The Ugly Game' was lauded as a significant piece of investigative journalism. But it was the work of a source, paid for by someone with an interest in World Cup 2022
England, June 2016
“Bonita, I’ve got something to tell you,” said the man in front of me as he handed me a mug of coffee.
We were sitting in the kitchen of his home in rural England. It was a large, comfortable and spotlessly tidy kitchen. Modern, with every convenience, but containing a tilt to English tradition with an Aga as the centrepiece, framed by a picture postcard outlook beyond the back garden to patchwork fields leading to gentle rolling hills.
He sat down opposite me with his own mug of coffee. “You were right about that book.”
The book was The Ugly Game – the Qatari Plot to Buy the World Cup by Jonathan Calvert and Heidi Blake that had been published in 2015.
Calvert and Blake had first revealed excerpts of it under the banner of The FIFA Files in The Sunday Times to coincide with the 2014 World Cup.
Like many journalists around the world, Calvert and Blake had been following the story of the troubled 2018 and 2022 World Cup bids since 2010 when The Sunday Times had previously published claims that grabbed worldwide attention.
But there had been at least one gap in one of their 2014 excerpts.
It related to a visit to Doha in October 2009 of then FIFA Executive Committee member, Franz Beckenbauer, and Fedor Radmann, his longstanding trusted aide. Radmann was a highly paid ‘strategy consultant’ to the Australia 2018-2022 Bid. In the FIFA world it had long been discreetly acknowledged that Radmann was a ‘go to’ man when it came to backroom deals that keep the wheels of the ‘FIFA Way’ greased.
Calvert and Blake wrote that Beckenbauer and Radmann went to Doha at the invitation of Qatar’s Mohamed Bin Hammam to meet with the Emir of Qatar. According to Calvert and Blake, the Doha visit was part of a body of evidence that Bin Hammam had schemed since 2006 to win the 2022 vote for his country. Beckenbauer needed to be convinced by the Emir to vote for Qatar, rather than Australia.
Beckenbauer’s vote was one that was thought to be in the bag for Australia because of Radmann and business partner, Andreas Abold, who was also employed by the Australian Bid. Abold was responsible for Australia’s Bid Book – the one bound in kangaroo leather that, to this day, has probably never been opened by any FIFA executive committee member – the technical inspection and the final presentation.
The three Menschen had previously worked together and were the architects of the successful Germany 2006 and South Africa 2010 bids, as well as other major events. At the time of the Doha visit, Radmann was being paid more than $150,000 per month by Australia for his services.
So why hadn’t Calvert and Blake sought comment from Australia?
I reasoned that perhaps they were not familiar enough with who was involved with different bids. I called Jonathan.
Bin Hammam may have funded the visit as part of a strategic move on his part, but the Doha trip by Beckenbauer and Radmann was also part of an Australian strategy. The plan was for Beckenbauer to convince the Emir to withdraw Qatar’s bid, in return for which Australia and Germany would support Qatar’s bid for a world event of the Emir’s choosing. Australian government officials were informed of this idea six weeks before the visit took place. How had Bin Hammam’s plans and Australia’s plans come together so conveniently?
Calvert didn’t want to know.
I wondered why he was not pursuing the issue.
“Your source is Frank Lowy,” I said to Calvert.
“That is very funny. Who is putting that around?”
“I just did. You know it makes sense,” I responded.
It made sense because I knew that Lowy had already spent big on his own investigation into the 2022 vote, including hiring a topnotch outfit in Washington DC. Having employed Radmann and another FIFA insider, Peter Hargitay who had close links to Sepp Blatter, Jack Warner and Bin Hammam, Lowy was also now positioning himself as an innocent abroad in the big, bad world of FIFA.
The man sitting with me now in the kitchen of his home sharing a cup of coffee is the person Calvert and Blake referred to in The Ugly Game as their source.
He and I had first been in touch with one another more than a year beforehand. Since then, we had talked about all things football over numerous cups of coffee. He had football in his blood like I did. And he knew that I thought Frank Lowy had a hand in The Ugly Game.
The source and his colleagues had gathered the material in the course of their work. By the early part of 2014, realising that the Garcia investigation was heading strictly nowhere, the source knew it was time to do something with the nine terrabytes of data he held.
He made contact with media outlets and journalists in England offering them access to the material. The BBC was in talks with him. The Guardian believed they were close to a deal.
And then an American middle-man came knocking. The introduction was made through American private investigators known to both of them. The middle-man wanted to know how his client could have exclusive use of the material.
“We talked about where the material came from and how I came to have it. I told him that there was material in there that could be helpful to what was going on with Garcia and at FIFA,” the source was telling me now.
“I also offered to put him in touch with media who could assist in getting it out.” He took a sip of his coffee. “He didn’t want to know about my media contacts. He said ‘that’s all sorted already’.
“Next thing I know, the contract was signed within 24 hours and Jonathan [Calvert] and Heidi [Blake] were here … as quick as that,” he said snapping his fingers.
He said Calvert and Blake had barely touched the surface of the information available to them.
“They looked at 100,000 – maybe 120,000 – pages. That’s all. They only seemed to want stuff about Qatar. What they really found was stuff about Bin Hammam.”
He shook his head. “There’s so much more.”
The kitchen was quiet. There were no usual Saturday morning sounds of children playing outside, or lawns being mowed. No household cleaning or radio blaring. Just the modest tick of a clock on the far wall.
He shifted on the stool. “You were right all along,” he said again. “It was paid for by Frank Lowy. I felt you were owed the truth. You of all people deserve to know this.”
He said that the middle-man was an American by the name of Mark Bieler who is a longstanding consultant to Lowy’s Westfield Corporation. A former employee of Bankers’ Trust, Bieler’s other clients included Morgan Stanley, Ogilvy and Mather and the CIA.
“What I can’t figure out is what Lowy was trying to achieve from it,” the source said to me. “Was it to ‘get’ Qatar and/or Bin Hammam? Did he think it would overturn the decision and Australia would get it? Or was it to cover his own backside by making sure anything in there about him or Australia was not uncovered by someone else?”
“Probably all of the above,” I said.
It was a quick visit. The source had work to do as well as weekend chores, and I had a commitment in London.
“It’s a big story. It’s another piece of the puzzle. I’ve been right about everything so far,” I mused as we headed to the train station.
“It is big,” he replied.
“What can I do with it?” I asked.
“It’s your story to tell. You do what you want with it.”
My April 2015 review of ‘The Ugly Game’ is here.