BLATTER QUITS AS FIFA PROBE DEEPENS
Five days after being re-elected as president of FIFA and blithely claiming a renewed mandate amid charges of deep corruption in his organization, Sepp Blatter shocked the soccer world Tuesday by stepping down and calling for new elections. Blatter spoke for about six minutes at FIFA headquarters in Zurich, and then left the news conference without taking questions.
“While I have a mandate from the membership of FIFA, I do not feel that I have a mandate from the entire world of football — the fans, the players, the clubs, the people who live, breathe and love football as much as we all do at FIFA,” Blatter, 79, said, according to FIFA’s translation. “Therefore, I have decided to lay down my mandate.”
Blatter said he intends to stay on until FIFA’s far-flung national representatives can reconvene for a special congress in Zurich, some time between December and March. The next regularly scheduled FIFA congress was not until May 2016.
FIFA was rocked last week by a U.S. investigation that resulted in 14 indictments on federal charges and seven arrests in Switzerland.
Blatter was nonetheless reelected as leader and it is unclear what specifically prompted his change of heart. This week, reporting by The
New York Times and a document unearthed by The Press Association in the U.K. linked Jérôme Valcke, FIFA’s secretary general and Blatter’s second in command, to a $10-million bribe allegedly paid by South Africa to ensure it won the vote to host the 2010 World Cup. Officials in South Africa have denied this happened.
Valcke was supposed to come to Canada for the start of the Women’s World Cup on Saturday, but nixed those plans on Monday due to the “current situation.”
A Swiss investigation was also investigating the process by which the 2018 and 2022 World Cups were awarded to Russia and Qatar, respectively, although the Swiss attorney general said that Blatter was not part of that probe. ABC News reported that Blatter was part of the FBI investigation.
FIFA , which has been plagued by bribery allegations, announced Tuesday that it would adopt several reform proposals.
Domenico Scala, the independent chairman of FIFA’s audit and compliance committee, will oversee the reform efforts, Blatter said.
“Many of the issues that have been raised in the past relate to the actions of individuals,” Scala said in his own statement. “In order to ensure that those who represent FIFA are of the highest integrity, FIFA will seek to implement FIFA-driven integrity checks for all executive committee members.… Today these checks are the responsibility of the confederations to which these members belong. This must change.”
There are plenty of reasons to not take Blatter at his word when he says he is seriously pushing for change, and to distrust the system that he leaves in his wake.
Blatter served as secretary general from 1981 until 1998, before taking over from Joao Havelange as president. Rumours of match-fixing have long hung around international soccer, but the culture of bribery surrounding important FIFA votes has been an open secret. Blatter has previously said that he cannot oversee every part of FIFA, although that is essentially his job description.
Ultimately, the dual investigations produced too much evidence to ignore. Michel Platini, the French president of UEFA, the body that oversees soccer in Europe, publicly discussed the possibility of declining to sit on FIFA’s executive committee, while Visa and Coca-Cola, two primary sponsors of the World Cup, released statements that put pressure on FIFA to enact real change. Bigger threats — boycotts, the mass withdrawal of sponsors and even several countries opting to leave FIFA and form their own governing body — might have been on the horizon without Blatter’s announcement. Those concerns should stop, at least for the moment.
“We have a different ball game now — FIFA having to play on a playing field that is not governed by their rules,” said Trevor Watkins, a lawyer specializing in sports law with Pinsent Masons in London. “They’re governed by the rules of business and crime and nation-states, which is not something they ever intended, irrespective of whether it is seen as a witch hunt or a determined effort by certain countries to undermine the credibility of the current leadership.”
Regardless of any policies put in place or whoever follows Blatter as president, skepticism will still dog the organization.
Most of the concerns revolve around the next two World Cups. FIFA awarded Russia and Qatar those events at the same meeting in December 2010.
Both are considered troublesome choices — Russia for its aggression in Ukraine and its profligate spending on the 2014 Winter Olympics, Qatar for the virtual foreign slave labour required to build facilities — even before factoring in any potential bribery. Russian President Vladimir Putin recently accused the FBI investigation of being “another obvious attempt to spread jurisdiction to other states.” In 2013, the International Trade Union Confederation estimated that Qatar’s construction would result in the deaths of at least 4,000 migrant workers. These issues will not go away with Blatter, nor will the Swiss probe.
Still, Blatter’s resignation — after 34 years of holding one of the top two jobs in the organization — clearly makes any attempt to clean up FIFA easier.
“It is inconceivable that they could get away with this,” sports ethics campaigner Jaimie Fuller, chairman of Australia’s Skins sportswear, said minutes before Blatter’s announcement on Tuesday. “I can’t believe that they will. I can’t believe for a second that we’re going to be sitting here in two years’ time and Sepp Blatter will be the president of FIFA and it will be same old, same old.
“As (British journalist) Andrew Jennings said to me the other day, he’s (done). It’s just a question of when, not if.”
FIFA (now is on) a field that is not governed by their rules