SCANDAL DRIVES FIFA BOSS OUT
Rivals hail Sepp Blatter’s exit
In the end he jumped.
Tuesday, late afternoon Zurich time, in a sparsely attended press conference Sepp Blatter, the president of the world soccer governing body — FIFA — for the 17 scandal-filled years, resigned.
Blatter’s announcement caught the sports world by surprise.
Four days ago Blatter was in a jubilant mood. He had just won re-election as president of FIFA, beating off challenger Prince Ali Hussein of Jordan.
He had sounded defiant in his press conferences, saying to delegates who had voted against him: “I forgive, but I do not forget.”
Yet almost without warning the man whom many had said would never go — left.
For his rivals, the surprise quickly changed to joy.
Michael Van Praag, the Dutch candidate for the president of FIFA who pulled out of the race to support Prince Ali Hussein, tweeted, “(This is a) very big step in the right direction.”
It had not been a good day for Blatter. He had learned in the morning that his second-in-command, secretary-general of FIFA Jérôme Valcke, was implicated in a $10-million payment involving the South African bid for the World Cup in 2010. Valcke had always been regarded as a personal favourite of Blatter. He had even been brought back to FIFA as secretary-general despite a harsh U.S. judgment against him in 2006, that chastised him for lying on the stand during a court trial.
Tuesday, Valcke discovered “critical business in Zurich,” which did not allow him to travel to Canada for any of the Women’s World Cup. Valcke’s change of travel plans may have something to do with the Canada-U.S. extradition treaty, which means that suspects arrested in Canada are almost automatically transferred to the United States.
Tuesday evening, the New York Times and other U.S. news agencies are reporting that Blatter himself was under investigation by the FBI.
If true, Blatter would have run the risk of being arrested if he had come to Canada.
Nor have Canadian soccer fans been unmoved by the FIFA scandals of the last week.
Last Friday, after an Ottawa Fury soccer game on the weekend, fans gathered afterwards to chant “FIFA Mafia.” The Fury is a team in the second-tier North American Soccer League (NASL). If fans were to cheer at such event, what might they do at World Cup game when FIFA officials would be there and the game was televised around the world?
The potential sight and sound of soccer fans across Canada doing similar chants while their senior executives were arrested is a marketer’s nightmare.
Romario, the Brazilian soccer star turned politician who had butted heads with Blatter and FIFA on many occasions said, “His fall will come as a tsunami to every corrupt leader in the confederations around the world.”
What Romario means is that Blatter’s exit is a nightmare for many of the National Soccer Federations around the world that voted for Blatter and the status quo.
In countries such as Nigeria, Kenya, Iran and, last week, Greece, Blatter’s FIFA has specifically stepped in to stop investigations into corruption in the national soccer federations.
Blatter and FIFA used the big stick of threatening to suspend all international soccer games unless the government backed off investigating.
Afraid of the public outcry if the soccer stopped, governments almost invariably backed away.
What is clear is that the FBI investigation into FIFA will go on, Loretta Lynch, the U.S. attorneygeneral in charge of the investigation, specifically said upon hearing the news of Blatter’s resignation, “This changes nothing.”