Witness: Lord Triesman, former chairman of the English 2018 World Cup bid team, gave evidence.
Q47 Chair: Lord Triesman, I welcome you back to the Committee this morning.
You will recall that right at the tail end of your previous appearance I asked you if you had any observations on the England bid and the outcome of the 2018 World Cup contest, and you said at that time that that would require a much longer session but you indicated to us that you did have some concerns, particularly as a result of some of the conversations you had had with members of the FIFA executive. Would you like to expand on that and tell us what are your concerns about your experience in dealing with FIFA during that time?
Lord Triesman: Chairman, I think there are two sets of issues. Let me just distinguish between the two, otherwise it will be a confused comment that I make. The first is about what potentially are the ingredients for working with FIFA as a whole in order to deliver a successful World Cup. I think you have just heard what I regard as in a substantial way a very accurate description of that from Mike Lee. The second area is about the conduct of some members of the FIFA executive. What I had in mind when I was last in front of the Committee was not that I would retail every rumour-Mike Lee is absolutely right; the place is awash with rumours all the time-but that I would, if it was thought helpful by the Committee, go to the specifics of some things which were put to me personally, sometimes in the presence of others, which in my view did not represent proper and ethical behaviour on the part of those members of the committee. If that is helpful, I think it is probably high time it was ventilated.
Q48 Chair: That would be helpful, and I think the Committee would like to hear it.
Lord Triesman: Let me start if I may, Chairman, with a couple of the stories that investigative journalists have already started on, although I suspect there is more detail.
The first concerns a proposition that was put to me and to Sir Dave Richards on 7 October in the afternoon at the Wyndham Grand Hotel, in the business suite there. We were invited by Jack Warner to meet him that afternoon after he had spoken at the Leaders in Football conference. He said that he had things that he wanted to talk to us about and put to us. Sir Dave and I speculated about what that might be in the taxi ride over to Chelsea, but it did not take us very long in the discussion with him before he came to the point. He said, and I took notes then and wrote down a contemporaneous note as soon as I got home, that he was very concerned; he believed that after all of his years in Trinidad and Tobago football, he had nothing that he could regard as his legacy; things that he would think were his legacy. What he had in mind was that some sort of school should be built, or an education establishment should be built, which had some affinity with football, possibly with some sort of academy role in the school, but essentially a school and with a proper set of offices which would be his legacy to the Trinidad and Tobago football authority, from which they could work in the future. As he described it, Sir Dave nodded to me. I understood exactly what the nod meant. It meant this is what we probably came in the room expecting to hear. I said immediately that in my view the proposition was out of the question. Sir Dave said in what I can only really describe as a stage whisper-you could certainly have heard it around that lounge-I’ll leave out some of the language-Sir Dave said, "You must be joking, Jack. You’re talking about probably £2.5 million." Jack Warner nodded at that and sat back. He didn’t say anything. He nodded at it. But he then said that the funds could be channelled through him and he would guarantee that they were appropriately spent.
Some time later, because that was obviously an event to which we did not respond positively, nor would we respond positively, he got in touch with me after the appalling disaster in Haiti. I think we were all concerned about that, Chairman. I could just illustrate it very, very quickly if I may. When the earthquake struck, a number of Haitian referees were meeting at their football headquarters and a number of them were killed. It was an appalling disaster for Haiti generally speaking, but certainly football suffered its part of that disaster. Jack Warner got in touch with me and he said that the thing that in his view would lift the spirits of the people of Haiti was if they could see the World Cup; football would lift people’s spirits, and what he needed was somebody to make the donation to buy the television rights so that large screens could be erected in Haiti so that people could watch the games. He believed that if he had a sum of about half a million pounds sent to him, he could secure those rights. I again said that that was in my view entirely out of the question. Of course I would love to think that people could see the tournament from wherever they were but that that was out of the question. Some time later it was put to me that he was the owner of those rights but whether he was or he was not, those were the sums that were mentioned. I probably ought to add, Chairman, that because of what we felt about it, as soon as we could we sent a team of referee trainers to try and train the next echelon of referees in Haiti to step up and rebuild their capacity. That seemed to me to be the proper way of trying to respond to the problem that they had encountered.
A second example is from 3 November 2009, when we met Nicolás Leoz in Asunción. We were presenting the World Cup bid to him. There was a brief interlude toward the end of the introduction to the bid. I would describe it as not a break in the conversation; it was a conversation which essentially continued as I was guided from the table around which we were all sitting to a display cabinet in which there was a large book in which there were facsimiles of the very many honours that he had received from a number of different countries, and indeed photos of streets and street signs around the world which had been named after him also as a matter of honour. The translation-because I don’t speak Spanish, although I can occasionally understand a word or two and I won’t pretend that I could understand it-was as I recall it undertaken by Mr Amaral. Mr Leoz said that he believed that the appropriate way of recognising his achievements in world football was not by money-he didn’t need money, he already was personally a very wealthy man. That was not what he sought. But he was deeply concerned about whether people recognised what he had achieved in terms of the honours that he had received. I was shown the facsimile of his Légion d’Honneur and I was then told, through the translator but directly after he had spoken, that he believed that a knighthood from the United Kingdom would be appropriate. It was put to me that as a former Foreign Office Minister, I must know how these things are organised and could probably achieve it if we had a mind to do so. I said that it was completely impossible; we did not operate in the United Kingdom like that. Mr Leoz shrugged his shoulders and turned and walked away.
The third example was on 14 November in Qatar with Mr Teixeira, the representative of the Brazilian Football Association and this was a very much briefer encounter. We had just lost to Brazil and I was congratulating him and he was commiserating with me-he has some English, certainly, but relatively limited English-and I said I was looking forward to coming to Brazil to talk to him about our bid and that I was personally delighted that President Lula, with whose State visit I had been involved as a Foreign Office Minister responsible, among other things, for the Americas, had given us express support for the chance to host the World Cup in 2018. Mr Teixeira said to me, "Lula is nothing. You come and tell me what you have for me." Now I understand that that could be sufficiently ambiguous as to refer to a variety of things, but I must say that I thought it was a surprising way of putting it and, in its way, a shocking way of putting it, because it would be easy to interpret, "What you have for me" as meaning, "What do you have for me?" rather than anything else.
The fourth example to bring to your attention, Chairman, is this. We had a number of conversations with Mr Worawi Makudi, telephone conversations for the most part. He was eager to secure a match between the England team and the Thai team, and I have to tell you that discussions about the possibility of playing matches in countries, even if they are not at the top of our list of desired friendly matches, is a discussion that takes place, and it would be foolish to pretend that it doesn’t. He was eager to see the match take place to commemorate-it was either the 50th or 60th, I think 60th anniversary, but it could no doubt be checked-of the King of Thailand’s accession to the throne.
Mr Makudi said it would be a great honour if England came, and we talked about the possibilities, how it would fit in at the end of the season, what the arrangements might be with the clubs. But the one thing that he did insist on was that one way or another the TV rights to the broadcasts in the United Kingdom would go to him. I made the point to him that, broadly speaking, the rights to games played overseas are owned by the federations or those in the countries where the game is being played. So, for the sake of argument, if we played in France, the rights to a game would be held by whatever arrangements the French Association has with its broadcasters for games of that kind. It was not, in any case, in my view, something that we could or should organise, and I told him that. But that was what he believed was the critical thing to making the arrangement a success.
Those four examples, Chairman, struck me as being way out of any of the understandings I ever had of what the Ethics Committee of FIFA would expect or FIFA would expect.
I just finish the point, if I may-and forgive me for retailing it at length, but I was asked to be explicit about these things-I thought, having taken quite a lot of advice over a period about the Ethics Committee, that from the point at which Seb Coe was asked to step back from the chairmanship of the Ethics Committee of FIFA, which he chaired with great success over a period of time, but because he was linked to the England bid, and it was therefore thought potentially inappropriate, there was a vacuum in FIFA for some considerable time about the adjudication of ethics issues, and those were four specific examples where I thought that the standards were way below anything we would ever accept in this country.
Q49 Chair: Can I ask you to clarify? How overt in your mind was the linkage in each of the four cases between what was being asked for and the promise of a vote for an England bid?
Lord Triesman: In the first three examples they all took place absolutely in the context of formal approaches about the bid, and in the case of Mr Teixeira it was the second or third sentence in from saying that we were looking forward to coming to Brazil in order to present our bid to him. I think that with Mr Makudi, it might be argued that the events were potentially different, but it is hard not to think that a member of the FIFA Executive Committee, who is potentially seeking what might be a very lucrative arrangement around a football match, is unaware of the idea settling in my mind, or in the minds of people in this country who are responsible for the bid, that these things would be linked.
Q50 Chair: When you had these conversations, were you aware of reports and rumours that this was quite common practice for members of the Executive Committee, or some members of the Executive Committee, to seek some kind of payment in order to secure their support?
Lord Triesman: Rather as Mike Lee said, the place is awash with rumours the whole way through this and it is always a bit difficult to know-some of the rumours are very fanciful-which ones to believe. But there were certainly a large number of rumours of that kind. I must say that there were also people who were saying to me, "There are some people in this FIFA Board who we can tell you,"-and I would say this is all a bit dismaying-"are honest in an absolutely stellar way." People would always say that of Mr Ogura in Japan, Dr Chung in South Korea, of Michel Platini, of Senes Erzik in Turkey. There were always people who were mentioned on the other side of it as people who were completely incorruptible.
Q51 Chair: What did you do about these individuals who you felt had not behaved appropriately? Did you express your concerns to FIFA?
Lord Triesman: That is an absolutely critical question. What we did-I am not sure it was the right thing to do, and I will acknowledge that-was that we decided, inevitably, that we would not engage in any of those kinds of activities, whatever the suggestions were. There was a huge amount of pressure to try and secure these games for England, a huge desire not to burn off any prospect of doing so, and although there have from time to time been some discussions with people at FIFA, the point was not pressed. I think in retrospect we would have burned off our chances of the games very much earlier-probably no greater disadvantage than we ended up with, when one thinks of the entire ballot-had we said what we knew to be happening earlier.
Q52 Chair: So you felt that to make a complaint that some members of the Executive Committee were being unduly influenced by what can best be described as bribes, and to pursue that the only result would be to absolutely ensure England stood no chance at all?
Lord Triesman: Yes. Not only that, but when you listen to some of the things that members of the Committee said when The Sunday Times and then Panorama quite rightly, in my judgment, published the evidence they had about corrupt practice, the response was immediately that if we in England, including our media, behave like that, "Then you cannot expect any support from us."
Q53 Chair: You will have heard that we have received a further submission from The Sunday Times, which names other members of the Executive Committee and suggests that they received payment in support of the Qatar bid. Is that something which comes as a surprise to you?
Lord Triesman: I suppose these days I am not surprised by any of it, Chairman. The truth is that if it can be stood up by good journalism it ought to be taken seriously. I haven’t heard those allegations directly myself, but I would like to think that good investigative journalism will have established whether there is a fundamental case, and if there is a fundamental case it cannot be right for FIFA to ignore that, any more that it ignores anything else.
Q54 Chair: On the basis of your experience, both in terms of your direct contact with certain members, and indeed from having observed the process, do you think that the outcome of the 2018 and 2022 contests was unduly influenced by improper behaviour on behalf of some members of the Executive Committee?
Lord Triesman: I think it will have been influenced to some extent. I also think that there were a number of things that we failed to understand about the character of the competition. Indeed I found myself having quite a lot of sympathy with what Mike Lee said about some of those factors. So I think there were a number of different features, but certainly the behaviour of some individuals in a very small electorate, an electorate of course diminished from 24 to 22 by two people being stood down for corruption in the course of the process. It sounds rather like a narrow statistician, forgive me, but the variants that each of those voting members represents is, of course, quite considerable, if you think of it in electoral terms.
But let me add, if I may, that when we first embarked on the bid, because I do think this was a factor, we were very strongly encouraged to do so by Jérôme Valcke, largely because he believed it would be very helpful if a hosting nation could guarantee a very considerable commercial success without there being any considerable risk around that success, and we looked to be a very natural candidate in those circumstances.
What was not put to us was that the desire of a number of people was to see a far greater geographical spread of the opening of new markets, and I think that was genuinely a significant factor, and not a factor that was built into our thinking, largely because of the guidance we were receiving in a different direction. Had that been said to us at the beginning I would have probably advised the FA not to make a bid.
Q55 Chair: Would you accept that on that particular criterion, unlike payment of bribes, that is a perfectly legitimate aim for FIFA? They perhaps should have made it clear in the first place, but if that was one of the key considerations they are perfectly entitled to adopt it.
Lord Triesman: Yes, I think they are absolutely entitled to adopt it. They could help bidding nations. There are advantages in bidding even if you are not successful. There is not much of an advantage in bidding if you are humiliated, but there are advantages in pursuing bids and seeing if you can build on the experience of bids over a period of time, all of that is true. But if there is to be a filter, and that is a perfectly legitimate filter, then someone should tell you at the beginning before money that would otherwise go into children’s football in parks, and the proper organisation of the sport at the grassroots, is diverted into an exercise of this kind.
Q56 Chair: It is a perfectly understandable frustration that perhaps we entered a contest without fully appreciating the rules under which it was being conducted, but obviously the suggestion that there was widespread breach of the rules is a much more serious matter. What do you think needs to happen? What should FIFA do to try and clean up its act?
Lord Triesman: I think it needs to do a series of things. The first thing is to produce a very much wider electorate. I don’t think that is the only answer in this incidentally, because what we do see of voting in FIFA, for example, for the presidency of FIFA, is that continental blocs very frequently vote together, so it would not automatically create the kind of diversity that you get in the award of an Olympic Games, but I believe it would help because it is not always possible to corral everybody, and over a period of time people would probably break out of the corral.
Secondly, I think that it is imperative that FIFA has a proper Ethics Committee, properly chaired, as Seb Coe unquestionably did chair it properly, that has absolutely explicit powers and which takes every prima facie case that is presented with good evidence seriously and investigates it. The option of saying, "We simply don’t believe that it happens and we are not going to investigate, but we think it is a slur that somebody should even suggest that it is the case", seems to me to belong to-well, certainly not to any modern period in any modern institution.
Q57 Dr Coffey: But if there is an Ethics Committee and member nations like the FA cannot be bothered to take allegations to it of impropriety, why bother? Because frankly I am appalled that we did not take our view there, and also the evidence that you were suggesting that Russia and others had bribed referees. If you are not prepared to put an allegation forward why does the Committee exist?
Lord Triesman: I said that I thought that conforming to the expectations that we should try and win this but without behaving improperly, in retrospect, was not the right view to take, and I accept that point. But the Chairman’s question understandably is, "Going forward what might we do that was different?" and I am trying to illustrate that.
Q58 Dr Coffey: So you would encourage anybody with any suggestion of allegation with evidence, and I assume you will now present this evidence to FIFA, that we should give a green light to all whistle-blowers to do that.
Lord Triesman: To all credible whistle blowing-
Dr Coffey: Yes, but you have evidence there.
Lord Triesman: So long as it is credible and it is not just simply the retailing of unsubstantiated rumours, I think that your point is right.
Q59 Dr Coffey: So you will go to FIFA now with your suggestions will you?
Lord Triesman: I always said I would come to a committee in Parliament first, because I am a parliamentarian myself. That would be the first step, but I think it is right to then proceed.
Q60 Dr Coffey: You could have said it in the Chamber with parliamentary privilege, couldn’t you?
Lord Triesman: I am not entirely sure under which piece of recent legislation I would have got up and made that speech, but I will ponder that.
Q61 Dr Coffey: I am sure you could always do a debate or you could have asked for a debate on a particular matter.
Lord Triesman: Indeed, and I would probably have had-what is it now, given the size of the Chamber?-a one in 770 chance of securing it.
Dr Coffey: I think Madam Speaker would have been-
Q62 Paul Farrelly: Before we move on to the FA, the personnel and the changes, I wanted to clear up a couple of curiosity items, as it were, on this point. How did the man from Paraguay come by his Légion d’Honneur? Did you ask him?
Lord Triesman: No, I decided-
Paul Farrelly: I don’t want to insinuate that France held a very successful World Cup bid for 1998, but did you ask him?
Lord Triesman: No, I took the view that I wasn’t going to proceed with that conversation any further than it had gone, but he had come by-let alone the Légion d’Honneur-a very significant number of other awards.
Q63 Paul Farrelly: We will leave that in FIFA’s hands to investigate or otherwise. Secondly, you mention the media-I think we are going to have some questions about the media later. Wasn’t it the reality that the bid was lost long before The Sunday Times came sniffing around; that the numbers weren’t there?
Lord Triesman: I think that is probably true. I think that what may have happened over the period is that we moved from the position that wasn’t a winning position to a position that was an extremely poor losing position, and that that was one of the factors.
Paul Farrelly: If you look-
Lord Triesman: Let me add, I imply no criticism. I know that some people were critical of the media telling stories about corruption. I thought there were a number of things that were said in the media that were very disobliging about this country and various features of the bid, but that is up to them. That is their choice. What I think nobody could object to is proper investigative journalism revealing the facts.
Q64 Paul Farrelly: Sure, but if you look at the way the voting went, there were two people in particular who knew that England did not have the votes, and those are the two people who voted for Netherlands and Belgium to finish you off in the first round because that vote dropped by two and they switched to Russia afterwards. Did you know who the dastardly duo were who really had it in for you?
Lord Triesman: No, I haven’t investigated it, but if you told me I would be intrigued.
Q65 Paul Farrelly: No, I am just asking the question. The final curiosity question: do you know who were the "truthful twosome"? Who were the two who voted for us?
Lord Triesman: Oh-
Paul Farrelly: If you hazard a guess who would you put your finger on?
Lord Triesman: I think Geoff Thompson would have been one of them.
Q66 Paul Farrelly: You have no idea about the second?
Lord Triesman: I think despite the fact that he was the subject of one of the allegations, there is a reasonably good chance that the representative of Cameroon was the other one. He made a very public promise in front of his African football executive that he would support it in a way that, in my judgement, he need not have done and would certainly have made his stance very visible to a number of people. Backing off that might have been a rather more complex issue.
Q67 Mr Sanders: Did England’s bid deserve to win?
Lord Triesman: I would like to have won. I don’t know that it was done to the standards that, in the final analysis, would have justified it winning, particularly if the criteria were the movement through to new geographical areas. If I may say so, not in a spirit of arrogance, because I couldn’t stand those signs of arrogance if they ever bubbled through to the surface-I think there were a number of things that were genuinely compelling about our bid, not least those elements of legacy that we were able to identify, some of which we didn’t do precisely because of the bid. The outreach work in Africa, for example, had been going on for a decade before we made the bid, but I was very proud of that work in the FA. It was being done with some of the poorest children in the world, and some of the richest football stars in the world were prepared to take part in doing it. So I think it was the case that some of the things we were doing, and intended to step up to an even higher level, probably ought to have given us a little bit more credit.
Q68 Mr Sanders: Is there anything that should have been done differently?
Lord Triesman: I am sure there were a number of things that should have been done differently. I find it hard to comment on the last seven or eight months, for obvious reasons, but I think that over the years there was a great deal more that could have been done in working with both FIFA and UEFA. I completely accept that.
One of the first things I did when I arrived at the FA was to ask a number of colleagues to run-and for the most part they were successful-in elections to various UEFA bodies: David Elleray, David Gill, Peter Kenyon, myself as the Senior Vice Chairman of the International Competitions Committee, Ian Watmore, and I think there were four or five others, but I would have to say that this was pretty late in the day in the sequence of disengagement that some have, quite rightly, criticised. In FIFA I think that, apart from the meetings of the International Football Association Board, we were present because we had one of the Vice Presidents. That was about as present as we ever were. Those are long term structural problems and I think that we suffered from them. I think that it is true to say that there were aspects of the bid that were complex and quite difficult to explain, and I am not sure whether they were successfully explained to our domestic media. Let me give you a couple of examples of those, if I may.
The representative of Côte d'Ivoire, Jacques Anouma, was the personal financial adviser and very close associate of President Laurent Gbagbo. Anybody who has watched Côte d'Ivoire over the last months will understand the character of President Gbagbo’s regime and the extent of the control that he exerted in that regime. Indeed, it was sufficiently difficult and involved sufficient crimes against humanity for the United Nations to involve itself directly. I took the view that there was not a prayer that Jacques Anouma would do anything that President Gbagbo did not want him to do. You could take him to see Old Trafford and Wembley; you could talk to him about football until the cows come home, but the reality was that that would be something that was much more likely to be directed by a ruthless dictator in charge of that country. Mr Abu Reda, a very close associate of the Mubaraks: what were the prospects, unless there was some agreement at a more senior level, of persuading him to back England? These were regimes that were not only capable of deciding who should be in all of these key positions but determining their behaviour.
Q69 Chair: Could I come back to another story that has emerged today. You have made it clear that you took a view that the England bid would not resort to any of these tactics that you would regard as improper. A story has appeared about the England bid team having employed security consultants to snoop in the hotel lobbies to try and obtain information. Would you like to comment on that?
Lord Triesman: I don’t think, Chairman, that there was ever at any stage any improper behaviour in trying to get a view about what was happening across all of the competing bids. To my knowledge it was done-and when I was there it was done-openly and properly, and the people who assisted in running all of the bids, I think, were alert to what other bids were doing, but not by snooping, not by means that I think were dubious. I was not aware of anything that was dubious.
Q70 Chair: No, but were you surprised when you heard the reports that the England bid team had security people seeking to obtain information about other bids?
Lord Triesman: I knew the whole way through we were trying to understand what other bids were doing. For example, there were a number of occasions when people from other bids were on the road and seeing FIFA Executive Committee members in their countries. We tried to keep track of that because it was believed that if we didn’t keep track of it and we didn’t see them in their countries, or if we were seeing them after somebody else rather than before somebody else, we would need to think hard about how we were campaigning, but I am talking about issues at that level.
Q71 Chair: Would you regard the use of consultants, to try and obtain information by listening into conversations, as improper or perfectly fair as all part of this process?
Lord Triesman: I suppose it depends. If they are hanging around with a group of people and they hear a conversation, it would be a bit hard in the world of football, where everybody has constant and probably indiscreet conversations, not to hear some of that, but if it meant an intrusive approach I would not regard that as at all appropriate.
Q72 Damian Collins: How does one keep track of a member of FIFA Exco?
Lord Triesman: You have some fixed points that you know are going to be in their diaries: they are going to be at the FIFA Executive; they are usually going to be at the executive of their continental federations; you know that in some cases they are likely to turn up at some of the big events around the football world: SoccerEx and Leaders in Football, and so on. So you can see where quite a lot of them are going to be quite a lot of the time. Also, because they are on committees you know when all those committees are meeting. So, if they are going to be up in Zurich or in Nyon you will know about that. That probably gives you a pretty strong indication of what their diary looks like.
Q73 Damian Collins: Did you have people monitoring these meetings, and these events, that weren’t known to the FA officials or part of the England bid?
Lord Triesman: No, I don’t think that we ever went around in a way that we did not disclose. I am not aware that we ever did that and, candidly, I wouldn’t see the point.
Q74 Damian Collins: I want to briefly go back one final time to Jack Warner’s hotel room. It is difficult to see you and Sir Dave Richards as blushing maidens. You are both men of the world of football, and clearly you went into that meeting with some expectation that Jack Warner might have requirements from the England bid team that he wanted to discuss with you. Going into that meeting, what sort of things would you have been prepared to offer?
Lord Triesman: One of the things I knew that he felt very strongly about was that we had put a large amount of our effort, in development capacity-building terms, into Africa, and that he believed that there were a number of places in the Caribbean that ought to be considered for development work. They don’t always come up in the indices of the most poor countries because they often have mixtures in their economy that are a bit wealthier and a bit poorer, but there are unquestionably countries where it is a struggle to train the coaches, to train the referees, and it did seem to me that he was quite likely to put to us the need for greater investment in his federation in those areas. That is something that we would have considered in our normal programme.
Q75 Damian Collins: What about accepting offers for England matches-England played a Trinidad and Tobago friendly, as you alluded to earlier? Some of the England friendlies aren’t necessarily against the sort of ranking teams that England would feel it needs to play against. Other federations might say, "Well, this is an ace up England’s sleeve that it can use and we can’t."
Lord Triesman: We had already done it. The match was played within a month of my arriving at the FA, and I think had been booked into the schedule a year or a year and a half before that. So we had gone to Trinidad and Tobago. Some of the star players had met a number of the kids and young aspirant footballers in Trinidad and Tobago. I didn’t think he was likely to ask us for that, because the idea of going back a couple of times in two years would not have been realistic in anybody’s book.
Q76 Damian Collins: I would like to go back to your resignation and the events around that. Firstly, the allegations that you made-I suppose, in an off-the-record situation-that were reported, which led to your resignation. Did you feel that there was enough basis to those allegations that that is something you should have taken up with FIFA? It is not an example that you gave to the Committee today about concerns about corrupt practices.
Lord Triesman: I want to express this cautiously, because there are matters that are still in front of the PCC and I don’t want to trespass inappropriately. What I had said, to be accurate about it, was that there were a number of rumours around. I will tell the Committee that I had been approached by a Spanish investigative journalist who wanted to put to me a number of things which he wanted to know whether I had either heard about or believed might be happening here. He was writing what I assume would be a pretty substantive story that covered the manipulation of referees and also questions of avoiding the doping regulation in Spanish sport. As I understood it, he had access to the tape of a discussion that a Spanish investigating magistrate had managed to get hold of, in which some of these things appear to have been discussed between fairly senior people in Spain. But I didn’t put it in my list because even a good and serious journalist coming along with a story of that kind might very well not be accurate. It might be a rumour, and I said it was among the more fanciful things I thought I’d heard.
Q77 Damian Collins: You must regret the fact that you were recorded as making those comments, given that you feel-compared to other statements you have made today-that those allegations were fanciful enough that they didn’t warrant further discussion in your evidence of this morning.
Lord Triesman: It was a very light-hearted discussion over a cup of coffee. Rather as people who know each other and are chatting about football might have. Of course I would rather it hadn’t happened, but the fact is you don’t expect, while having a cup of coffee with somebody who you think is a friend that they are recording you and then going to sell it to a newspaper.
Q78 Damian Collins: You said something about the Spanish, and ultimately the allegations are in regard to the Russian Federation as well. Do you have anything more to say about that?
Lord Triesman: It was part of the sequence of questions that the Spanish journalist put to me in which he said, among other things, did I have any view about why a Spanish Sports Minister should have been at a discussion about oil and gas between the two Governments. I had no idea. I have no idea whether it happened.
Q79 Damian Collins: Mike Lee mentioned earlier on that he thought it was wrong to have the roles brought together, being Chairman of the FA and chairing the bid. With hindsight, do you think that is right?
Lord Triesman: Well, when it started, almost the first thing I did was to go to see Mr Blatter in Zurich, where we had an intriguing discussion. Just in order to explain the tone of it I ought to say that the first part of it for some time involved him interrogating me as to whether Andrew Jennings was one of my very close friends and whether we had been to university together. I think he was surprised to hear, because he had been briefed that that was the case, that we didn’t know each other at all. Indeed, we only came to know each other in the last year. I think that is probably pretty accurate. Anyway, he was deeply concerned about that and he pressed that point at some length.
But then, to come to your question more directly, he said that he believed that there were two things which were absolutely paramount in making any kind of bid, including any kind of successful bid. The first was that it would be completely clear that the Government of the day, and any possible successor Government, stood absolutely behind the bid, stood behind whatever the terms FIFA dictated ought to be included in the bid agreements, and that that should be at the very highest level-prime ministerial level. The second was that the domestic football association must be seen to be 100% behind the bid as well. Incidentally, because Russia was mentioned in this context earlier, it was a requirement put to Vitaly Mutko as well-exactly the same requirement. I asked him what he meant by that and he said, "You have got to chair this bid."
I will tell the Committee, I wasn’t over the moon-to use a footballing expression-at hearing that. My life was very full. The FA was very full. I am a member of one or two Chambers of this Parliament, I like to take a decent part in the life of this Parliament, and I had done a vast amount of travelling when I was Foreign Office Minister, as you do, and the idea of doing a vast amount more was not exactly what I wanted to hear. But it was certainly true that they wanted an arm’s-length company, and we created one, and I accepted what he said was a requirement of us and took that role, having had a really quite difficult discussion in the FA Board saying I was not at all keen on it and they said, "You know, those seem to be the rules of the game; buckle down and understand it."
Q80 Damian Collins: In light of that, was that the reason for having Sir Dave Richards involved as well as Chairman of the Premier League, and do you feel that his resignation damaged the bid?
Lord Triesman: I was very, very eager to have the Chairman of the Premier League-or if not the Chairman then Richard Scudamore from the Premier League-and Lord Mawhinney, then Chairman of the Football League. Because the whole of the arrangement that you would have to make would involve not only the use of some of the biggest grounds but, as we saw in our bid book, grounds that went down through the championship, and also a number of grounds that would be the home base and the practice grounds for all of the teams. These leagues had to be really fully behind it and to co-operate with it. It took a long time to get the Premier League on board. The point was made to me very early on that I could have them on board very quickly if I would concede that the 39th game was a great idea-then they would be on board immediately.
Q81 Damian Collins: That was seriously a negotiating point?
Lord Triesman: That was put to me directly.
Q82 Damian Collins: Who by?
Lord Triesman: By Richard Scudamore. My view of the 39th game is my view of the 39th game, I am afraid. If I was asked the same question today I would produce the same answer. But it was none the less really desirable, and Sir Dave did come on and he did take part in a good deal of the international travel, and I appreciate that and thank him for it. At the point at which he decided to resign I thought that it was shaking a rather shaky machine to too great an extent.
Q83 Damian Collins: Back to talking about Sir Dave for a moment, were you aware that the company of which he was a director, which his son ran, had been used by the World Cup bid team as a supplier for some of their events?
Lord Triesman: No, I have seen that in the newspapers and I am surprised to hear it.
Q84 Damian Collins: You were not aware of that then?
Lord Triesman: No.
Q85 Damian Collins: Did you have any rules in terms of managing potential conflict of interest for people who are members of the bid team who may have many different interests in their professional life? Were there any procedures for managing conflicts of interest like that?
Lord Triesman: What, among the members of the bid board?
Damian Collins: Yes.
Lord Triesman: There were no members of the bid board who had a direct involvement in FIFA other than Geoff Thompson, and I think that everybody will know that Geoff’s conduct is always pristine. That is my experience of it.
Q86 Damian Collins: No, I was talking more in the case of Sir Dave Richards, were there known procedures whereby if a commercial supplier was going to be used by the bid and one of the members of the board had an interest-in Sir Dave’s case he was a director of that company-that that should be disclosed. I only ask because when I put this question to Hugh Robertson when he gave evidence to us, he said that, for example, with LOCOG there are very clear rules that a director might leave the room before a decision is made to engage that company.
Lord Triesman: Where there were questions of potential conflicts of interest, people were expected to leave the room. I would have expected in the case of anything that was being purchased by the bid to have seen, above a certain value at least, competitive tendering, and I would have expected a declaration of interest by anybody whose business was supplying anything to us.
Q87 Damian Collins: Regardless of the value in that case?
Lord Triesman: Regardless of the value-anything that is in a commercial contract. That essentially was a ground rule that we had in the FA Board. Any member of the FA Board would know that was exactly how we conducted ourselves.
Q88 Damian Collins: So you were surprised to read these reports?
Lord Triesman: I was very surprised. I don’t even know what it was he supplied, incidentally-or sorry, what the company supplied.
Damian Collins: It was promotional material to support some of the events that were held to promote the bid. Thank you.
Q89 Dr Coffey: Lord Triesman, you heard the question I put to Mike Lee earlier, and I said I would ask you the same. I have not heard this particularly from the FA but from other people involved in football. There was a concern that one of the things that went wrong was announcing the bid too early. You have heard Mike Lee’s response. Gordon Brown was perhaps about to call an election, and it could have been a feelgood factor in the country with an England World Cup bid. Is it fair to say that Gordon Brown gave an ultimatum?
Lord Triesman: No, he didn’t give an ultimatum. What happened was that he announced it before the FA board considered it, and the FA Board then-
Q90 Dr Coffey: Is that a bit of an ultimatum?
Lord Triesman: If it was intended to be an ultimatum it nearly had exactly the opposite effect.
Q91 Dr Coffey: So why didn’t the FA say, "Actually, Prime Minister, we are holding our fire until we make our own decision"?
Lord Triesman: This happened before I arrived at the FA, but from what I understand took place, because I have of course tried to reconstruct the sequence and the narrative for myself, the announcement was made, and the FA, which was going to consider a paper at a board meeting-which it did shortly after I arrived; I think it may have even been my first board meeting-looked at it, and was concerned that it had not taken the initiative if it had been minded to do so, and that it had not happened that way round.
Q92 Dr Coffey: We heard some evidence from Roger Burden about why he withdrew his application to be Chairman of the FA, because he recognised one of the roles was to have that relationship with people in UEFA and FIFA and he felt that he couldn’t do that. Do you think the FA is likely to bid for the World Cup ever again? Would you do it?
Lord Triesman: I think it’s extremely unlikely that the opportunity will come round any time soon, not just because the next three are already decided-Brazil, Russia, Qatar-but if it is the case that opening up new territories is the critical factor, I could well imagine the logic of that argument taking people towards China or India or whatever, or maybe Australia, which did mount a bid. I don’t know for certain that that will happen, but we are probably talking then, if those are the general conditions that impact on the thinking of the FIFA Executive Committee, a very long time into the future. I fear I won’t be seeing those games. I am going to try, though.
Dr Coffey: Thank you.
Q93 Alan Keen: Do you think the strength of the Premier League-it is not just the poaching of players, and the economics of it, from other nations, but also the televising of Premier League games in other nations-damaged our bid? Do you think that causes resentment?
Lord Triesman: The response I found to the Premier League around the world came in two different ways. The first was that there was an enormous admiration for what had been achieved. Great, great competition, generating huge rights and a great deal of other commercial activity. I think that was admired. I know that on a number of visits that I made abroad with Sir Dave people would ask advice about, for example, how to construct television deals or what the basics of the competition might be that would be encouraging to broadcasters and I think he gave of his time very fulsomely when people asked those questions. So on that side lies admiration. I don’t think I am being indiscreet here, because I think a number of people overheard this conversation, but I had a conversation with President Lula when he came to receive an international award in London in which, alongside telling me how much he admired football here and how much he would wish to see us win the 2018 bid, he also said it would be desirable if we stopped, as the translator put it from the Portuguese, hoovering up all of their youngsters so that the most talented ones were never seen playing in Brazil. That was a view which I also heard around the place. Not everybody wants to see their 16-year-olds move around. Whatever the state of international employment law might be, whether there are any restraints on it or not, you can understand why people would like to see great local talent playing in great local competitions. So I think that a number of people did tend to respond to us as being successful but at some considerable cost to them.
Q94 Alan Keen: The economic reasons for the players coming to the Premier League and televising worldwide of the Premier games, that is justifiable to a certain extent on economic grounds. But you are absolutely right, something should be done about the poaching of young players. Do you agree that we have the same argument within this country between the Premier League and the rest of football, right down to grassroots? Is there not the responsibility also for helping the rest of the world develop its football, instead of all the money coming to the Premier League, because it is so good and is often praised as deserved by Richard Scudamore and Sir Dave Richards? Is one of the problems that we are faced with resentment that has built up because of the economic success of the Premier League?
Lord Triesman: The greater the economic success, of course, the more the powers gravitate towards whoever is successful in that way, and that means that they come to dictate. I do not mean in the sense of issuing diktats, but in the sense of the economic rationale that then follows. They come to dictate the sorts of salaries that are available, the size of squads on those kinds of salaries and so on. There is no question that there are people who feel that that disadvantages them quite considerably. It is also true that there is a great deal of outreach work done in the world by Premier League clubs. I have the great honour-and I do count it as a great honour-to be a patron of Tottenham Hotspur’s foundation. I have probably upset people. Anyway, there is a great deal of work done in Africa by that foundation and that is outreach from that club. Many clubs do it, but it is an uneasy balance.
Alan Keen: There is a self-interest involved in any development work done.
Lord Triesman: Yes, I guess the answer may be that, if you look at the proportion of the money that is earned going to those kinds of objectives, the greater the proportion, the less resentment there will be. The more people will feel it is crumbs off a very rich table, the more likely they are still to feel some resentment. I guess that is how people feel.
Q95 Alan Keen: You heard me ask Mike Lee-it was not that I wanted to do Mike out of his job that he does probably better than anyone else in the world, going by the results-does there need to be a bidding system, whether it is the IOC or FIFA? Should the world governing body not, through talking to other nations-not making them cover all they do not want to-make those decisions? Do you accept this-that the FA were really misled? If FIFA wanted to give the World Cup to Russia because it needed some encouragement, and Qatar was not one of the best-known football nations, and it is a way of encouraging developing football nations to develop their game, is there an argument for not having a bidding system at all? It does cost an awful lot of money and a lot of heartache.
Lord Triesman: I suppose it would be possible to devise other ways of awarding the World Cup. I think it is very important that the key criteria are set out by the world governing body. If it believes that the aim is to get football to other parts of the world, I think that is a perfectly reasonable criterion to express. It may very well be that there are other means then available for selection. The advantage, as I said earlier, is that you would not bid for things in which you have no chance. Why on earth would you bother? The one potential advantage of a voting system rather than any other kind of system is that it does and should engage a very much wider part of the worldwide football family in deciding what it wants.
Q96 Alan Keen: You would still have a voting system within the governing body, as happens now. It is just that you do not force nations to incur tremendous costs bidding against each other, when only one can win. Could I ask you, David, as well: you have mentioned where you felt that approaches were being made for bribes; did you also have the feeling, those aside, that it was FIFA itself that was-not asking for bribes necessarily, but making the decision irrespective of the quality of the bids? They had made their mind up in a way. Is that true? Are there two segments of that in the 24 voting body: one segment of individuals looking for bribes, but others being dictated to by FIFA for whatever reason that may be?
Lord Triesman: I am sure that FIFA, as an organisation, though its president, has very great influence and impact on some members of the Executive Committee. Whether all of them, I would not say, but it does have influence without any question. In a way, Alan, I think I can only answer the question and try to get to the heart of what you are saying by saying that I think a wider electorate would be better than this narrow electorate. I think that it would be harder to influence everybody in a wider electorate to the same extent. It would become impossible for bidding nations, should they seek to do things that were not proper, to do that to the same extent to 215 possible voters, for example, if it was the whole of the membership of FIFA.
At the end of it, my point about the end of it is about the beginning of it: whatever happens at the beginning, it would be very, very important if what was required was spec-ed out properly and set out for whoever then wanted to contest it. In a way, I guess it is like winning the contractual rights to do anything in a business or elsewhere. If what you are being asked for is fundamentally at odds with what you can possibly do-you cannot be a new territory in that sense-then tell us at the beginning and we will make the decision to not embroil ourselves in a way that is fruitless.
Q97 Ms Bagshawe: Just quickly, Lord Triesman, at the start of your evidence, you have identified, I think accurately, that there are two separate issues here: one is the deficiencies of England’s bid, and you have agreed with some of Mr Lee’s evidence on some of the ways it could have been improved; the second is the possible corruption of people on FIFA’s Executive Committee. In the earlier session, we explored some of the submission that was made by The Sunday Times. May I say, you are always good box office when you come in front of the Committee, Lord Triesman? You gave us some very shocking evidence of your direct experience as part of the World Cup bid. In your judgment, even if our bid had been better and had remedied some of those structural deficiencies, would it have been possible for England to have won its World Cup bid without offering bribes, benefits in kind, honours and other considerations to members of FIFA’s Executive Committee?
Lord Triesman: I do not know the answer to that question in a way that would allow me to say yes or no, but I certainly think it was a millstone.
Q98 Ms Bagshawe: My colleague Mr Farrelly asked jokingly in his question when the Légion d’Honneur might have been awarded to the executive member from Paraguay. I actually think that was a very salient question. Do you think that, given the evidence that we have had presented us today in both sessions, including your evidence, it is now absolutely a matter of pressing concern for FIFA to have an open investigation into these allegations of corruption, which are black and white?
Lord Triesman: I do think it is a pressing concern and I take the point that some of might have pressed it earlier. I understand that point as well, but I think it is a pressing concern. We have a number of very credible pieces of good investigative journalism: The Sunday Times, The Times in relation to Mr Warner, Panorama. But what I observe is that it is very, very unusual that any investigation gets off the first few steps. The first few steps did have an impact on FIFA Executive Committee members, but that is a very unusual event and there is nothing else that I understand is likely to happen.
I will present them with whatever evidence is useful, and I am more than willing to do that. I have no doubt that the first response will be that it never happened, and there will be a closing of ranks, but it must be right in any circumstances where there is so much at stake-huge amounts of money, large amounts of national prestige, a sport that is loved worldwide-to clear up anything that is dubious.
Q99 Ms Bagshawe: Just finally, in your answer to Dr Coffey earlier, you said that you had waited. There was a reason why you did not make these allegations during the bid. You did not want to blow up the World Cup bid-fair enough-and afterwards you wished to present this evidence before a Select Committee of Parliament before taking it further. You have now done that. Will you now, therefore, be presenting this evidence to FIFA and asking for an investigation?
Lord Triesman: I will make good all parts of my undertaking.
Ms Bagshawe: Thank you.
Q100 Damian Collins: I will focus in on something completely different, and a bit closer to home. As you are the last witness in the oral evidence sessions for our inquiry, I just wanted to have an opportunity to ask you a question in your capacity as a former chairman of the FA. It relates to the situation with Queens Park Rangers and the process that led to them being fined. Now, that investigation allows for about eight months, and we had a farcical situation where a club were about to be awarded the Championship trophy and might have had to give it back within hours or days depending on the arbitration of the FA’s investigation. Do you think the FA needs to have slicker processes in place to consider issues like this so they do not affect the overall competitions?
Lord Triesman: I do not know what was involved in the collection of evidence, so I say this a little tentatively, but I would like to address the principle of what you have asked. Both Ian Watmore and I believed that it must be possible to do the regulatory work more effectively, more rapidly and in a more transparent way right across the whole of the field of regulation, and this would certainly be included in that.
Damian Collins: Thank you.
Chair: I think that is all we have for you. Lord Triesman, thank you very much.
Whats your opinion? One is treading through a minefield of mere 'SPEAK' and What is stranger? 'TRUTH or FICTION' and might I add also eventually 'All Roads Lead to Armageddon' for the 'Forsaken'.
Written Evidence from The Sunday Times a little later.
Cheers.
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