It Could Be Useless Trip for the U.S.

Coach Glenn “Mooch” Myernick has 25 players in camp at the Home Depot Center in Carson -- every one of them spinning Olympic dreams.

On Jan. 22, Myernick will take 20 of them down, or rather up, to Guadalajara for some high-altitude acclimatization.

And on Feb. 3, 5 and 7, in the same Mexican city, the U.S. under-23 national team will play Panama, Canada and Honduras, respectively, as it tries to qualify for Athens 2004.

But even if the Americans prevail, there is an outside chance that it might all be for nothing.

That’s because the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has threatened to pull the plug on the Olympic soccer tournament unless FIFA toes the WADA line on sanctions against players who fail drug tests.

Dick Pound, the Canadian chairman of WADA, last week was scathing in his criticism of world soccer’s governing body, which so far has refused to sign the WADA code.

“I just don’t think they have thought this thing through,” he told Britain’s FourFourTwo magazine. “They said they would sign. It makes it sound like they are actively looking for ways to put [drug] cheaters back into play.

“The ball is in FIFA’s court. The IOC [International Olympic Committee] has amended the Olympic charter so that only sports that have adopted and implemented the world anti-doping code can be on the Olympic program.

“If they don’t sign, they don’t have to bother coming to Athens.”

That wasn’t all. Pound pounded on.

“I don’t know what the stumbling block is,” he said. “It makes me wonder whether or not these people [FIFA leaders] can read.

“Football has a [drugs] problem, as does every sport in every country, but how widespread it is, I don’t know. To say there’s no doping problem in football is burying one’s head in the sand.”

Pound’s criticism was in reaction to comments made last year by Joseph “Sepp” Blatter, FIFA’s president, who claimed that soccer does not have an issue with drugs. Blatter has since changed his mind.

“I thought our game was clean, but it’s not clean,” he said in Frankfurt, Germany, last month. “There is now a suspicion surrounding football.”

But admitting that and signing off on the WADA code are two different things, and so far FIFA has not consented to do the latter.

The idea that the IOC would banish soccer from the Olympics is too far-fetched to be taken seriously, and FIFA knows that. Soccer has always been one of the top-drawing sports in the Summer Games and one of the Olympics’ prime revenue generators.

It will be no different in Greece, where the men’s and women’s soccer tournaments will take place not only in Athens but also in Patras, Volos, Thessaloniki and in Heraklio on the island of Crete.

Pound might have the moral high ground, but FIFA, unfortunately, has the clout to simply ignore him.

Guatemalan Corruption

One of the reasons FIFA is able to do as it likes is that no government has yet seriously challenged its authority.

Guatemala has that chance.

On Friday, FIFA suspended Guatemala’s soccer federation, cutting off its funding and banning all of its national and club teams from taking part in international tournaments.

Unless the matter is resolved soon, Guatemala won’t be allowed in the CONCACAF women’s Olympic qualifying tournament Feb. 25-March 7 in Costa Rica, and one of its top club teams, Comunicaciones, will not be allowed to play in the CONCACAF Champions Cup, the draw for which is set for Wednesday in New York.

And when qualifying continues in June for the 2006 World Cup, Guatemala -- including Galaxy standout Carlos Ruiz -- will not be involved.

At issue is the ouster of Jose Mauricio Caballeros as president of the Guatemalan soccer federation.

Caballeros, who took office in 2002, was reelected to a four-year term in September in an election whose integrity was seriously questioned by Guatemala’s media.

Since then, Caballeros has come under investigation by government prosecutors over the disappearance of funds from the federation’s accounts. The government took over the federation’s headquarters Dec. 23 and has barred Caballeros and others from entering the building.

First CONCACAF and then FIFA threw up their arms in alarm, both issuing bans as the result of what FIFA termed “governmental interference in the affairs of the federation, which constitutes a violation of the general organizational principles and statutes of FIFA.”

But it is those very principles and statutes that allow corruption to flourish, especially in such soccer backwaters as the North and Central American and Caribbean (CONCACAF) region.

Missing funds is nothing new in CONCACAF, as its Trinidadian president, Jack Warner, well knows.

It was only in May that CONCACAF and FIFA slapped a similar ban on Antigua and Barbuda’s soccer federation amid all sorts of corruption allegations.

A subsequent investigation revealed that federation executives had misappropriated tens of thousands of dollars and that a large chunk of the $1 million that FIFA gives to each of its 204 national federations every four years had been put to personal use.

Now the same sort of thing appears to be happening in Guatemala, but instead of helping the government root out the corruption, CONCACAF and FIFA are trying to sweep it under the rug amid draconian threats of banishing Guatemala from all international play.

Guatemala’s government would win kudos the world over if it stands up to such bullying and challenges CONCACAF and FIFA in court.

The entire system is at fault.

The leaders of FIFA dole out millions of dollars to federations -- ostensibly for the well-being of soccer. The reality, in many cases, is that the money goes into the pockets of those who can do what they like with it as long as they cast votes every four years to keep those same FIFA leaders in office.

There is a rotten smell about the sport these days, the stench of drugs and corruption, and it all begins at FIFA headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland.