Longtime International Olympic Committee member Dick Pound claimed Monday that FIFA is not being transparent about the extent of corruption within the organization and lacks the will to clean up football. Having led the IOC's inquiry into the Salt Lake City bidding scandal, Pound believes FIFA is in the midst of a deeper crisis that needs to be resolved to protect the integrity of the sport. The Montreal lawyer's criticism of FIFA came in a speech to a conference in Germany two weeks before FIFA President Sepp Blatter plans to present the anti-corruption reforms demanded after a year of bribery scandals within his executive committee. “FIFA has fallen far short of a credible demonstration that it recognizes the many problems it faces, that it has the will to solve them, that it is willing to be transparent about what it is doing and what it finds, and that its conduct in the future will be such that the public can be confident in the governance of the sport,” Pound said. “At the moment, I do not believe that such confidence exists or would be justified if it did.” Blatter's pledge to clean up FIFA came after being re-elected unopposed in June for a fourth and final presidential term. Blatter's only election rival, FIFA executive committee member Mohamed Bin Hammam, withdrew days before the vote when allegations surfaced that he tried to bribe Caribbean voters. The Qatari has since been banned from football for life. The bribery scandal also exiled FIFA vice president Jack Warner, who resigned rather than face an ethics hearing. “When I compare (the Salt Lake City) firestorm of media attention to the relatively benign, again with certain exceptions, treatment of the remarkable conduct of FIFA and certain of its executives, I am astonished,” Pound said. “This is a far more serious and far more extensive problem for the world's most popular sport than the relatively narrow conduct, improper as it was, of a few IOC members ... “The IOC was able to borrow credibility from these independent third parties, in whom the public already had confidence and whose judgment in approving the reform package put forward could be relied upon and whose assertions that the IOC was serious, carried far more weight than similar statements made by the IOC itself,” he said. “If I were an independent adviser to FIFA today, I would counsel it to take similar measures. “The risk of not doing so is that no one will believe the outcomes of whatever process it may be implementing.”
