He managed to avoid becoming a victim of the corruption scandals which claimed the reputations of the three other fellow South Americans who dominated FIFA from the 1980s well into this century: Joao Havelange, Ricardo Teixeira and Nicolas Leoz were all found in 2013 to have taken massive bribes from FIFA’s collapsed marketing partner ISL.
Grondona will take any secrets to the grave, but he was a hugely wealthy man - even before his FIFA involvement he had founded and been president of the Arsenal Futbol Club in Buenos Aires from 1957 to 1976.
He took over as head of the AFA a year after the country had won the World Cup for the first time in 1978. For the next decade he thrived, and was often pictured with the dictators that ruled the country, often brutally, during that time.
Indeed, Grondona never made any secret of his support for Argentina’s claim to the Falkland Islands which saw his country to go war with Britain in 1982, and in recent years never hid his dislike for the English.
