Ray Whelan, the chief executive of Fifa ticketing partner Match who was arrested over touting allegations at the 2014 World Cup, has finally been cleared of any wrongdoing.
In a statement released by parent company Byrom and Match, which has been a partner of Fifa since the 1980s and will continue to provide hospitality and ticketing services through to the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, it was confirmed that the case against Whelan has been “officially closed in its entirety”.
Whelan was arrested in July 2014 over allegations of involvement in the illegal resale of hospitality tickets and VIP passes for matches at the World Cup, and detained in the infamous Bangu prison in Rio de Janeiro. Whelan was then placed under house arrest and finally allowed to return to the UK in November 2014 after Match guaranteed his return for any possible trial.
A judge dismissed the charges against Whelan in February 2015, but Byrom said it wasn’t until September 2016 that the highest Federal court in Brazil officially closed matters.
The company described the “very serious charges” brought against Whelan as “unjustified, baseless and utterly unsupported by either fact or supporting evidence”.
“The coverage of Ray Whelan’s arrests, his incarceration and subsequent court proceedings has been entirely one-sided, prejudiced, unrepresentative, and in many instances entirely inaccurate, from the very outset,” read the Byrom statement.
“These inaccurate stories live on forever in electronic archives (that includes the internet but also any other similar repository) and it is impossible to have them deleted, even though the case against Ray Whelan has now been closed and allegations therein have been proven to be untrue and unfounded.”
Whelan himself said he believes the Brazilian authorities’ lack of understanding of the sector led to the two-year ordeal. He also suggested the hosts of the World Cup may have been looking to deflect attention from their team’s 7-1 thrashing by Germany in the semi-finals.
Earlier this year, the head of Ireland’s Olympic Committee, Pat Hickey, was charged along with eight others by Brazilian authorities over claims of touting at the Rio Olympic Games.
Speaking to World Soccer magazine, Whelan said: “It’s like a mental roller coaster when you know you didn’t do anything wrong but the rest of the world is being given a totally wrong impression — even though it’s down in black and white and sound-recorded because the [phone tap] was clarification that what I was doing was totally within our company remit.
“I suppose it served a political purpose for the Brazilian or Rio governments because their team had just been beaten 7-1 [by Germany in the semi-finals]. Not only had they all invested in the World Cup but the team were expected to win it. Almost as if they didn’t think they’d even have to play. All they had to do was turn up to win it. And they weren’t just beaten, it was 7-1. It shattered the national psyche.”
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