Summary: Anto is joined by the Co-Director and General Counsel of the ChangeFIFA organization, David Larkin, to take a look at the ever-evolving political landscape as it applies to Sepp Blatter and FIFA given new allegations in the wake of two very important developments - a decision by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) which has annulled a ruling against a lifetime ban for former FIFA presidential candidate Mohamed Bin Hammam, and a PriceWaterhouse Cooper (PWC) audit into the financial affairs of the AFC. But even deeper still, these events serve as an exploration of old skeletons involving ISL and how that scandal was handled by the FIFA Ethics Committee, and whether a repeat of that playbook will soon involved Mr Bin Hammam much in the way that Jack Warner and other political adversaries have been handled in the past. We examine the CAS decision and what it may mean in the political realm as well as how the media machine behind FIFA will once again use this event to its own sense of expediency, as Sepp Blatter and his predecessors have done for decades. We also look into how politics works inside the FIFA organization, how the one nation-one vote process ensures an almost colonial approach to how FIFA conducts its business and how investigations without transparency and accountability are used as a political weapon, and how blocks of votes are acquired by the leadership to maintain total power on both the Executive and Emergency Committees. We also revisit how Sepp Blatter came to power and the many base ironies and hard contradictions that were at once revealed and how this ongoing process of trying to deconstruct the factions is a reflection of the organization itself. We also re-calibrate the events involving CONCACAF, the CFU and Jack Warner and how political forces are marshaled, and why the Bin Hammam candidacy serves as a very important lesson and may actually forecast how FIFA will try to inoculate itself against recent ISL revelations. More importantly, however, we also look at how Mr Bin Hamman and the Qatar 2022 World Cup bid are being incorrectly intertwined and how this may hold a key to yet another Sepp Blatter re-election effort in 2015 given how factions have aligned themselves based entirely on self-interest and economics. We also look at what became the catalyst for the ChangeFIFA movement, the key people involved, the heroic figures who continue the fight for FIFA reform and why events may be forcing a tipping point for change at last.
