Jerome Valcke is out of a job…for now. FIFA has released the 54 year old from his job as Secretary General and the second in command to FIFA President Sepp Blatter after more allegations against him from fallout from the FIFA scandal. He had said he would resign in February once a new FIFA President was elected but that good news apparently came about five months earlier.
The news from today stems from documents surfacing a few months ago that Valcke authorized a $10 million bribe to Trinidad and Tobago’s Jack Warner from South Africa in exchange for votes from the Caribbean portion of CONCACAF to host the 2010 FIFA World Cup. And just recently, Valcke was accused of what is essentially ticket scalping by selling World Cup tickets for profit.
FIFA posted a statement on Valcke and it reads:
“FIFA today announced that its Secretary General Jérôme Valcke has been put on leave and released from his duties effective immediately until further notice. Further, FIFA has been made aware of a series of allegations involving the Secretary General and has requested a formal investigation by the FIFA Ethics Committee.”
While FIFA has been (fairly) criticized for not taking matters like this consistently seriously in the past, it at least appears they are going to take this seriously. So that’s definitely a start.
Now that Valcke is in trouble and the subject of an investigation, there’s only one man left who is higher than Valcke. While it appears for now that Sepp Blatter has remained untouched, the house of cards is falling all around him. Attorney General Loretta Lynch is hinting at more indictments within FIFA and it appears as if it’s only a matter of time before Blatter is implicated and indicted. Whether that is because U.S. or Swiss authorities have the evidence or one of the indicted “flips” to implicate Blatter or a mix of both, I’m pretty sure most people won’t care how it happens, just that people like Sepp Blatter and Jerome Valcke are gone from soccer and are (hopefully) behind bars. Today is potentially a big step in FIFA actually making noticeable changes within their organization.
