Diarmaid Ferriter: Trap’s dignified defiance and Delaney’s Blatter ‘deal’

Giovanni Trapattoni, former manager of the Irish soccer team, has provided many memorable quotes over the years; one of his most stinging came in reaction to the revelation about FAI chief executive John Delaney's €5 million deal with Fifa's Sepp Blatter. After the infamous Ireland-France soccer match in 2009 and Thierry Henry's foul play, Blatter asked Trapattoni, then Irish soccer manager, to come and meet him, saying "we can find together a way out, a way to forget". Trapattoni told La Stampa, "I do not know what he wanted. I just know that when he gave me his hand I did not give mine, as I do not have two faces."

That was a dignified defiance.

We have seen many faces of John Delaney in recent times; the football statesman before the vote that re-elected Blatter, decrying the continuance of a rotten regime and calling for reform, the defiant defender of his grubby "deal" with Blatter as the best for Irish soccer in the absence of a "sporting" resolution, and the macho man, talking of exchanging expletives with Blatter and telling him he was "an embarrassment" to international soccer. He then altered his story when it came to whether the €5 million was to stave off a legal threat (widely dismissed as a fantasy notion) or "moral compensation" for Henry's handball and Blatter publicly mocking the idea of Ireland as a 33rd world cup team.

None of those latter faces or words of Delaney have been dignified.

Macho mafia of world soccer

His lads’ chat with Ray D’Arcy on

RTÉ

radio was an embarrassment as he implied he was well capable of mixing it with the macho mafia of world soccer; he told Blatter to “move on” when Blatter expressed approval of Delaney’s girlfriend, Emma, of whom Delaney said “She’s a great girl.” Isn’t he a marvellous FAI chief altogether?

Who knows how many grubby deals Blatter sanctioned in his 15 years at the helm of Fifa, before he ran for cover as the FBI investigators closed in? In his global history of football published in 2006, The Ball is Round, David Goldblatt pulled no punches in his assessment of Blatter's malign influence: "Many things in the world are badly governed. There are many elites who are incompetent, self-serving, self-important and arrogantly blasé about their evident limitations. None of them can begin to compare with the circus masquerading as the global governance of football . . . at the level of everyday management and internal politics, Blatter's regime has been a disgrace . . . the conduct of official Fifa business, always an opulent intercontinental affair, has spiralled to the levels of the grotesque."

That assessment only covered the first eight years of Blatter’s rule; any updated assessment will undoubtedly include far more to dissect and deride, given how long the US authorities have been investigating Fifa. Delaney was in full flow about Blatter after the latter’s resignation: “I never liked his modus operandi or style. He has a huge ego. It was all about politics and how money could be dispersed and all about him.” Pots and black kettles spring to mind. Delaney was vocal about the need for more transparency in relation to Fifa but in relation to his €5 million deal, the accounts of the FAI, a tax-funded organisation, were not transparent.

‘Passion for power’

The FAI has also been associated with a fair share of deals, politics, the suppression of dissent and unseemly resolutions of crises over the years, many of them detailed in Daire Whelan’s 2006 book,

Who Stole Our Game? The Fall and Fall of Irish Soccer

. At that stage, Delaney was four years in the job. Whelan gave ample space to Delaney’s critics to voice their concerns about the way he did his job; one of them maintained, “Delaney, you see, is not a detailed man. He is careless and he does leave trails behind him and I think he will get careless . . . I think he has a passion for power.” But Whelan also allowed Delaney have his say; Delaney was adamant he could address the fault lines in Irish soccer: “If people like myself are there, then the trust will actually come.”

Delaney was vocal at the time of the Henry incident that the issue was about sporting integrity rather than money. Understandably, Trapattoni was also furious about the incident: “I am so angry I cannot speak. It is a bitter evening. We played a great game. All the European people saw that we deserved to win or at least get to penalties . . . all I ask is for fair play.” But, judging by his recent comments, Trapattoni was well aware that meeting Blatter behind closed doors to horse-trade would compromise any sense of fair play. Delaney, it appears, had no such qualms. As we celebrate the 150th birthday of WB Yeats today, let us not forget why, more than 100 years after he wrote it, the phrase “fumble in a greasy till” still resonates.