Could there be a more Orwellian organisation than Fifa?

In his forbidding masterpiece, 1984, George Orwell depicts a tyranny in which meaning is stood on its head. Truth means lies, peace means war.

And so welcome to Fifa's so-called ethics committee, which has just decreed that Jack Warner, though drummed out of the organisation, goes with the "presumption of innocence".

Innocence? Don't they mean guilt? Warner has been found complicit in the attempt by Mohammad Bin Hammam to bribe Concacaf members to vote for him. We have even seen footage of the thick packets of dollars involved. But "innocent" Warner now slides out of the picture with his large Fifa pension untouched.

Sandre Kaafjord, a confused Norwegian member of the ethics committee, reassures us that "the result is the same as if he had been banned by us".

Hardly. Warner keeps his ill-deserved pension and, despite a record as long as your arm for previous ticket scams and such scandals as refusing to pay the gallant Trinidad World Cup team of 2006 its promised bonuses, has flourished under Blatter. From whom — see Andrew Jennings' devastating book Foul! — he seems to have been able to obtain any favour he wanted. Yet, the FA grovelled to him.

In the meantime, Blatter rules supreme, Qatar still keeps a World Cup which should never have been awarded to them and not a word is heard about how Russia managed, despite the appalling record of racism in its football, to grab the World Cup for 2018.

Once again, however, it should be emphasised that the moral battle was hopelessly lost when Joao Havelange, with funds procured (see David Yallop's How They Stole The Game) from the Brazilian football federation, toppled Stanley Rous to become Fifa President in 1974. And if Blatter sailed home unopposed this year, who stood against Havelange in the incredible, outrageous 24 years in which he stayed in office?

There is nothing to be done with Fifa, in whose counsels even such great stars of the past as Michel Platini (who voted for Qatar) and Franz Beckenbauer (who endorsed Blatter) have gone with the flow. And what a flow: Did anyone say sink of inequity?

Chelsea's gamble

Chelsea's surprising appointment of 33-year-old Andre Villas-Boas is a gamble. Chelsea's because, though the talented young Portuguese has worked at Stamford Bridge before and excelled with Porto, it's hard to know whether he can adapt to the immense pressures to which any Chelsea manager, with billionaire Roman Abramovich breathing down his neck, is subject to.

And so much will inevitably depend on whether, after a summer's rest, the £50 million (Dh292 million) Fernando Torres can at long last recapture form and score goals. He was a burden on poor Carlo Ancelotti's back and could be just as heavy a one on Villas-Boas.

Not that the young Portuguese's anonymity as a player is of any account. His mentor and Chelsea predecessor, Jose Mourinho, was never a footballer.

The author is a football expert based in England.