<div dir="ltr"><div>All, <br></div><div>Please find attached and below Jack Ryan's review of Scott Bensinger's <i>Red Card</i>.</div><div><br></div><div>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Bensinger,
Scott. </span><i><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Red Card:
How the U.S. Blew the Whistle on the World’s Biggest Sports Scandal</span></i><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">. New York: Simon & Schuster, 349
pp. <span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Reviewed by
Jack Ryan<span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0.2in 0in 0.0001pt;line-height:200%;vertical-align:baseline;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;color:rgb(18,18,18);background:white none repeat scroll 0% 0%">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 </span><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">International
Federation of Association Football (<span style="color:rgb(18,18,18);background:white none repeat scroll 0% 0%">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. </span>“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 <i>BuzzFeed</i>, makes abundantly clear in <i>Red Card: How the U.S. Blew the Whistle on
the World’s Biggest Sports Scandal</i>, 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.”<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0.2in 0in 0.0001pt;text-indent:0.5in;line-height:200%;vertical-align:baseline;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">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. <span> </span>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. <span> </span>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.<span> </span><span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0.2in 0in 0.0001pt;text-indent:0.5in;line-height:200%;vertical-align:baseline;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">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. <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0.2in 0in 0.0001pt;text-indent:0.5in;line-height:200%;vertical-align:baseline;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">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 <i>Red
Card</i>, 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.<span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:0.5in;line-height:200%;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">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 <i>Red Card</i>.<span> </span><span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:0.5in;line-height:200%;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Bensinger
opens <i>Red Card</i> 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.<span> </span>Prosecutorial success, though, has a short
shelf life, especially in our present period of lies filling in for the truth. A
recent issue of <i>The New Yorker </i>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. <span> </span>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. <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">______________________________________________________________________________<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Knight,
Sam. </span><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">“The Final Whistle: A fan’s revelations about the corruption
of soccer are bringing down its most famous teams and the players. </span><i><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">“The
New Yorker</span></i><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">, 3 June
2019, p. 44-55. </span><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span></span></span></p>
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</div><div><div><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">Remember to smell the roses as you recumber past<br><br>Duncan R. Jamieson, Ph. D.<br>Professor of History<br>Book Review Editor<br><i>AETHLON: The Journal of Sport Literature</i><br>Ashland University<br>Ashland, OH 44805<br>USA<br></div></div></div></div>