[ARETE] Scott Bensinger, Red Card

Sun Jan 26 08:49:22 CST 2020

All,
Please find attached and below Jack Ryan's review of Scott Bensinger's *Red
Card*.

Bensinger, Scott. *Red Card: How the U.S. Blew the Whistle on the World’s
Biggest Sports Scandal*. New York: Simon & Schuster, 349 pp.

Reviewed by Jack Ryan

Near end time of the World Cup 2018 final, a mostly tantalizing match
between France and Croatia, FOX Sports cut away from the pitch to an
executive box. Gianni Infantino, the current International Federation of
Association Football (FIFA) President, who was elected during a raucous
2016 session of the FIFA Congress, was signing a commemorative soccer ball.
Vladimir Putin, adorned in a white shirt accented with a blazing red tie,
sat contentedly next to Infantino. The next time the soccer ball (or a
close facsimile) appeared was in Helsinki, Finland, when Putin, fresh off a
propaganda coup after successfully hosting the World Cup, handed the ball
to Donald Trump, who continued to fail at attempting to conduct political
business on the world stage. “I’ll give this ball to you and now the ball
is in your court,” said Putin, handing Trump the soccer ball. What Trump,
Putin, Infantino, and soccer have to do with each other might not seem
obvious; however, as Ken Bensinger, an investigative reporter for *BuzzFeed*,
makes abundantly clear in *Red Card: How the U.S. Blew the Whistle on the
World’s Biggest Sports Scandal*, soccer has produced a staggering gallery
of corrupt characters who would not feel out of place sharing expresso with
members of the Gambino family, especially if they were meeting in Brighton
Beach, Brooklyn, which New Yorkers call “Little Odessa.”

Years before most people had heard of Christopher Steele, the former
British spy who compiled the now infamous dossier on Trump and his Russian
activities, he was hired by a group of individuals and companies supporting
England’s 2018 World Cup bid to gather intelligence on competing bids.
According
to Bensinger, by early 2010, Steele recognized Putin’s interest in hosting
the World Cup, and he shared his information with his British clients and
Special Agent Mike Gaeta, head of the FBI’s Eurasian Organized Crime Squad
based in New York. Russia, of course, was profoundly unqualified to host
the World Cup: the country has no soccer tradition; its team had lost to
Slovenia and missed out on the 2010 tournament in South Africa; the country
lacked the infrastructure to support the monthlong competition; and,
finally, FIFA, the Swiss-based nonprofit that runs the World Cup and world
soccer, rated Russia’s bid the riskiest for 2018. Magically, that changed
because with people like Chuck Blazer, a seriously overweight guy from
Queens who never played soccer yet held the position of General Secretary
of the Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association
of Football (CONCACAF), a FIFA subset, running things from Trump Tower
anything was possible.  Russia was awarded the 2018 World Cup by a
landslide. Bensinger’s book explains how that happened with a propulsive
drive well suited for an episodic Netflix adaptation.

Once the odds-on-favorite, England received two votes, one from its own
representative. Blazer, who moved CONCACAF’s headquarters to the
seventeenth floor of Trump Tower at Trump’s invitation, voted for Russia.
As Bensinger notes, Blazer was used to sweet deals. Trump “proposed giving
Blazer a year’s rent for free and eleven additional years at half the
market rate” (40). How much Russia paid Blazer for his vote has never been
completely revealed, but whatever it was it did not go toward paying
CONCACAF’s Trump Tower rent. Blazer is only one of the outrageous
characters Bensinger presents in this highly readable book. The New York
characters could have been created by Jimmy Breslin; the international
characters by John Le Carré.

Characters like these, though, cannot stay in the shadows, and one of
Bensinger’s good guys, Andrew Jennings, an investigative journalist who
fearlessly drew “attention to himself as well as the [FIFA] men he
excoriated” (24). Jennings took pleasure in addressing Sepp Blatter, FIFA’s
long serving former president, as “Herr Blatter.” Jack Warner, once the
FIFA’s Vice President and President of CONCACAF, and perhaps the most
corrupt character featured in *Red Card*, ultimately banned Jennings from
all FIFA events. Jennings’s blog accounts would be picked up by the
mainstream British press and Steve Berryman, the IRS special agent who
dedicated himself to uncovering every illegal transaction concocted by this
global band of sports profiteers.

Since Maradona’s “hand of God” and the beginning of the “Fair Play”
campaign, FIFA had pushed hard for moralism on the field, but not in the
luxury boxes across the globe.  The expression “fair play” became a
favorite composite noun of the soccer establishment, to the point that the
famously corrupt Blatter, upset at boos he received alongside President
Dilma Rousseff during the opening ceremony of the 2013 Confederations Cup
in Brazil, irritably and ludicrously pleaded with the crowd: “Friends of
Brazilian football, where’s the respect, where’s the fair play?” Three
years later, Blatter would be banished from the sport because of arrests of
his colleagues in North and South America based on information collected by
agents of the United States, the heroes of *Red Card*.

Bensinger opens *Red Card* with a FIFA organizational flow chart, a tool
that displays how small countries can coalesced voting block power in order
to enrich themselves. He also includes a “cast of characters,” which allows
his readers to separate the bad guys from the good guys, those going to
jail from those escaping jail, and those throwing themselves in front of
bullet trains from those who only contemplate suicide. It took
investigators years to untangle the FIFA web of deals, bribes, and fraud.
In the end, the desire of law enforcement to hunt down all the corrupt
officials drove them to successfully conclude the investigation by damaging
“the men who had debauched and cheapened the beautiful game for their own
selfish ends” (286). Bensinger details this policework and the corruption
in fast-moving details that makes it difficult to put this book down.
Prosecutorial
success, though, has a short shelf life, especially in our present period
of lies filling in for the truth. A recent issue of *The New Yorker *reminds
us that corruption is a contagion. Sam Knight’s essay, “The Final Whistle:
A fan’s revelations about the corruption of soccer are bringing down its
most famous teams and the players,” adds a new chapter to the story of
soccer’s sleaze.  Putin’s soccer ball symbolized the power of money, and as
Knight reveals, a “dense intermingling of tactics, feuds, and money” have
combined to threaten European soccer. “Money above all” (44). So it goes.

______________________________________________________________________________

Knight, Sam. “The Final Whistle: A fan’s revelations about the corruption
of soccer are bringing down its most famous teams and the players. *“The
New Yorker*, 3 June 2019, p. 44-55.

Remember to smell the roses as you recumber past

Duncan R. Jamieson, Ph. D.
Professor of History
Book Review Editor
*AETHLON: The Journal of Sport Literature*
Ashland University
Ashland, OH  44805
USA
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