--> And still nothing on Adidas, Nike...
The president of the German football association (DFB) resigned on Monday in a widening scandal over alleged financial irregularities linked to the award of the 2006 Fifa World Cup.
In a day of high drama, Wolfgang Niersbach entered a meeting of the DFB’s committee pledging to answer the mounting questions about the affair — and came out offering his resignation.
The 64-year-old has insisted he had no knowledge of the financial flows that are now being investigated by the DFB; by Fifa, world soccer’s scandal-hit governing body; and by Germany’s tax authorities. But he said he took “political responsibility” for a scandal that has shocked the country.
“I worked [at the DFB] absolutely cleanly and accurately. But things happened which have been disclosed only in recent days, which require me to resign in the sense of [assuming] political responsibility. The office of DFB president should not be burdened in this way,” he said.
Mr Niersbach, who worked at the DFB for 27 years, was involved in the process that led to Germany in 2000 securing the right to host the tournament. He later joined the organising committee chaired by German football star Franz Beckenbauer. He became DFB president in 2012.
The allegations concerning the 2006 World Cup come on the heels of wide-ranging judicial probes into Fifa in the US and Switzerland over the award of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar.
The German scandal broke last month when Spiegel magazine published details of an unexplained €6.7m payment from the German organising committee to Fifa. It alleged that that bribes had “likely” been paid to secure the tournament for Germany, which narrowly defeated South Africa in the final ballot by 12 votes to 11.
The DFB then said the €6.7m, earmarked for a Fifa cultural programme, may not have been used as intended. But it denied that it had found any “evidence of irregularities” in the award of the 2006 tournament and promised to complete an investigation into the matter.
Mr Niersbach insisted then that he had heard of the alleged payment only this year. But Theo Zwanziger, Mr Niersbach’s predecessor as DFB president, later alleged that Mr Niersbach had known about the payment much earlier.
Spiegel last week published what it said was a DFB document from 2004 referring to the payment to Fifa, with handwritten notes on it allegedly made at the time by Mr Niersbach.
Last week, tax investigators raided the DFB offices in Frankfurt, as well as the homes of Mr Niersbach and two other people linked to the association.
The Frankfurt prosecutors’ office said it had opened an investigation into “suspected tax evasion in a particularly serious case” in connection with “the awarding of the 2006 World Cup and the transfer of €6.7m from the World Cup organising committee of the DFB to the world football association, Fifa”.