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The Autumn of Football’s Patriarch
BACK TO Patriarch’s custom-built mirror. He dazzles himself with talk of his 35 year ‘mission’ to make the world a better place but still his meanness writhes in a dark corner as he tells her that ‘unlike former presidents’ (that’s one in the shrivelled nuts for the previous Patriarch, now aged 93 and, in Rio, beyond the reach of the Swiss cops) he has been ‘committed to a wide range of humanitarian projects.’
Fighting child labour: Tick that box. UNICEF, tick again. Fair Play, Respect, Discipline, Social Advancement, Mutual Understanding, Eradicate Polio, Improve Public Health.
Switch Ticking machine to rapid fire, fax results to NZZ Obituaries Department.
Keep reading, here’s Patriarch’s ‘Love Affair With Africa.’ Indeed he so much loveth Africa that, lacking a son, he hath bequeathed it to Nephew. Patriarch talks frequently of the Family of Football – but when there’s money to be extracted, it’s a very small family. Nephew has been given an enormous chunk of the television rights to the Big Games in South Africa this year and if that isn’t enough, he’s been gifted a large bite size of the ticketing for the corporations.
MANAGEMENT MUMBO-JUMBOISTS
But Nephew – a graduate of management mumbo-jumboists McKinseys – has majored in Greed and Failed in business acumen. (There’s a story within a story here. Back in the late 1990s Patriarch hired a mob of McKinsey Greenhorns, led by Nephew, to evaluate his business model. They gibbered managementspeak for a couple of years, pocketed millions of whatever currency you prefer and then split forces. Nephew went off to become CEO of the company that has since got the football business. He took another Greenhorn with him and the third stayed behind to become Patriarch’s financial controller. Its called keeping it in the families – McKinsey and Patriarch)
Patriarch and Nephew and their capos, cocooned in their duvets of wealth and self-confidence, didn’t notice taxpayers bailing out banks, dole queues growing and corporate budgets shrinking and even disappearing. They jacked up their prices. The capos jacked up the ticket prices for ordinary fans. Crazed South African hoteliers, airlines and profit-takers were encouraged to jack up their fantasy prices, swelling the percentage commissions.
And they waited for the money to roll in, as it always did. And they waited. And waited. And now they are panicking, stuck with inventory and abused by fans.
Falling back on the scoundrel’s defence Patriarch deplores the ‘envy and jealousy that the World Cup has gone to South Africa’ – whatever that means. And his capos blame the media. We’re used to it. But there’s a real victim. Retired to his ancestral home in the Eastern Cape and his own and most honourable Autumn is the Man from Robben Island. He has been disrespected by the European gougers busy looting his country and that may never be forgiven.
Patriarch, having had his photo-ops with the World’s Most Loved – who now looks too frail to protest at the deception – wasn’t fretting.
Then the NZZ spoke. Their editorialists know of Patriarch’s tax fiddles, the grotesque 8 million francs hush money to the last general secretary, the P’s disloyalty to his former boss and just about everybody who ever worked for him. They weren’t happy about the $90 million it cost to extract the family from the massive marketing mess the Grand Vizier got them into – and they know about the blackmailing letters between him and Patriarch, and everybody knows what the uppity woman judge in Manhattan had to say. But it was the fining and suspension of the shot-up Togo team that pushed them to reset their keyboards to ‘roast.’
RIGHT BETWEEN THE STICKS
On February 3 they gave it him between the sticks. It wasn’t just Patriarch’s refusal to condemn his ally in Africa who had shafted Togo. They fingered Nephew as well and ‘the stagnant sales of World Cup tickets’ and fumed that Patriarch refuses to discuss anything that matters in the real world beyond his barbed wire and uniformed guards.
The NZZ is very serious. Giacobbo and Müller are not. Most Sunday nights on Switzerland’s most popular television channel they lampoon Patriarch. So too does satirical site klatschheftli.ch that noticed the famous Swiss is actually a rather small person who needs to be on tippy-toes for photo-ops with normal humans.
The Swiss were less amused 15 months ago when Patriarch roared out of an Alpine tunnel in his 6.2 litre Mercedes sports car, smashed into a slower-moving car he was trying to overtake, lost control and cannoned into an oncoming VW Golf.
The Golf rolled three times. Fortunately, the driver suffered only minor injuries. The police hurriedly removed Patriarch’s number plates to ‘protect his privacy.’ Then this multi-millionaire got off with a paltry 600 francs fine.
Discontent rumbles at all levels of Patriarch’s diminishing empire. Irascible and erratic in these, his last days, he fired his press mouthpiece and then his most loyal consigliore. Spotting the open door his ‘Head of Security” a Christian Democrat MP and former member of the Papal Swiss guard has marched away.