Fifa Sacks Marketing Chief Over Visa Deal

FIFA has sacked its marketing chief Jerome Valcke and all his team connected
with the MasterCard World Cup account after last week’s federal court ruling in
the credit card’s favour over the governing body’s switch of the sponsorship
rights to rival Visa.

Valcke and three other members of FIFA Marketing – in-house legal counsel Tom
Houseman; head of sales Stefan Schuster and account director Robert Lampman –
have had their contracts terminated with immediate effect.

Last week, a New York federal court upheld MasterCard’s case that FIFA struck
a deal with Visa for the World Cup sponsorship post-2006 without allowing
MasterCard its contractual obligation of first refusal on the exclusive category
rights.

The court proceedings found that the four FIFA officials had lied to both
brands on numerous occasions regarding the availability of the rights, beginning
with a conversation with Visa head of marketing Tom Shepard at the 2004 Olympics
in Athens in which Shepard was led to believe that MasterCard had no contractual
rights on a renewal deal.

Visa subsequently signed a £150m deal with FIFA earlier this year for the
World Cup sponsorship rights for 2010 and 2014.

However, the court ruling supported MasterCard’s view that its contract with
FIFA included a clause outlining first refusal on a renewal – even though the
structure of the sponsorship packages moving forward was changing.

Valcke and his team were in Japan at FIFA’s Club World Championship when the
ruling was announced upon which it is believed they were ordered on the first
plane back to FIFA’s headquarters in Lausanne and had their email addresses and
contact systems terminated upon arrival.

FIFA refused to comment on the departures although the move appears to place
major doubts over the governing body’s ability to have the ruling overturned in
a Swiss appeals court – a scenario it had stated last week it believed it could
win.

FIFA could now face a major compensation claim from Visa which had already
begun hiring activation teams for the World Cup deal while MasterCard is by no
means guaranteed to take up its now legally binding ability to renew its
sponsorship with the governing body.