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Washington: During last year's World Cup the normally desultory interest football inspires in the United States spiked sufficiently to draw out the conservative agitator Ann Coulter, who wrote a column denouncing soccer as immoral.
She dismissed the game as marked by collective rather than individual achievement, as effeminate, elitist and, worst of all, as foreign.
"Soccer is like the metric system, which liberals also adore because it's European," she wrote.
Like most of Coulter's writing the piece was mean-spirited, strident and, presumably, tongue-in-cheek. But it captured a common sentiment towards the game in the US.
So news that the US Justice Department and the FBI have driven the most significant legal assault on the sport's governing body, an organisation that has been subject to high-profile accusations of corruption since as far back as 2006, has been received in America with some confusion.
Hosts of the Fox News late afternoon news talk program The Five sniggered about FIFA's president, Sepp Blatter, who, they agreed, was the "closest the thing we have to a Bond villain".
It took an American to straighten up a European mess, they declared.
The right-wing talk radio host Rush Limbaugh seemed delighted at reports that FIFA had donated to what he called "the Clinton Crime Family Foundation", but said that corruption of the sort alleged by the Justice Department was "the name of the game" in what he called "Western European socialism".
As disgusted as he was by the whole thing, Limbaugh made it clear that he could not figure out why the US was "even taking time to try to straighten this out when soccer doesn't matter a hill of beans to anybody in this country – stop and figure that".
In fact, not only are the allegations far closer to home than many US observers appear to comprehend, but the methods used to investigate FIFA are almost uniquely American.
The 14 defendants affiliated with FIFA so far accused of "racketeering, wire fraud and money-laundering conspiracies, among other offences, in connection with the defendants' participation in a 24-year scheme to enrich themselves through the corruption of international soccer", have been charged under the US' Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations Act, more commonly known as the RICO Act.
This law was enacted in 1970 for use in combating organised crime in the US, and was used most notably in the mid-1980s by Rudy Giuliani, who went on to become mayor of New York, to wipe out the mafia.
RICO basically allows prosecutors to target criminals for being criminal. Under the act, prosecutors can secure sentences of up to 20 years for committing at least two acts of "racketeering activity" drawn from a list of 35 crimes over a period of 10 years.
Though its most famous targets have been the so-called "Five Families" of New York City, the RICO Act was in fact designed to attack organised crime that had taken root in legitimate business organisations. Without similar powers, it would have been impossible – or at least very difficult – for authorities in other jurisdictions to pursue those within FIFA and its affiliates in other jurisdictions.
American authorities claim jurisdiction for their attack on alleged corruption in FIFA based on the fact that alleged crimes were committed via the US banking system. But that is not necessarily why they launched the investigation.
A key figure in the prosecution is Chuck Blazer, who has already pleaded guilty to a number of charges and is understood to have aided the investigation.
Blazer was the head of CONCACAF, the FIFA affiliate that includes the US, North and Central America and the Caribbean countries in its territory. (Blazer is also the man who is reported to have kept a $US6000-a-month apartment in Trump Tower for his cats.)
Also accused of paying bribes is Aaron Davidson, a US executive whose company, Traffic Sports, was involved with the North American Soccer League.
Perhaps the US interest was best explained in a piece written by Andres Martinez, a professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University. He argues that the soccer world should look at the United States the way the US looks at China in the economic context: "A relentless giant inevitably bound to take over."
"Just look at the numbers," he writes. "Last year's World Cup final in Brazil between Argentina and Germany was watched by an estimated 26.5 million people in the United States. That number dwarfs the 15.5 million viewers for the 2014 NBA Finals, or the 14.9 million viewers for the final game of the World Series the previous year.
"The average viewership for all 64 World Cup matches was up 39 per cent over 2010 on ESPN. Just imagine what will happen the day the US team makes the World Cup final."
Even if many Americans are ambivalent about the sport they still call soccer, it is not hard to see why US authorities felt they had the means, the motive and the opportunity to act.
