Jennings exposes FIFA's offside deals

The BBC's Panorama exposé on FIFA made the dodgy dealings of Irish councillors in the 1980s look tame in comparison, writes Dermot Bolger

The World Cup is up-and-away and spreading its testicles (as a DUP politician once allegedly said) across our television screens. Experts are undoubtedly starting to pencil in teams of the tournament, but for me the Player of the Year Award is already done and dusted. So step forward Andrew Jennings of England and take a bow. He may not be a household name like Beckham or Rooney, but ask any high-ranking FIFA official what Englishman causes them the most sleepless nights and all will pop for Jennings. He is not too fast on his legs and has the dress-sense of a retired physics teacher, but the sight of him with a microphone can make football officials move faster than the young boys their industry relentlessly preys on.

The mild-spoken Jennings also has that great quality of a defender – sheer unrelenting doggedness. Panorama (BBC 1, Sunday, 10.15pm) was not his first attempt to pierce the murky heart of FIFA who control and manipulate "the beautiful game", and Sepp Blatter and other FIFA officials have not got any fonder of him over the years. They scurry into buildings when he appears and make a point of banning him from their press conferences.

But he seems such a decent man that if they would simply answer the few questions he keeps asking, you just know that he would leave them alone and take up watching cricket.

Jennings' questions on Panorama were simple. While FIFA control the World Cup, they do not directly sell television, merchandising and advertising rights. For almost 20 years these rights were exclusively leased to a marketing agency called International Sports and Leisure (ISL) who could earn up to 25 per cent commission by selling the brand rights to soft drinks companies, etc. In return for this cosy relationship, it is clear that ISL paid bribes to very senior FIFA officials by way of direct payments into secret bank accounts.

They first strayed offside when ISL got their account numbers confused and paid a bribe for one million Swiss francs directly into the main FIFA bank account instead of into a secret account. To say that pandemonium broke out would be a mild understatement, with FIFA desperately begging their bank to erase any paper trail. But worse was to follow when ISL went into receivership and the Swiss receiver found details of a succession of such payments.

Panorama made the workings of many Irish county councillors in the 1980s seem so tame that Irish local politics at that time might be put forward as a bastion of open democracy. Because at least Irish councillors eventually had to account for themselves. But a secret deal was done in Switzerland whereby a proportion of the brides were allowed to be anonymously paid back to the creditors of ISL and the rest written off.

However, as Jennings discovered, this money was not returned to the creditors from the secret account-holders but by FIFA itself who refused to say if FIFA were being reimbursed by the bribed officials or simply bailing them out. We were just left with the image of a middle-aged man locked outside a succession of doors, an image unlikely to feature on any officially sanctioned souvenir records of the world cup.

World Cup Stories (BBC 2, Sunday, 10.40pm) gave us a flavour of the genuine emotion of sport by recounting the fortunes of the Italian nation who were briefly healed and united by joy in 1982 when becoming unlikely winners of the World Cup. But, while they were counting the goals, across the border in Switzerland men in blazers were counting the money. Still, I wish we were there.