On Friday, Sepp Blatter declared: “I’m the president of everybody.” On Tuesday he shocked the football world with his resignation as Fifa president, just four days after being re-elected for a fifth term. Many, including me, thought he was invincible to external pressure but, at the end, even the most powerful of leaders, rulers and dictators break down. It’s biology.
The extreme pressure from world media, reports that criminal investigations from the FBI, US prosecutors and Swiss authorities were being conducted and the likelihood of more revelations from the US Department of Justice about Fifa’s culture of corruption is probably the most significant reason for him rushing out of office.
Or was it?
The million-dollar question has to be asked: why resign now, why go through with the election? What changed? Did the authorities finally find something on Blatter? He has always been very intelligent and a master in the way he could bend Fifa laws to his advantage, but never break them. That is why he had not been tied to a specific charge. Not yet at least.
A person who once worked closely with Blatter and Mohamed bin Hammam, the former Asian Football Confederation president from Qatar, told me the only reason Blatter went through the re-election was because he was opposed to Prince Ali bin Al Hussein of Jordan being elected Fifa president. Prince Ali, remember, was backed by nearly the whole of Uefa, the European federation.
Blatter had constructed an unassailable electoral position. First, he supported and campaigned for Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim of Bahrain to be AFC president, in return for near-unanimous support for his re-election from the 47 Asian members of Fifa.
Then he orchestrated the unanimous election to the executive committee of Sheikh Ahmad Al Fahad, the president of the Olympic Council of Asia and honorary president of the Kuwait Football Association. Sheikh Ahmad is the man Blatter will endorse, to the 133 Fifa associations who voted for him, to be the next Fifa president.
Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa, president of the Qatar FA, has reiterated again that the country was innocent of wrongdoing in the 2022 World Cup bidding process, back in 2011. However, if the next Fifa president is not a Blatter ally, Qatar could be at real risk of being stripped of the World Cup.
Blatter might be hated for his fortitude and, as some call it, for running a “rogue regime”, but I have a lot of respect for the self proclaimed “mountain goat” who kept going and going. He has done wonderful work, which has got lost in this media whirlwind.
The Palestine/Israel peace initiative, grass-roots developments in Africa, women’s football and taking the World Cup around the world – as it should be – these were Blatter’s accomplishments.
The West needs to understand that football belongs to the world and the cliché of “you have no history” has really become history.
The next Fifa president must be a former footballer, and the election should incorporate a system in which fans count for something like 30 per cent of the vote. After all, fans pay for the game.
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