BRENT LATHAM – Grant Wahl’s done it again. The CNNSI writer has unleashed a publicity campaign so brilliant in conception it could only have come from the annals of a six-grade class president’s playbook, or David Beckham’s crack staff.

Wahl, who wrote The Beckham Experiment, helping make himself quite famous, now says he wants to be FIFA President. And from the looks of things, though it may not have started that way, he might mean it.

All he has to do, he says, to be in the race, is to get one single country to nominate him.

Wahl’s tongue-in-cheek campaign is great because it draws attention to the precise problems posed by FIFA’s encrusted power structure: billions of fans worldwide love the game (Wahl is the American representation of that love in media form – the guy has almost 70m twitter followers), but those fans have no say in the international game.If there were a place to hold a revolution overthrowing FIFA, the bureaucrats in Zurich would have nowhere to run.

And a good case can be made that Wahl, a Princeton educated scribe who’s been in the game for over a decade, is just as qualified or moreso to run an organization like FIFA.

Which brings up the question, maybe not Wahl, but why are their not more qualified candidates for a job that millions around the world would like someone more qualified to have?

Unfortunately, it’s not likely to happen. Every single one of FIFA’s delegates – those who would do the nominating – owe their loyalty to the impregnable power structure already in place. Nothing’s changing save coordinated government pressure from around the world.

But FIFA’s non-government intervention policy uses a divide and conquer strategy to alienate one country at a time that decides not to leave soccer to the corrupt power structure withing each zone and region.

It’s a perfect setup – one tailored to the crooks already inside. So let’s hope Grant Wahl and his twittersphere can foment a digital revolution. But let’s not hold our breath.

by Brent