David Conn - The Fall of the House of FIFA: The Multimillion-Dollar Corruption at the Heart of Global Soccer

A ll the people who love football, the uncountable, ever-expanding millions or billions of us, will forever remember their first World Cup. For children, watching on television the faraway stars and splendours of the rolling matches, it is greater than entertainment and remembered with more than fond nostalgia: it is a formative experience. At the risk of blurting out a near-religious affinity for football, a simple, natural sport, so early in this account of how its world governing body, Fifa, crumpled into a mire of corruption and lies, I do believe there is in the World Cup something transcendent.

My first was 1974, the tournament played in the west of divided Germany, won finally by the host country whose strong and capable team, helmed by the visionary and rarefied skills of its captain, Franz Beckenbauer, overcame the fabulous, elaborate Holland of Johan Cruyff.

I was nine. I watched the whole spectacle, transfixed, on a big wooden lump of a colour telly in the living room of our house in north Manchester, where football was all around, woven into childhood. One of my earliest memories is of walking to infant school with my friend Anthony, and seeing the big boys in the junior school thundering through a mass game in the playground. As we passed by, a boy scored a neat, side-footed goal between the lines in the tarmac which passed for goals, and he wheeled sprinting away with an arm in the air and all his team running after him. I always wanted to be in the thick of that tumult, to play the game, and to be good at it.

Being taken to see United at Old Trafford and City at Maine Road, my head waist-high to the enormous crowds gathered there, connected our scamperings in the playground, park and garden to a much wider experience. I remember a friend of my dads pointing to some mass synchronised singing, swaying and clapping on the Stretford End at United, and I instinctively understood there was a deep swell of passion and tradition formed for football long before I was born into the swim of it. When it came to the challenge every Manchester boy faces, sometimes demanded with menacesCity or Unitedmy dad, a lapsed Bolton Wanderers supporter, gave no direction to follow, and with my freedom to choose I opted for City. The club was not the corporate, mega-wealthy, Abu Dhabi-owned, multinational City Football Group of today, nor were City the underachieving poor relations of United then; in the early seventies City had international stars and were the superior Manchester club. Bobby Charlton, the great engine of Uniteds recovery as a football club from the human tragedy of the 1958 Munich air crash, star for England in the 1966 and 1970 World Cups, was exhausted by then. The bright-eyed Belfast boy George Best, who unfurled his playground skills in the grandest stadiums, was already being scooped up in drinking basements in town. Denis Law, the other maestro in Uniteds triumphant trio, was a City striker for a final season or two by the time I emerged into football consciousness.

The gruff, tough pride Manchester men had for football was stamped into the citys character, and I think I was dimly aware of the general impression that we, in England, even invented the game. I never gave that much credence because the people who made a point of it only seemed to do so when they were angry, in bad-tempered exasperation at a modern game or world gone wrong, and with some implicit hostility to foreigners thinking they owned it.

It was only as an adult, a journalist researching the roots of football to understand its hyper-commercially exploited modern incarnation, that I read into the games history properly and discovered that this claim of British national pride is actually, remarkably, true. Football, its proportions, layout of the pitch and rules, which allow for its endlessly thrilling expression, were indeed first established and agreed at the historic meetings of the newly christened Football Association at the Freemasons Tavern in Londons Lincolns Inn, in 1863.

Now I believe that these fascinating and cherished origins should be taught to young people as a valuable part of learning football, and history, but they are not, and many of footballs adherents love the game all their lives without ever knowing how it all began. Growing up, we experienced these roots not as explicit history lessons but as a received sense of heritage, with innate values, from teachers at school and the dads who ran our clubs in the Sunday leagues. They strove to impart the understanding that along with the human instinct to get hold of that ball and run with it, dribble, boot it into the goal, came a necessary teamwork. When I started to play the game properly, on an actual grass pitch, I was quite startled to discover the degree of effort and fitness it demanded, and the challenge of sustaining it. There were the obvious rules of the game itself, against fouling, bullying, cheating and other thuggerynot always observed in the snarling confrontations, which passed for football, we grew up to encounter in some of Manchesters badlands. There was a decency we all soon understood in not lording a victory too cockily, and in having to scrape ourselves up after a defeat and shake hands with the boys on the other side. There were, to acknowledge the words now proclaimed as global commandments by Fifa and Uefa, fair play and respect, inherently required in the essence and conduct of the game.

Before the World Cup magically turned up on television in the summer of 1974, I am not sure I knew much about it at all. I can remember watching only two international matches before that tournament, both famous defeats for England, who were sinking into what would be a prolonged hangover following their victory at Wembley in their home World Cup of 1966. The first match was a 31 evisceration by Beckenbauers West Germany at Wembley, in which Gnter Netzer seemed to play uncontested in midfield, and which I did not even realise was the quarter-final of the 1972 European Championships, ultimately won by West Germany. The second was the generation-defining 11 home draw with Poland in October 1973, which meant England had not even qualified to play in the World Cup finals, when their goalkeeper Jan Tomaszewski was extraordinary and ours, Peter Shilton, let their goal through his legs. I couldnt quite take in what it all meant at the end, but remember running out of the lounge, crying in dismay.