Jérôme Valcke, Sepp Blatter’s charming right-hand man and long-time fixer, has often been described as “Teflon” by those close to the warped world of football’s global governing body.
Even when he was forced to quit in 2006 after being criticised by a New York judge for lying during contract negotiations with Mastercard he was back in the fold within months. Yet in a terse two-paragraph statement on Thursday night, the man who is an avowed fan of Ferraris appeared to run out of road.
Still shaken by the aftershocks of that May morning when seven Fifa officials were dramatically arrested in the heart of their Zurich domain – the lobby of the five-star Baur au Lac hotel – a series of serious allegations against Valcke could not be simply shrugged off in the newly paranoid atmosphere that stalks the halls of Fifa House.
Valcke was believed to be on his way to Moscow, one of the few countries he and Blatter are still prepared to visit given the travel restrictions they have placed on themselves in the wake of the dramatic intervention by the US attorney general Loretta Lynch, as a one-time associate Benny Alon laid out a series of allegations.
The Frenchman, left to spin plates and deal with the fallout from the executive committee above his head for more than a decade, stood accused of claims that he was implicated in a deal.
No money actually changed hands as the underlying agreement with Fifa for tickets to resell for Brazil 2014 did not work out. Valcke denies the claims by Alon, a consultant to the ticketing company JB Sports Marketing, which had the underlying contract with Fifa to resell World Cup tickets.
But on top of question marks after evidence emerged in May showing he was aware of a $10m payment from South African officials to the disgraced former Fifa official Jack Warner described by US investigators as a bribe, the decision was swiftly taken to place Valke on indefinite leave.
Given he has promised to follow Blatter out of his opulent HQ during February in any case, insiders on Thursday night said it was hard to see how he would ever return to work after being “released from his duties until further notice” by Fifa from a well-remunerated role that he once described as “a dream”.
“Our world is a very small world,” said Valcke in 2007, having staged a remarkable return to Fifa as general secretary after the Mastercard affair.
It is a world that – thanks to US prosecutors following in the wake of dogged investigative reporters – in the last six months has finally been held up to microscopic scrutiny and smashed to smithereens by a determined criminal investigation.
“We worked closely together for three years. Whatever Blatter asked me, and what I committed to deliver when I joined Fifa, I did. So we have a strong relationship, Blatter and myself,” the Frenchman said in 2007.
If that was true then, their bond has only strengthened in the intervening years. It was Valcke who delivered logistically challenging World Cups in South Africa and Brazil through a combination of charm and threats (he sparked a diplomatic meltdown in Brazil by saying that they needed a “kick up the backside”).
It was Valcke who said in 2013, “I will say something that is a little bit crazy but sometimes less democracy is better for organising a World Cup.” And it was Valcke who was revealed in 2011, at the height of a scandal-hit presidential election that ended with Blatter re-elected unopposed, to have sent a private email saying that Qatar had “bought” the 2022 World Cup. He claimed that he meant the tiny Gulf state had spent a fortune on its bid and therefore was likely to win. He did not, he insisted, mean that it had paid bribes.
In the fallout from the chaotic, controversial race to host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups it was Valcke who again had to pick up the pieces, negotiating with broadcasters, sponsors and the press – trying constantly to square circles. In doing so he employed all the Machiavellian tactics that had served him so well in the Wild West world of sports marketing down the years.
Before the announcement that the World Cup in 2022 would, after all, be shifted to winter rather than played in temperatures of 50C in June he quietly did a deal with Fox to hand it the rights to the 2022 and 2026 tournaments without an auction. The Rupert Murdoch-owned TV network had been among the most voluble critics of a shift to winter. Valcke insisted he had not done anything wrong.
He once held ambitions to ascend to the presidency himself but amid the dying embers of Blatter’s regime and the ongoing twin-track inquiries by the US Department of Justice and the Swiss attorney general, he had already announced he would also leave in February along with the president – with whose fate he has become entwined.
Speaking before the World Cup qualifying-phase draw in St Petersburg last summer he sought to draw a line between the scandal-plagued executive committee and the administrative corps who kept Fifa running on a daily basis.
“As the head of the administration I can be proud of what Fifa has done. The administration, I don’t think, has ever been part of any of the stories which are around Fifa, including all the commercial agreements we have signed from 2007 to 2015,” he said. “I have not seen anything relating to wrongdoing by the Fifa administration regarding any commercial aspect during this period so, if you are asking me if I am responsible for what happened, I don’t think I am really involved.”
The urbane 54-year-old with a background in sports broadcasting and TV-rights deals quickly became indispensable to Blatter when he joined in 2003 as head of marketing and TV. Barring that brief interregnum in 2006, when he was let go after Blatter said Fifa “could not possibly accept” such behaviour from employees before being reinstalled as general secretary less than 12 months later, he has been a Fifa fixture. He has also seen off myriad enemies in the organisation’s internecine political battles.
Just as it was once impossible to imagine Fifa without Blatter at its head, whatever corruption and bribery claims washed over the organisation, so it was hard to imagine it without Valcke smoothing the path, pouring honey and dripping poison in his wake.
All of a sudden, everything has changed.
