Football: Release of report will end the crisis at Fifa

Sepp Blatter is staying calm. Photo / AP

Fifa President Sepp Blatter declared "the crisis at Fifa is over" after the executive committee of football's governing body agreed to publish their confidential report into corruption in the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bids.

But he confirmed Fifa will not revisit the decision to award those two tournaments to Russia and Qatar. That choice was made in December 2010 by a Fifa executive committee of which 11 of the 25 members have since left, eight following allegations of corruption.

The report will be published with "appropriate redactions" to protect the confidentiality of those who co-operated with its author, US attorney Michael Garcia.

The summary of the report by Garcia's co-head of Fifa's ethics committee, German judge Hans Joachim Eckert, prompted the American to complain of "erroneous representations". The summary cleared Qatar and Russia of any wrongdoing.

Garcia resigned last week in protest, calling into question the integrity of Fifa.

Ever since Fifa executives voted to send World Cups to Russia and Qatar there have been questions about why they picked those countries and accusations that some of them might have been bought off or otherwise leaned on.

Fifa's executive committee yesterday agreed the report, redacted with names taken out, can be published ... in good time.

Here's a look at the key points of that decision, which Fifa president Sepp Blatter said was unanimous.

Why the U-turn?

Fifa executives seem to have decided that whatever is in Garcia's report can't be as bad as the hammering they are getting for not releasing it.

Since his re-election in 2011 - unopposed after bribery allegations took out his challenger - Blatter has championed a reform process to make the organisation he has led for 16 years more credible. That effort, however, was being shredded by the secrecy surrounding what Blatter now calls "this famous Garcia report" and the legalese Fifa employed to try to justify why it couldn't be published.

What happens next?

More waiting. Before he resigned, Garcia launched prosecutions against five people, three of them still serving on the executive committee, for alleged wrongdoing in the World Cup campaigns. That includes suspicions some of them might have taken or asked for gifts and favours from bidding nations.

Fifa say those investigations must be concluded before Garcia's report can be published. That could take years because anyone found guilty could exhaust multiple appeals.

What's in the report?

That's the big question. Only a few people have read it. One of those is Eckert. He said he didn't see any smoking gun that would justify stripping Qatar and Russia of their World Cups. Irregularities in the bidding process were "only of very limited scope" and "far from reaching any threshold that would require returning to the bidding process", he said in his 42-page summary.

That might have been the end of this saga - at least that's what some at Fifa hoped - if Garcia hadn't subsequently objected. He said Eckert misrepresented his findings. That, in turn, reopened the question: What exactly did Garcia find out and was it so damaging Fifa would rather sweep dirt under the carpet?

What of Russiaand Qatar? Unless some major new evidence of wrongdoing turns up, they seem certain to keep their World Cups.

"There is no reason to say that our decisions were wrong. So we will go on sticking to our decisions," Blatter said. "There must be huge upheaval, new elements must come to the fore, in order to change this." Independent/AP