David Ginola's FIFA Bid Achieves the Impossible: It Makes Sepp Blatter Look Good

David Ginola will not be the next FIFA president. We can say this with certainty. We also say this with a certain amount of dejection, and a certain amount of anger that we even have to say it in the first place.

Ginola will probably not be an actual nominee in the forthcoming FIFA elections, which at least will save us having to talk about it for very much longer. Ginola, who officially announced his "candidacy" on Friday, needs five endorsements from national team associations before the end of this month to be eligible to stand for president, along with convincing evidence that he has been working in football administration for two of the last five years.

The 47-year-old claims to have correspondence showing he has been assisting a lower-league French side with football matters since 2010, although whether that cuts the mustard remains to be seen. Even if it is accepted as evidence, it is hard to imagine which football associations will end up putting their names to his bid—although with 209 of them to canvas, Ginola presumably hopes some of the smaller ones can be persuaded to get on board.

At this stage, then, it remains uncertain whether he will be able to fulfill either criterion, although he at least has some big, blue-sky ideas about some sort of halcyon future where FIFA is for football and the people and other such pre-school nonsense.

In a statement announcing his candidacy, Ginola said:

"

I’m standing because, like you, I love football. Whether you are on the terraces or on the pitch we all know that the FIFA system isn’t working. ... The game needs to change. But I can’t change it on my own.

I need you to stand up and change it with me. I need you in my team. By joining Team Ginola you are saying yes to a FIFA built on democracy, transparency and equality. You are saying yes to a FIFA which cares about one thing: football.

"

This is, in essence, well-spun nonsense—perhaps the first real hint that Ginola might actually have the credentials required to run FIFA. There are no clear indications about how he would change FIFA, just buzzwords like "transparency" and "equality."

Such a lack of any real manifesto became evident when Ginola held his first press conference on Friday morning, where it was also confirmed that the whole situation is really about Ginola being paid a sizeable sum by a well-known British bookmaker to be the front man to their campaign.

Asked whether he was being paid to stand, Ginola responded, per the Daily Telegraph: "Yes, I am." The bookmaker, Paddy Power, subsequently said Ginola had always been top of a list of preferred candidates, which makes you wonder what the criteria actually were.

Perhaps it was Ginola's L'Oreal adverts, and perhaps Cheryl Fernandez-Versini (formerly Cole, formerly formerly Tweedy) was second on the list. We might never know.

Michel Spingler/Associated Press

Expanding on his manifesto, Ginola repeated the same buzzwords used in his statement, talking a lot without actually saying anything. At this point everyone knows that FIFA needs to be overhauled and Blatter ousted, but what we want from potential candidates are details on how this will be achieved.

"I do believe that I can stand in front of you and say that I can be the next president because I want to share my ideas, my view of the game," Ginola added, per the Daily Mail:

"

I want a fair game. 

Three things are very important: transparency, democracy and equality. That’s the main thing I want to achieve.

I need obviously to know a lot more about FIFA. The most important thing I guess is to be standing in front of you today, thinking, well, what can I change? What can I do for the game? 

Crucial to that element is the right of football fans to have a say in who will represent them at the highest level in the game. We will deliver a new and fair democratic process.

The football community will be asked to elect our officials. There’s no room for doubt in football. If we cannot remove all suspicion and doubt from football, then how can we trust?

"

"

Congratulations to David Ginola for managing to debase himself in an even more gratuitous way than those L'Oreal ads.

— Tom Adams (@tomEurosport) January 16, 2015"

The bottom line, then, is that Ginola is primarily running for president for his own monetary gain, meaning that on this matter all that separates him from Blatter is a certain willingness to acknowledge that is the case.

How can we trust, indeed. This is not change we can believe in; it is a cynical cash-grab marketing stunt we can, and should, ignore.

Unfortunately, not everyone will. Ginola, along with Paddy Power, are hoping to raise £2.3 million to fund Ginola’s presidency bid (which, if reached, would include Ginola’s full payment of £250,000) via crowdsourcing, meaning they are asking for the money of normal people to facilitate an idea that would be considered a bad one among friends even after six hours down the local pub.

"

If you're mug enough to donate to Ginola's Fifa campaign here's what they'll use your cash for (via @sportingintel) pic.twitter.com/hlobhV4St5

— Ian Prior (@ianprior) January 16, 2015"

At the time of writing, Team Ginola have already raised more than £260,000 and accumulated more than 124,000 Twitter followers. Generously, you might say that underlines the public desire for change at the highest levels of FIFA, even if it is being channelled down a dead end.

Less generously, you have to wonder who exactly is buying into such nonsense, and whether the rest of us should all just give up and go home now.

Once again, the only ones who might benefit from this situation are FIFA, along with Blatter himself. If this is the best challenger, of all the many ex-players and managers around the world, that those calling for change could come up with, then what exactly is the threat to Blatter?

Ginola has no track record in football administration, demonstrates no evidence of carrying real, implementable ideas about changing football and did not seem to have any interest in running for a role within FIFA until a sizeable cheque became involved.

In the Frenchman, FIFA may have actually been hand-delivered a candidate for president who is actually worse than Blatter; the first positive bit of PR the Swiss has had in a long time. He might be changing his campaign slogan to "At least I'm not Ginola" as we speak. 

Alastair Grant/Associated Press

"We love the fact David is a truly competitive, seriously credible FIFA presidential candidate," David Larkin, of ChangeFIFA, said (presumably at gunpoint?). "His campaign will be respectful and constructive—it does not seek to confront or attack his fellow challengers. In this spirit of his positivity we hope the world and its 209 Associations embraces David as the new FIFA president in May."

ChangeFIFA has been described in the press as variously a "pressure group" and an "organization," but really it’s a moderately subscribed Twitter feed (19,000 followers as of Friday morning) that fills a convenient vacuum for news organisations: When you are looking for an anti-FIFA quote for a story, who better to talk to than a group called ChangeFIFA?

"

Ginola asked by @charliesale how many members of Fifa ExCo he could name. 'That's a good question. I need to learn a lot more about Fifa.'

— Oliver Brown (@oliverbrown_tel) January 16, 2015"

Being quoted on newsworthy stories is very different from having real, plausible ideas about change, however (talking trash about FIFA is pretty much like shooting fish in a barrel at this point), and the Ginola farce suggests that, like the player himself, Larkin and ChangeFIFA are more style than substance.

Getting into bed with Paddy Power, a company whose actual desire for FIFA to change comes, at best, a very distant second to their desire to raise their profile (this is in many ways the natural continuation of a desire to shock that saw them pay Nicklas Bendtner to wear Paddy Power pants), is a symptom of all that.

Ginola and ChangeFIFA have shown that their integrity can be bought, making them literally exactly like all the worst elements of FIFA they claim they are fighting to change.

That irony alone should drown this "project" at its source. We can only hope.