Pressure from Swiss and US investigators may be the only hope for independent reform of football’s governing body
When Sepp Blatter addressed Fifa staff in what was once his personal fiefdom 10 days ago it was on very different terms to those he has become used to.
With criminal proceedings hanging over him he made a brief speech to staff, of whom there were just 34 when he took over in 1998 but who now number more than 400. Then, for the first time in his 17-year presidency, he was ordered to leave the room.
Markus Kattner, the acting secretary general, and Marco Villiger, the legal director, took to the stage and explained that now Blatter was under criminal investigation by Swiss authorities he would no longer be speaking on behalf ofFifa and would issue statements through his lawyers.
Blatter was now fighting alone as he defended himself against charges that he had missold a World Cup TV contract to the disgraced former Fifa official Jack Warner and made a £1.3m “disloyal payment” to the Uefa president, Michel Platini, that was against the interests of his employers.
It was a symbolic move by an organisation that is now simply a shell. With no president (Blatter, suspended), no secretary general (Jérôme Valcke, suspended) and no heir apparent (Platini, suspended) Fifa is effectively being run by a team from the US law firm Quinn Emanuel, reporting to Kattner and Villiger. While football fiddles and Fifa burns, the lawyers at least are making hay.
Another US consultancy, Teneo, is providing communications advice. As crisis management assignments go, the Fifa car crash – with its multiple narratives, double-dealing and no clear end in sight – must be among the more challenging.
Meanwhile, in another part of Zurich the Swiss investigator Cornel Borbely is running the investigatory arm of Fifa’s much-maligned ethics committee.
For so long seen as just another weapon in Blatter’s arsenal of methods to pick off his rivals, Borbely insists that he is serious about following his brief. His triple suspension, plus a six-year ban handed down to presidential candidate Chung Mong-joon, was designed to prove it.
Borbely and Domenico Scala, the head of Fifa’s audit and compliance committee, privately insist they are serious about rooting out the bad guys and equipped for the task.
Yet they are saddled with the reputation of their ineffectual predecessors and, despite the action taken against Blatter and Platini, continue to operate under the suspicion that they are not fully independent from the organisation they are probing.
More significantly, the Swiss attorney general, Michael Lauber, is continuing to oversee an investigation that has already seized 11TB of data, uncovered 121 suspicious banking transactions and confiscated property in the Swiss Alps suspected of being involved in money laundering.
Prompted by the determined four-year US investigation that led to a string of current and former senior Fifa executives being charged with offences including money laundering, racketeering and fraud, something has shifted in the psyche of the Swiss political and legal elite.
When he handed a handful of documents relating to the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bidding processes to Lauber’s office last December, Blatter could scarcely have imagined he would end up here – cast from his own kingdom and fast running out of options.
Now Swiss prosecutors appear to be acting in concert with the Fifa ethics committee. By placing Blatter under criminal investigation, Lauber gave Borbely’s committee the ammunition to suspend both Blatter and Platini.
Blatter was in his office on Wednesday when the call came that the investigatory arm was to recommend a 90-day ban from all football activities.
Klaus Stöhlker, one of a rotating and sometimes competing cast of advisers battling for Blatter’s ear, said: “He is quiet, he is reluctant [but] he is fully prepared to take his responsibilities.”
Since Swiss police shattered the opulent calm of the Baur au Lac hotel in the early hours of 26 May to make a series of arrests the once unthinkable prospect that Blatter would not leave Fifa on his own terms has become ever more likely.
As ever amid Fifa’s grotesque hall of mirrors, conspiracy theories abound. Some of those who have spent decades observing Blatter’s ability to turn events to his advantage even suggest he could yet return from suspension to argue that the election should be postponed and he should remain in post for a while longer yet.
Others speculate that, having got wind of the fact that Swiss prosecutors had him in their sights, he simply resolved to bring Platini down with him.
The pair’s intertwined fates will surely one day make a movie far more compelling than Fifa’s £17m vanity project United Passions.
Platini played a crucial role in getting Blatter elected in 1998 and continued as a trusted confidante until they fell out over whether he would stand aside for his French protege.
The three-time European footballer of the year initially decided against standing for the presidency against Blatter but changed his mind in the wake of the fallout from the May arrests and the 79-year-old’s decision to stand down in February.
But he has faced questions over his strong backing for Qatar’s successful bid to host the World Cup in 2022 and now struggles to explain why he received £1.3m from Blatter nine years after it was due.
The Swiss prosecutor has questioned him as somewhere “between a witness and a suspect” and he has gone in the space of a fortnight from believing he was about to ascend to the most powerful role in world football to being suspended from all football activities.
In an interview with the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant in August Blatter assumed a bunker mentality. He said that he and Platini had once been like “father and son” but that they fell out bitterly shortly after Platini became Uefa president in 2007.
While Blatter, consumed with megalomania, has forlornly played his usual games – attempting to knock out his enemies and promote the chances of his favoured sons – wider forces are at work.
Beyond the walls of Fifa House, both Lauber and his US counterpart, Loretta Lynch, have been very clear that they won’t let up. Last month they held a joint press conference to outline exactly that fact. Lauber said his investigation was “not even at half time”. Lynch vowed there would be more arrests and said she would go wherever the evidence led.
So there are two parallel games in play. In one scenario, the farcical election process limps on until February. Prince Ali of Jordan, who lost to Blatter in May, is now the only declared candidate. With Platini out of the way others, such as Sheikh Salman, the president of the Bahrainian Asian Football Confederation, may consider a run.
But the fact that Fifa is incapable of healing itself has long since become obvious to everyone outside football. Those who hold out some hope for independent reform cling on to the idea that the pressure from those twin criminal investigations will become so great that it will have no other choice.
As the contagion spreads from Zurich to Nyon, the Uefa headquarters on the shores of Lake Geneva where its 54 member nations will hold a crisis meeting, the idea that the European game would ride to its rescue has also become laughable.
In Fifa House a portrait hangs on the wall with the inscription “Sepp Blatter is Football. Football is Sepp Blatter.” Substitute the word Fifa for football and that was once indisputably true. No longer.
Asked in August whether he had any friends in football, he shook his head but added: “The most loyal man in my entourage is the longest incumbent vice-president, Issa Hayatou.”
It is Hayatou, the Cameroonian who has been head of the African confederation since 1988 and in 2011 was censured over his role in the ISL bribery scandal, who now takes over as acting president. Campaigners say that simple fact is ample proof of why Fifa must change.
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