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The Dead Thread


From toffee web 1997
October 26th: Howard Kendall decides he has no further interest in Dalian Atkinson, who returns to Turkey. Everton FC place an advert in The Sunday Times for a new Chief Executive to revitalise the merchandising and lead the new stadium project.
  • 23rd: Everton Reserves added the scalp of Liverpool's second string at Goodison Park as they triumphed 4-3 after squandering a 3-goal lead. Visit the Everton Reserves page for a match summary. Branch sustained another injury and misses the Coventry match on the 25th.
  • 22nd: The Croatian FA deny Everton's request for Slaven Bilic to play at Coventry as they prepare for their World Cup Qualifying Playoff on the 29th. An X-ray reveals that Tony Grant has a hairline fracture of the shin and could be out for at least 3 weeks.
  • 20th: Franz Carr has returned to his Italian club but Dalian Atkinson remains at Bellefield for the time-being as Howard Kendall looks for clearance from Galatasary for him to play in the mini-derby on the 23rd.
  • 19th
 
The father of FIFA corruption dies.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/aug/16/joao-havelange-obituary

João Havelange obituary


When João Havelange was elected president of Fifa, football’s world governing body, in 1974, he announced: “I have come to change entirely the wayFifa works. I have come to sell a product called football.” Judged on those criteria, his 24 years in office were more successful than even he – a man of unshakeable self-belief – could have foreseen.

World Cup finals from a 16-nation to 24-nation and then 32-nation competition, invited almost all the countries in the world to join Fifa, and offered them increased involvement in it. By the time he left office in 1998, the organisation had more members than the UN.

He was the first sports administrator to pursue global sponsors, such as Adidas and Coca-Cola, and gain total control of television rights and advertising, through his links with the now discredited and defunct sports marketing company ISL. The revolutionary lobbying and business techniques he used to win votes and contracts are now employed routinely.


And yet, to his many critics, Havelange’s zeal for commercialising football resulted in it losing its soul. There was rarely any evidence of his love for the game – the players, countries and hundreds of millions of fans to whom the game brings such joy seemed but parts of his money-spinning masterplan. Worse still, his administrative era was severely tainted by allegations of bribery and corruption, which intensified under the man he pushed forward to be his anointed successor, Sepp Blatter.

Havelange was born in Rio de Janeiro to Belgian parents. His father was an arms trader who sent his son to school in France, and the family spoke French at home. Havelange played football as a youth but it was swimming at which he excelled, and he represented Brazil at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 (the year in which he also earned a law degree). He won a bronze medal for water polo at the Pan American Games in 1951, and represented Brazil in the sport at the Helsinki Olympics in 1952.

He made his fortune building up Cometa, a transport businesses, but it was as a sports administrator that Havelange made his name. He led the Brazilian delegation to the Melbourne Olympics in 1956 and became a member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1963. In 1958 he was appointed head of the CBD, the Brazilian Sports Confederation, which oversaw all the nation’s sports.

The appointment was made six months before Brazil won their first World Cup, in Sweden, and coincided with a golden era of Brazilian football as they went on to win the tournament again in Chile in 1962 and Mexico in 1970. The 1958 and 1970 teams included a galaxy of stars, among them Pelé, who would become an important figure in Havelange’s quest for power.

His role in funding and organising Brazil’s World Cup victories was important, if typically autocratic. In 1958 he included a psychologist in the party (fearing some players were still affected by the trauma of 1950, when Brazil lost in the final at home in Rio, in front of 200,000 people), and wanted to imposeconcentração total on the squad, effectively round-the-clock supervision, believing that football was too important to be left to the footballers.

By the late 1960s Brazil was entering the most brutal phase of a 20-year military dictatorship and Havelange appeased the generals by sacking the coach, João Saldanha, a member of the Brazilian Communist party, in 1969. He also instigated a three-month pre-tournament training camp for the squad. They won the 1970 World Cup playing some of the best football ever seen, but they arrived in Mexico wearing dark green, military-style suits.

In 1969, with an eye on the Fifa votes of African football federations, he organised a tour of the continent for Pelé’s club, Santos. It was Havelange who circulated the story that the opposing sides in the Biafran civil war in Nigeria declared a two-day truce so they could watch Pelé play. Years later, Pelé claimed the story was exaggerated. There was the chance for more lobbying in 1972 when Havelange invited 20 countries to Brazil, all expenses paid, to play in an unrecognised football tournament, the Brazil Independence Cup.

By the time of the 1974 election for Fifa president, Havelange had spent millions touring the world lobbying for votes, often accompanied by Pelé. He reckoned he had visited 86 countries in 10 weeks in the runup to the election.

His strategy was to attack the European dominance of Fifa while promising developing countries a greater role, money for their football infrastructure and an expanded World Cup. He paid for many poorer African delegates, who otherwise rarely bothered to turn up at such meetings, to attend for the vote. Despite the enormous global success of the 1970 World Cup, broadcast for the first time in colour, the incumbent Fifa president, Sir Stanley Rous, was hanging on to amateur traditions and supported apartheid in South African sport. He was an easy opponent for Havelange to outmanoeuvre.

According to Patrick Nally, a pioneer of modern sports marketing who played a key role in the victory, interviewed by the journalist Andrew Jennings for Dishonored Games (1992): “Havelange had seen the future … He knew that if he became the president of the only federation already running its own high-profile world championship, then he would enjoy huge economic power.”

Havelange had relatively little influence on his first World Cup as Fifa president, held in Argentina, then ruled by a military junta. He let the generals and the head of the Argentinian organising committee, Vice-Admiral Carlos Lacoste, run it their way. In the semi-final stage, Argentina beat Peru 6-0, one of the most controversial results in the history of the tournament.

While that match was in progress, a bomb exploded at the home of the Argentinian finance secretary, Juan Alemann, who had criticised the organising committee for wasting millions of dollars on the World Cup. Alemann believed Lacoste had masterminded the operation. Two years later, Havelange appointed Lacoste a Fifa vice-president. When democratic rule was restored to Argentina in 1983, Lacoste was investigated for corruption.

Havelange’s expansion of the World Cup began at the 1982 tournament in Spain, when the number of teams increased from 16 to 24. The following World Cup was scheduled to be held in Colombia, but when the country pulled out in financial difficulties, the US, Canada and Mexico put themselves forward to host it. In a show of strength that typified Havelange’s rule, every member of the Fifa executive committee voted with him in support of Mexico.

Mexico 1986 set a template for future World Cups – and was soon copied by other global sports federations. Havelange backed Mexico’s bid because of his close relationship with Guillermo Cañedo, a Fifa vice-president and Mexican media baron who brokered a lucrative global TV deal with ISL.

The founder of ISL was the German businessman Horst Dassler, former boss of Adidas, who, together with Havelange and the IOC chairman Juan Antonio Samaranch, were the most senior members of “the club”, an exclusive group of sports administrators and marketing men who controlled a large proportion of international sport. It was a cosy relationship, with the world’s two most powerful sporting bodies and the company that provided the lion’s share of their income all based in Switzerland.

ISL bought the rights to the World Cup for enormous sums, peaking in 1996 at the £1.45bn combined bid for rights to the 2002 and 2006 finals. The company folded in 2001, leaving debts of £153m and a trail of corruption that led to Fifa’s door. A Swiss court investigating the collapse, and the whereabouts of millions of missing dollars, heard evidence from a legal representative of Christoph Malms, a former ISL chief executive, that “the company became a private source of money for Fifa, virtually their private bank”.

After two decades, Havelange’s Napoleonic rule began to stretch the patience of even loyal Fifa executives. He developed the habit of closing executive meetings by simply leaving the room and, in one famous case, postponing a discussion on Fifa appointments by handing out his own list of new committee members, then declaring the list passed without a vote.

He banned Pelé from attending the draw for the 1994 World Cup in Las Vegas after a feud involving Ricardo Teixeira, Havelange’s then son-in-law and president of the Brazilian Football Confederation. This behaviour towards Pelé would have raised eyebrows anywhere in the world. In the US, where he was the only soccer player known to many Americans, it was reckless.

Havelange survived one more term as president, secured after further intensive lobbying and a promise to expand the World Cup from 24 to 32 teams for the 1998 tournament. Before resigning in 1998, he helped his righthand man, Blatter, to win the vote to succeed him, over the Uefa president, Lennart Johansson.

In 2011, Jennings told a Brazilian senate investigation that Havelange had received bribes totalling around $50m from ISL. Later that year the IOC ethics committee announced that it would investigate claims that he had received bribes of $1m. Soon afterwards, he resigned from the IOC for health reasons.

In April 2013 he resigned as honorary president of Fifa, again citing health reasons. Jennings led a BBC team for a Panorama programme in December 2015 that revealed the existence of a letter written by Havelange in 2010 claiming that disputed payments to him were above board and known to Blatter. An investigation by the FBI led to Blatter’s ejection from Fifa later that month.

Havelange and his wife, Anna Maria (nee Hermanny), had a daughter, Lúcia, who was divorced from Teixeira in 1997, a granddaughter, Joana, director of the organising committee of the Brazil 2014 World Cup, and two grandsons, Ricardo and Roberto.

• Jean-Marie Faustin Godefroid de Havelange, lawyer, sports administrator and businessman, born 8 May 1916; died 16 August 2016
 
summerisle said:
The father of FIFA corruption dies.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/aug/16/joao-havelange-obituary

João Havelange obituary


When João Havelange was elected president of Fifa, football’s world governing body, in 1974, he announced: “I have come to change entirely the wayFifa works. I have come to sell a product called football.” Judged on those criteria, his 24 years in office were more successful than even he – a man of unshakeable self-belief – could have foreseen.

World Cup finals from a 16-nation to 24-nation and then 32-nation competition, invited almost all the countries in the world to join Fifa, and offered them increased involvement in it. By the time he left office in 1998, the organisation had more members than the UN.

He was the first sports administrator to pursue global sponsors, such as Adidas and Coca-Cola, and gain total control of television rights and advertising, through his links with the now discredited and defunct sports marketing company ISL. The revolutionary lobbying and business techniques he used to win votes and contracts are now employed routinely.


And yet, to his many critics, Havelange’s zeal for commercialising football resulted in it losing its soul. There was rarely any evidence of his love for the game – the players, countries and hundreds of millions of fans to whom the game brings such joy seemed but parts of his money-spinning masterplan. Worse still, his administrative era was severely tainted by allegations of bribery and corruption, which intensified under the man he pushed forward to be his anointed successor, Sepp Blatter.

Havelange was born in Rio de Janeiro to Belgian parents. His father was an arms trader who sent his son to school in France, and the family spoke French at home. Havelange played football as a youth but it was swimming at which he excelled, and he represented Brazil at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 (the year in which he also earned a law degree). He won a bronze medal for water polo at the Pan American Games in 1951, and represented Brazil in the sport at the Helsinki Olympics in 1952.

He made his fortune building up Cometa, a transport businesses, but it was as a sports administrator that Havelange made his name. He led the Brazilian delegation to the Melbourne Olympics in 1956 and became a member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1963. In 1958 he was appointed head of the CBD, the Brazilian Sports Confederation, which oversaw all the nation’s sports.

The appointment was made six months before Brazil won their first World Cup, in Sweden, and coincided with a golden era of Brazilian football as they went on to win the tournament again in Chile in 1962 and Mexico in 1970. The 1958 and 1970 teams included a galaxy of stars, among them Pelé, who would become an important figure in Havelange’s quest for power.

His role in funding and organising Brazil’s World Cup victories was important, if typically autocratic. In 1958 he included a psychologist in the party (fearing some players were still affected by the trauma of 1950, when Brazil lost in the final at home in Rio, in front of 200,000 people), and wanted to imposeconcentração total on the squad, effectively round-the-clock supervision, believing that football was too important to be left to the footballers.

By the late 1960s Brazil was entering the most brutal phase of a 20-year military dictatorship and Havelange appeased the generals by sacking the coach, João Saldanha, a member of the Brazilian Communist party, in 1969. He also instigated a three-month pre-tournament training camp for the squad. They won the 1970 World Cup playing some of the best football ever seen, but they arrived in Mexico wearing dark green, military-style suits.

In 1969, with an eye on the Fifa votes of African football federations, he organised a tour of the continent for Pelé’s club, Santos. It was Havelange who circulated the story that the opposing sides in the Biafran civil war in Nigeria declared a two-day truce so they could watch Pelé play. Years later, Pelé claimed the story was exaggerated. There was the chance for more lobbying in 1972 when Havelange invited 20 countries to Brazil, all expenses paid, to play in an unrecognised football tournament, the Brazil Independence Cup.

By the time of the 1974 election for Fifa president, Havelange had spent millions touring the world lobbying for votes, often accompanied by Pelé. He reckoned he had visited 86 countries in 10 weeks in the runup to the election.

His strategy was to attack the European dominance of Fifa while promising developing countries a greater role, money for their football infrastructure and an expanded World Cup. He paid for many poorer African delegates, who otherwise rarely bothered to turn up at such meetings, to attend for the vote. Despite the enormous global success of the 1970 World Cup, broadcast for the first time in colour, the incumbent Fifa president, Sir Stanley Rous, was hanging on to amateur traditions and supported apartheid in South African sport. He was an easy opponent for Havelange to outmanoeuvre.

According to Patrick Nally, a pioneer of modern sports marketing who played a key role in the victory, interviewed by the journalist Andrew Jennings for Dishonored Games (1992): “Havelange had seen the future … He knew that if he became the president of the only federation already running its own high-profile world championship, then he would enjoy huge economic power.”

Havelange had relatively little influence on his first World Cup as Fifa president, held in Argentina, then ruled by a military junta. He let the generals and the head of the Argentinian organising committee, Vice-Admiral Carlos Lacoste, run it their way. In the semi-final stage, Argentina beat Peru 6-0, one of the most controversial results in the history of the tournament.

While that match was in progress, a bomb exploded at the home of the Argentinian finance secretary, Juan Alemann, who had criticised the organising committee for wasting millions of dollars on the World Cup. Alemann believed Lacoste had masterminded the operation. Two years later, Havelange appointed Lacoste a Fifa vice-president. When democratic rule was restored to Argentina in 1983, Lacoste was investigated for corruption.

Havelange’s expansion of the World Cup began at the 1982 tournament in Spain, when the number of teams increased from 16 to 24. The following World Cup was scheduled to be held in Colombia, but when the country pulled out in financial difficulties, the US, Canada and Mexico put themselves forward to host it. In a show of strength that typified Havelange’s rule, every member of the Fifa executive committee voted with him in support of Mexico.

Mexico 1986 set a template for future World Cups – and was soon copied by other global sports federations. Havelange backed Mexico’s bid because of his close relationship with Guillermo Cañedo, a Fifa vice-president and Mexican media baron who brokered a lucrative global TV deal with ISL.

The founder of ISL was the German businessman Horst Dassler, former boss of Adidas, who, together with Havelange and the IOC chairman Juan Antonio Samaranch, were the most senior members of “the club”, an exclusive group of sports administrators and marketing men who controlled a large proportion of international sport. It was a cosy relationship, with the world’s two most powerful sporting bodies and the company that provided the lion’s share of their income all based in Switzerland.

ISL bought the rights to the World Cup for enormous sums, peaking in 1996 at the £1.45bn combined bid for rights to the 2002 and 2006 finals. The company folded in 2001, leaving debts of £153m and a trail of corruption that led to Fifa’s door. A Swiss court investigating the collapse, and the whereabouts of millions of missing dollars, heard evidence from a legal representative of Christoph Malms, a former ISL chief executive, that “the company became a private source of money for Fifa, virtually their private bank”.

After two decades, Havelange’s Napoleonic rule began to stretch the patience of even loyal Fifa executives. He developed the habit of closing executive meetings by simply leaving the room and, in one famous case, postponing a discussion on Fifa appointments by handing out his own list of new committee members, then declaring the list passed without a vote.

He banned Pelé from attending the draw for the 1994 World Cup in Las Vegas after a feud involving Ricardo Teixeira, Havelange’s then son-in-law and president of the Brazilian Football Confederation. This behaviour towards Pelé would have raised eyebrows anywhere in the world. In the US, where he was the only soccer player known to many Americans, it was reckless.

Havelange survived one more term as president, secured after further intensive lobbying and a promise to expand the World Cup from 24 to 32 teams for the 1998 tournament. Before resigning in 1998, he helped his righthand man, Blatter, to win the vote to succeed him, over the Uefa president, Lennart Johansson.

In 2011, Jennings told a Brazilian senate investigation that Havelange had received bribes totalling around $50m from ISL. Later that year the IOC ethics committee announced that it would investigate claims that he had received bribes of $1m. Soon afterwards, he resigned from the IOC for health reasons.

In April 2013 he resigned as honorary president of Fifa, again citing health reasons. Jennings led a BBC team for a Panorama programme in December 2015 that revealed the existence of a letter written by Havelange in 2010 claiming that disputed payments to him were above board and known to Blatter. An investigation by the FBI led to Blatter’s ejection from Fifa later that month.

Havelange and his wife, Anna Maria (nee Hermanny), had a daughter, Lúcia, who was divorced from Teixeira in 1997, a granddaughter, Joana, director of the organising committee of the Brazil 2014 World Cup, and two grandsons, Ricardo and Roberto.

• Jean-Marie Faustin Godefroid de Havelange, lawyer, sports administrator and businessman, born 8 May 1916; died 16 August 2016
Click to expand...
He did Havelange life, to be fair.
 


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