Soccer HQ run like a Swiss bank
IF Wednesday’s sweeping arrests of several Fifa officials at a five-star hotel in Zurich turn out to be the moment when everything finally started to unravel for Sepp Blatter, it would be hard to imagine a more appropriate setting.
Blatter, the president of soccer’s governing body, has long been accused of running his organisation like a Swiss bank, providing a minimum of transparency when it comes to the billions of dollars that flow into and out of its coffers every year.
Blatter has worked at Fifa since 1975, rising from technical director to general secretary to president. As Fifa’s leader, he has been praised for extending soccer’s reach to less developed nations, which included bringing the World Cup to Africa for the first time. But Blatter, who was not indicted, has also been widely criticised as tone-deaf and dictatorial, an unworthy steward of the global game.
Blatter has been dodging scandals almost from the moment he was elected president of soccer’s global governing body in 1998 — and his campaign that year was accused of bribing African delegates to secure victory. He denied this.
The US justice department may be hoping a few of the Fifa executives named in the indictment will implicate Blatter, in the same way that law enforcement officials start by going after the lieutenants in organised crime rings.
“A lot of people have asked me why Sepp Blatter wasn’t involved in this seemingly historic day, and the answer is, that’s how true power works,” said Alexi Lalas, a soccer analyst and a former US player. “It’s called plausible deniability.”
For the moment, Blatter, 79, does not seem to be treating this scandal any differently than any of the others that have unfolded on his watch.
Asked about Blatter’s state of mind at a news conference in Zurich, Fifa’s director of communications, Walter de Gregorio, described him as “quite relaxed”. He quickly clarified this, noting that the president was not “dancing in his office”.
Blatter released a statement of his own, in support of the US and Swiss investigations into his organisation. He did not appear at the news conference or make himself available for interviews.
Blatter owes his job security in part to the structure of Fifa. It is nominally a democracy, though without term limits or meaningful oversight. Each of the group’s 209 member nations gets one vote for president. Given how much money Fifa has at its disposal to dole out to impov- erished countries in need of new soccer facilities, it is a setup that tends to produce entrenched leaders — effectively a system of patronage and fiefdoms.
“You have vast sums of money being doled out to tiny, tiny locales,” said US soccer commentator Roger Bennett. “When you have that kind of situation, it enables the leader to wield power in a way where there are absolutely no checks and balances. It’s almost medieval.”
Blatter came under intense scrutiny in the wake of Fifa’s decision to award the 2018 World Cup to Russia and the 2022 tournament to Qatar.
In the face of mounting criticism, including allegations that Qatar had bribed members of Fifa’s executive committee, the organisation conducted an internal investigation.
When the resulting 400-plus-page report was not made public, its author, the former US attorney Michael Garcia, resigned in protest from Fifa’s ethics committee. (Fifa did release a summary, clearing Russia and Qatar of wrongdoing. Garcia criticised it as inaccurate.)
Blatter has weathered a number of allegations of corruption, while also producing something of a blooper reel of gaffes. He once quipped that female soccer players should wear tighter shorts to raise the game’s profile and suggested that players who have been victims of racially motivated abuse should “shake hands” and get on it with it. — © NYTimes.com