KEIR RADNEDGE COMMENTARY: He did not affect to the stern arrogance of Joao Havelange, the bouncy bonhomie of Sepp Blatter or the godfatherly twinkle of Juan Antonio Samaranch. But, in his way, Jean-Marie Weber was as significant in the advance of sports business as any of them.

Weber, who has died at 75 after four years of serious illness, was the shadowy executive who delivered ‘commissions’ (known to outsiders as bribes) in the days when his Adidas mentor Horst Dassler and the latter’s marketing money machine, otherwise known as ISL, ruled the world.

Jean-Marie Weber . . . ISL paymaster

He was famously labelled by relentless pursuer Andrew Jennings as ‘Dassler’s bagman’ but Weber was no mere purveyor of paperwork; he was more akin to the US service servicemen who carry their president’s so-called ‘nuclear football.’

In the end, after Dassler’s death in the late 1980s from eye cancer precipitated a long slow slide – riven by family rivalries, a fall-out with the IOC and a series of business blunders – so ISL exploded into criminal bankruptcy.

Its collapse nearly took FIFA with it.

In the end the stain of scandal smeared not so much the federation as men who charted its course as those illicit commissions had demanded: Havelange, Nicolas Leoz, Ricardo Teixeira, Issa Hayatou being merely the known tip of an iceberg of brazen beneficiaries.

Shadows man

Weber drifted on in his preferred shadows. Not only did he know all the old guard, he knew too much about them.

He was Banquo’s ghost at every significant football and Olympic congress and conference; to be found unobtrusively in the corner of the hotel lobby after every latest exco or board meeting.

As the forest of faces parted in their haste to the exit so Weber would be revealed, mixing, mingling, whispering, reminding . . . in latter years with a slight stoop, greying to white hair matching immaculate grey suit.

He would catch your eye, bestow a slight smile, a nod of recognition.

Then he would vanish into his crowd.

Now he has gone beyond the talking shops, beyond the corridors of power.

More revelatory details of those days may eventually slither out from beneath the rocks of sporting secrecy. But not from him.

He kept his long-ago promise to prosecutors, taking his secrets to the grave.

Many men, now as back then, have relieved cause to be eternally grateful to Jean-Marie Weber.

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