IN ZURICH tomorrow, the great and the good of football will attend the Fifa World Player Gala. They will honour one of three players: Fabio Cannavaro, who led Italy’s triumphant World Cup squad, but had a less sure-footed transition to Real Madrid after quitting Juventus when the Italian giant was demoted because of the match fixing scandal. Or Ronaldinho, whose smile waned during Brazil’s subdued World Cup. Or Zinedine Zidane, whose last act on a pitch was to butt an opponent during the World Cup final six months ago.

If the choice of player is clouded, so is the reputation of the world governing body. Last Tuesday, Fifa sacked four of its leading marketing officials after a New York judge ruled that they had repeatedly acted dishonestly by lying and deceiving two companies bidding for the rights to sponsor the next two World Cups, to the tune of $180m.

Judge Loretta A Preska castigated Fifa. She concluded that the Fifa slogan is “fair play”, but Fifa’s dealings with MasterCard, its sponsorship partner for 16 years and entitled to renew that contract, “constituted the opposite of fair play”. She granted MasterCard an injunction to prevent Fifa switching its contract to Visa from January 2007 for eight years. In her judgment, which reads like an industrial espionage thriller, she stated “Fifa’s negotiators lied repeatedly to MasterCard, including when they assured MasterCard that, consistently with MasterCard’s first right to acquire (the sponsorship rights), Fifa would not sign a deal with anyone else unless it could not reach agreement with MasterCard.” The judge also concluded Fifa had lied to Visa when it asked, again and again, whether MasterCard had any contractual right to prevent the football authority from negotiating with a rival.

After the full transcript of the ruling was published, Fifa president Sepp Blatter acted. Fifa would appeal against the judgment which he deemed “very biased”. Nevertheless, he issued a statement that Fifa had “parted company” with its director of marketing and TV, Jerome Valcke, and three others officials in the division, Tom Houseman, Robert Lampman and Stefan Schuster. “The employees who had conducted negotiations were accused of repeated dishonesty and giving false information to the Fifa deciding bodies in question,” said Blatter. They were fired for breaching business principles.

Judge Preska equally tersely dismissed Chuck Blazer, an American member of Fifa’s executive committee and of the marketing and TV board. “Mr Blazer’s testimony was generally without credibility based on his attitude and evasive answers on cross examination.” She also drew the conclusion that “someone at Fifa” falsified the signature of Visa president Christopher Rodrigues on a contract to alter the date it was signed.

Visa, having made an offer that was initially $30m below the MasterCard agreement, was persuaded to up its terms to match the figure, and assured that would swing the deal.

Ultimately, said the judge, the witnesses confessed it was “clear somebody has it in for MC”. The crux of it was that MasterCard met and signed every requirement put to it by Fifa, but the contract was granted to Visa following a private dinner between its president and Blatter, also set down in the judge’s papers.

The deal was meant to start on January l, 2007 and run to the end of the 2014 World Cup. There was no response to the court judgment from Visa headquarters in San Francisco. MasterCard’s company lawyer in New York said: “MasterCard now look forward to reforms in Fifa’s business practices going forward.”

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