It was a foregone conclusion. Sepp Blatter was always going to be given another term in office as president of soccer’s governing body, Fifa. But the ramifications for football are grave.
Blatter is not fit to run a bath, let alone one of the world’s biggest businesses. Since he took over Fifa in 1998, the game has gone to the dogs. In the next four years it will continue to do so. And Uefa, European football’s governing body, is becoming increasingly powerless to stop it.
The man’s chutzpah is admirable even if his actions are not. The scale and persistence of the allegations of, at best, gross mismanagement and, at worst, outright corruption would prompt a resignation letter from lesser men. But Blatter is seemingly immovable.
He wafts away the stench of impropriety with gay abandon. He has an explanation for everything. Accused of bribing referee Lucien Bouchardeau to smear rivals, Blatter told a Swiss newspaper that he was guilty only of charity: “He said to me, with tears in his eyes, that he was a poor devil and had nothing left. So I gave him $25 000 of my own money. I’m too good a person.” You couldn’t make it up.
Uefa president Lennart Johannsson suspected that his enemy would beat Issa Hayatou in Wednesday’s vote but draws the following analogy: “After Watergate, Nixon was still voted in as president before people knew all the facts. But the allegations never went away and he eventually had to go.”
Yes, the allegations against Blatter are never going to go away. But someone has to investigate them, and he’s cleverly prevented that from happening thus far. It’s a bit difficult for a committee to investigate the books if it is disbanded before it can read the first page.
How can Blatter get away with this? Because of the way Fifa is run. As the English Football Association’s Adam Crozier pointed out, it is a complete joke, one that has Blatter and his cronies laughing all the way to their Swiss bank.
It’s a gentleman’s club for hooligans. Money is apparently pushed around on the quiet without being properly accounted for and there’s nothing even the most morally minded men can do because Fifa is able to hide behind Swiss law. No one knows what Blatter pays himself, or any of the detail of how Fifa is really run.
Fifa’s general secretary Michel Zen-Ruffinen tried to find out. He met resistance at every turn. But what he did discover did not paint Blatter in a good light. The dossier he produced, which is currently in the hands of the Swiss police, shows how the mismanagement of the Blatter regime may have brought Fifa close to bankruptcy.
It estimates that the shambolic collapse last year of Fifa’s sports marketing company ISL involved losses to Fifa of more than $100-million (not the $31-million that Blatter owns up to) and shows how Fifa is deep in negative equity, already living off the projected marketing income of the 2006 World Cup. Blatter’s response? He suspended the committee looking into the affairs and told Zen-Ruffinen to run along and “stop playing detective”.
Uefa has seen all this happening. But still no one can stop it.
Certainly not Blatter’s opponent. Hayatou was fighting for a noble cause, but a lost one. He was running as an anti-corruption candidate, but for two-thirds of the Fifa membership, Blatter’s operation has been just fine.
It goes something like this: Blatter gives them a fat slice of Fifa cash and a say (they normally say thank you), and then lets them get on with it. Officially this operation is called Goal and Fifa sell it, commendably enough, as a worthy investment in the grass roots development of football, allowing the world’s poor to play the same game as the big boys.
In practice though it is just a continuation of the cash-for-votes scandal that allegedly got Blatter elected for his first term. Too little effort is made to ensure the money goes into football projects, rather than ever-deepening presidential pockets. The irony of Fifa’s maxim “for the good of the game” is not lost on Fifa’s European representatives.
Hayatou promised to clean up Fifa’s finances. But turkeys don’t often vote for Christmas. Blatter’s thinly veiled bungs will do very nicely for another four years thank you, few questions asked. And because there are so many countries in this position, Hayatou and Uefa didn’t stand a chance in the vote.
With 204 countries signed up, Fifa has more members than the United Nations. Each country — whether France at the top of the rankings or Montserrat at the bottom — has one vote and so, predictably, the election was decided primarily by those 150 minor nations who will never qualify for a World Cup. Vote cast, dye cast. That’s democracy for you.
“Today was victory for the truth,” Blatter said after his election victory. Nothing could be further from it.