than two days just who the lucky countries are.

"Brainless, Betraying, Cretinous", screamed The Sun this morning, and so it was that their much-anticipated slaying of the BBC after last night's Panorama began. It took a twin-headed approach firstly, an apparent "voice of the fans" piece of garbage which was either written by or ghost-written for Ian Wright.

Idle thoughts:
Just wondering if MR AFL Andrew Demetriou has spent any of his AFL millions on bribes to the FIFA Executive........check his passport in the last two years anyone?

Russia might have already given up on winning the 2018 World Cup bid if reports emerging from Zurich are anything to go by. When heads of most delegations including figures like heads of governments, royalty, football stars and keen enthusiasts are eagerly awaiting the news. Russian Prime Minister Vladmir Putin will be sitting pretty in his home where he will be watching the proceedings on television.

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Lucky 5 for Barcelona and Dimitar Berbatov, Real Madrid lose the plot and corruption at the heart of FIFA. You can listen to these and other stories on our weekly podcast.

Following the disappointment of the United States' failed bid for the 2022 World Cup, I received an e-mail from U.S. Soccer President Sunil Gulati with the subject line "What We Achieved." Although Sunil and I are tight, I assume a few other U.S. Soccer backers got the same note. With all due respect to the efforts of the U.

There are plenty of things in this old world I know absolutely nothing about. Zilch. Like women's shoes. Or fly fishing. Or macramé.

And bribes. I know diddly-squat about the high-dollar, high-stakes, hifalutin world of bribery.

Why would I? I'm a journalist.

The things you miss if you aren't on Twitter.
Like a respected Newsweek reporter casually dropping a Wile E. Coyote-style bomb, the kind that looks more like a bowling ball with a wick than something that might actually harm anyone, labelled "Qatar World Cup Bribes" into the laps of Twitter's ever-milling soccer writers, bloggers, and fans with not so much as a "how do you do.

Things are getting strange, he's starting to worry We all no doubt took an interest in the BBC's Panorama revelations on World Cup vote bribes earlier at the end of last month. But it now appears that some of us took more of an interest than others. Take Arsene Wenger, for instance. The Arsenal boss [.

Following the disappointment of the United States' failed bid for the 2022 World Cup, I received an e-mail from U.S. Soccer President Sunil Gulati with the subject line "What We Achieved." Although Sunil and I are tight, I assume a few other U.S. Soccer backers got the same note. With all due respect to the efforts of the U.

I wish this were the US bid's logo, but clearly the Qatari's
must have put more money in Sepp Blatter's bank account.As you might have guessed from the title of this post, I'm indignant (at best) at the selections of both Russia for WC2018 and Qatar for WC2022. Ravi Ubha over at ESPN calls the two picks bizarre, and I couldn't agree more.