Fifa’s lavish £150m headquarters in the hills above Zurich has been so often described as a Bond villain’s lair that the comparison has long since passed into cliche. But never has it been more appropriate than yesterday, when a self-pitying Sepp Blatter spent the morning holed up in his office receiving a string of visitors as he tried to plot a way out of the worst crisis of his 17-year tenure as president.
Naturally, his scheming concerned his personal survival in a role that carries with it an estimated $10m (£6.5m)salary and all the trappings of a head of state, rather than the future of his tattered and discredited governing body.
Michel Platini, the Uefa president who backed Blatter’s first campaign in 1998 and became the first in a succession of favoured then spurned potential successors, delivered a tear-stained plea to Blatter to go before today’s election. Naturally, he refused. Uefa itself is no paragon of virtue and the European game is too often perceived as a hectoring bully by the rest of the world. It needs to become part of the solution.
For never has an organisation become more inured to scandal than Fifa. From the 1998 election that brought Blatter to power, to the ISL scandal in which $100m in kickbacks were paid to senior executives, and the complex, controversial and chaotic race for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, Blatter has reflexively learned to shrug off corruption on a scale that would sink the leader of any other organisation.
Down the years he has managed to successfully play off against one another a combustible mix of rogues and created a system that effectively allowed them to act with impunity in their own backyards using the power and privilege granted to them by their position. He has also learned to maintain the appearance of keeping his own hands clean. Down his 40 years he has regularly heard the shattering of broken glass but rarely been caught casting the stone. Never ask, never explain.
Even when he has been caught out – such as when he handled a $1m bribe meant for his mentor Havelange that was part of the web of $100m ISL kickbacks – he has managed to obfuscate and delay, using the Swiss legal system to his benefit. No longer. All those charged by the US Department of Justice on Wednesday have close links to Blatter and find themselves at the mercy of a suddenly emboldened Swiss prosecutor.
Fifa has tried to sing the old songs, shielding its leader from complicity. Blatter, too, when he finally emerged from crisis talks in his bunker to walk past the police vans parked outside the conference centre and deliver a predictably mendacious promise to change.
In his opening speech, he admitted the current situation was “unprecedented”. Back in 2011, when allegations of bribery and corruption again swirled around Zurich, he said: “We will put Fifa’s ship back on the right course in clear, transparent waters.” But four years on, with the situation so much more serious given the might of the US justice system ranged against him and some of those with whom he has been so closely entwined down the years facing extradition and FBI interrogation, the ship is nearly sunk.
On Friday he will promise to share Fifa’s World Cup bounty with its 209 members, skimming over the fact that it spends as much on salaries, protocol and other operating expenses as it does on football development.
Looking at the US charge sheet and considering what we now know about the 2018/22 World Cup race, together with the grim history outlined by investigative reporters down the years, a familiar thought resurfaces. Given all that has happened on his watch, Blatter is either corrupt or incompetent.
There is already a rush to proclaim the US case against Fifa and the culture of cosy kickbacks and patronage minted by Havelange and developed by Blatter during a period when World Cup income rocketed as world football’s “Salt Lake City moment”.
But that reference to the investigation into the grubby world of graft that characterised the bidding process for the 2002 Winter Olympics and led to a clean-up at the International Olympic Committee was not the point when its image began to improve. That was when its president Juan Antonio Samaranch finally left office. It is time Blatter finally looked in the mirror and did the same. For the game, for the world.
