Jack Warner—the former top figure in North American soccer and a former FIFA vice president—is wanted for prosecution by U.S. authorities. (He’s the one who cited an Onion article as evidence that the Department of Justice’s soccer investigation was retaliation for the decision not to award the 2022 World Cup to the United States.) Warner has also been on the outs with FIFA since 2011, when he was kicked out of the organization after being accused of corruption by Chuck Blazer. Blazer himself subsequently pleaded guilty to a number of corruption-related crimes, and Warner’s ouster is suspected to have been less about genuine ethics concerns and more about punishment for supporting a rival of FIFA president Sepp Blatter’s.
The point is, Jack Warner has a lot of enemies. And if he’s going down, he’s now saying in language reminiscent of Mad Max: Fury Road, he’s going to bring them down too. From ESPN:
Warner – mopping sweat from his forehead several times – told supporters at the rally that he will not hold back in his plan to expose scandal at FIFA.
He said he has compiled reams of documents and is delivering them to his attorneys, for them to disseminate as they see fit.
“I apologise for not disclosing my knowledge of these events before,” he said. “Not even death will stop the avalanche that is coming.”
As NBC’s Pro Soccer Talk site points out, though, Warner (who also says he is afraid that he will be killed) made the same kind of colorful threats—and never followed through on them—in 2011:
“I tell you something, in the next couple days you will see a football tsunami that will hit FIFA and the world that will shock you,” Warner said. “The time has come when I must stop playing dead so you’ll see it, it’s coming, trust me you’ll see it by now and Monday. I have been here for 29 consecutive years and if the worst happen, the worst happen.”
We’ll see, then, I guess. We’ll see whether the avalanche is really coming and whether even death can stop it.
