Keir Radnedge Football's Corruption Currency

Watches Are Football’s Corruption Currency

When is a gift not a gift? In football, that’s simple: when it’s a watch.

Luxury timepieces are collectibles for many of the rich and well-heeled in the upper echelons of football, but also for the self-entitled and the unbelievably naive. And within these ranks now count the latest hapless and hopeless recruit, Reinhard Grindel.

Football’s grandees need no wristwatches to note hours, minutes and seconds; they count time only in computations of years until the next election stitch-up.

When it comes to examining the fuzzy line between gift and bribe, look back no further than Mohamed Bin Hammam. As The Sunday Times revealed, the Qatari supported his decade-long reign over the Asian Football Confederation with a generous distribution of largesse far beyond his nearest and dearest.

The fact that Bin Hammam was focused more on his own FIFA presidential ambitions than Qatar’s 2022 campaign is neither here nor there; the point is the manner in which he compromised voting officials across Asia and Africa.

Gifts such as luxury watches work both ways: as indications of unseen adhesion and/or as encouragements of personal and political loyalty. They are be-ribboned with trouble and treachery for giver or receiver.

In 2013, Bayern Munich’s CEO Karl-Heinz Rummenigge was fined €249,000 for bringing two watches, said to be worth £84,000, into Germany after a trip to Qatar.

A year later, senior directors of FIFA were forced to hand in watches gifted by the Brazilian football confederation at the 2014 World Cup – but not all of them were accounted for, and Michel Platini, then the UEFA president, has volunteered various different tales of how he disposed of his.