On Tuesday, the UK government held a parliamentary committee to investigate how soccer is being run in England and why London’s bid for the 2018 FIFA World Cup failed so dismally. Stealing the headlines were serious allegations made by the former head of the English Football Association (FA), Lord Triesman, about corruption up to the very highest level of the world governing body.

This news won’t have been viewed kindly by the global powers of the game. Though current FIFA President Sepp Blatter promised swift action for any proven wrongdoing, both he and rival Mohamed bin Hammam will be far more focused on winning the upcoming FIFA presidential election in June and would be happy to put this all behind them. And it’s not as if bin Hammam can use this to strengthen the case for his candidacy, because his own country of Qatar won the right to host the 2022 World Cup under serious allegations of fraud.

In England, fans won’t exactly be happy with the news—not much will make up for losing the right to hold the World Cup—but they’ll surely feel a bit of delight at the thought of some of the biggest names in soccer politics being made to squirm. Many feel that FIFA has long shunned the birthplace of the game, even to the point that Blatter once made the ludicrous claim that the origins of soccer lie not in England, but in China. No one can seriously claim to have invented the concept of kicking a ball around—that’s like saying you invented the wheel, or fire—but it is an indisputable historical fact that the rules of this game were formulated in England.

Of course, Blatter seems to court controversy on many topics, once arguing that women’s soccer would be improved by the players wearing tighter shorts.

It’s hard not to feel this is all too little, too late. According to the allegations, members of the FIFA executive committee asked the FA chief for bribes to win their support. A clearer-cut case of corruption would be hard to find, and if true, the question has to be asked why nothing was done back then, before the climax of the bidding process in December. The college equivalent would be like sitting through a final exam watching all those around you blatantly cheating, but keeping quiet, trusting in the system. Would it really be a big surprise when you get your final grade and find you’ve fallen significantly behind the curve?

The harsh truth might just be that the FA was happy enough to go along with a rigged election and just underestimated the necessary lengths (and money) needed to win that way. During the drawn-out process, the English team suffered the embarrassment of having the seemingly innocuous gifts of a few handbags to executive committee members sent back over suspicions that they constituted bribery, and there had reportedly been offers of invitations to the recent Royal wedding. Compared to the millions of dollars quoted in the recent allegations, those “bribes” are almost laughable.

If England is truly the motherland of soccer, it needs to start acting like it. When your child starts hanging out with a bad crowd of people and doing things you don’t approve of, it’s not just a parental right but a responsibility to be brutally honest. Going along with the flow or sitting back and doing nothing just isn’t good enough—sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind.

Had the English FA taken a stand during the bidding process—either exposing these allegations or perhaps threatening to drop out in protest—it may not have changed the result, but it would surely have had far greater impact. Now it just comes across as the losing side being bitter, and while us fans are undoubtedly upset, it’s hard not to feel there might be some truth behind this. There is no smoke without fire, and the heads of FIFA, like most politicians elsewhere, are certainly no saints.

When the tiny desert state of Qatar won the right to host the World Cup, it was a victory for real fans everywhere. Not because of any deserving reason like a storied soccer history, large fan base or infrastructure suitable for such a massive undertaking (the 2010 World Cup Final was viewed by 700 million households worldwide), but because the absence of those attributes from Qatar’s bid highlighted the flaws in the selection process far more than these recent English claims of misconduct have.

@@line:An Englishman through-and-through, Tom Taylor was one of the handbag designers whose gifts to the FIFA were sent back. What he won’t tell you is that the committee members weren’t concerned about bribery—they just found his designs dreadful. To judge for yourself, contact him at tom.taylor”at”stanford.edu.