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5 things FIFA needs to do to stop its impending implosion

FIFA is in the gutter. Sportingly, morally, culturally, it has reached the lowest low. It needs to start all over again. And here Tim Collings suggests where it needs to focus to recover some much needed respect…

FIFA is in a mess. Ripped apart at the heart, football’s governing body needs to get back to basics. A change of leadership is a given, but more needs to be done to bring back belief.

As the interrogation deepens and revelations get increasingly unfathomable, the organisation needs to get tougher, leaner, cleaner and more dynamic. It needs to put football first. And it needs to do it quickly.

This is what it needs to correct.

Trust: Elect an honest leader

After 40 years of varying degrees of systemic corruption, the leadership of FIFA is universally regarded as morally bankrupt – by people from inside and outside football.

Mention FIFA in public in front of ordinary non-sports-mad people, and it is a by-word for cheating. People laugh. Nobody trusts FIFA anymore. Indeed, nobody other than the blindest enthusiast trusts football anymore.

When Sepp Blatter is finally replaced in February it must be by someone with an impeccable reputation, with no connection to the current regime and, preferably, no direct connection with football business in any form.

None of the current candidates for the role of reformer-president fit the bill.

It needs not only a new broom, but a different kind of new broom. One outstanding candidate would be Loretta Lynch, who has several recommendations: she is a woman, she is American and, in her role with the FBI, she proved she understands integrity and transparency.

Moreover, she knows the truth about football and is more than capable of cutting through the clichés and jargon, the blatant lies and the smoke and mirrors that have supported the ruthless and decadent regimes of Joao Havelange and Blatter since 1974.

Image: Cut the champagne and bring on humility

Exorbitant amounts of money are currently spent on luxurious comforts for the executive committee or on the presidential pursuits of travelling in the name of international expansion.

FIFA needs to apply some austerity to its lifestyle.

It also needs to stop pretending it is more important than anyone else and rediscover a connection with the people who really matter in football – the ordinary fans and ordinary players around the world.

Its time to lose the bloated champagne-swilling first-class five-star focus. It needs to change from the top down, to take a totally different approach.

That means fewer slogans, mottos and self-congratulatory PR stunts. Cut the self-glorification. Re-brand with humility.

The Big Event: Take the World Cup back to basics

Fifa is all about the World Cup – but three decades of commercial globalisation have turned what once was the best live sports event on the planet into a bloated and exhausted, over-sized caricature.

The World Cup finals used to leave you relishing the prospect of the next. It doesn’t feel that way any more.

To please the demands of an ever-expanding globalised broadcast media, not to mention keeping the sponsors and corruptly chosen hosts happy, the world’s top players have been dragged exhausted through weeks of often dull and tortuous competition.

The event is now simply seen as a bigger opportunity to harvest more and more money. But big is not beautiful. It must stop. Make the World Cup an event that can be hosted – and enjoyed - affordably, by anyone, not just the affluent supporters and not the questionably persuasive affluent nations.

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Governance: Scrap the committee and re-assign World Cups

The selection of Russia and Qatar as hosts for the 2018 and 2022 World Cup tournaments was the act that confirmed FIFA’s utter and complete decay.

The two nations’ ‘success’ in ‘securing’ these events came as a result of a system of governance, and internal administration, that has been in need of an overhaul for decades.

Both cups should be re-assigned - though for 2018 it might be difficult – and, crucially, the governance system that selected them must be scrapped.Secret voting.

What place does that have in football? None whatsoever; not if FIFA is to steer a transparent future. The executive committee has to be axed and the new reforming leadership must create an open structure that is clean, modern and admired for its work.

Brand: Come clean and start again.

The world’s leading sports sponsors have warned of the problems ahead for FIFA – even if, arguably, they have helped lead it to its downfall.

An inquiry into the future of the governing body by the British parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee heard much evidence that was echoed elsewhere by Coca-Cola and others that not only the World Cup, but all of FIFA’s events, could suffer from a catastrophic deflation in sponsor value.

And FIFA may already have forced itself to slim down through its own cynical chicanery and mismanagement of events and funds.

The previously exposed links with agencies that have made fortunes from these systems of corruption make it clear that only an entirely new and ethical approach to rebuilding the value of the FIFA brand will be accepted.

All in all, quite simply, a new start is required.

FIFA cannot survive any other way.