Fifa boss ‘corrupted absolutely’

What is truly nightmarish about Fifa is not so much the extent of the allegations of sleaze, and the arrogance of its perpetrators, mountainous though they are, but the impotence of those who have long cried that the governance of world football is an abomination.

This is true to such an extent that you have to suspect if Fifa was in charge of some decrepit banana republic, rather than the world’s most beautiful and popular game, some of its most outrageous figures might be found hanging from the nearest lamp posts.

Not an outcome to be advocated by any reasonably law-abiding citizen, of course, but let’s be honest: wouldn’t it be intriguing to see if Fifa president Sepp Blatter and his cronies could maintain their expressions of unchallengeable smugness, even under such fraught personal circumstances?

The chances are they probably could, because if the history of Blatter’s reign, like that of his Brazilian predecessor Joao Havelange, is characterised by anything, it is an insuperable belief in his ability to shape the organisation any way he chooses.

It is necessary only to stroll casually back through the 13 years of Blatter’s presidency to find examples of, not just his disregard of his critics and their claims that Fifa was riddled with corruption, but his open contempt.

In Seoul nine years ago, he put down various rebellions in the wake of the catastrophic collapse of Fifa’s marketing organisation – amid huge debts and claims of outrageous profiteering within the organisation – and was voted into another term by “acclamation”. His hubris was quite something to see. The African challenge of Issa Hayatou had faded away and the whistle-blowing of Fifa’s then secretary-general, Michael Zen-Ruffinen, had been shoved aside.

Zen-Ruffinen had done much to organise the 2002 World Cup in Japan and South Korea, and for a little while it seemed he would be sacked on the eve of the tournament as part of Blatter’s jubilantly packaged revenge. Instead he left “amicably” some time later, but not before Blatter had claimed triumphantly that Zen-Ruffinen would be “thrown out of the door by Friday. The executive committee is going to take care of Mr Clean”.

The language is chilling, isn’t it, but then we have known for some time that when the first Baron Acton declared that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, he might have been anticipating the creation of Fifa. Here is indeed absolute power, power untrammelled by any of the normal restraints imposed by well-ordered and passably just societies.

This was the bedrock of Blatter’s authority when he appeared this week to face questions about the latest pantomime of political chicanery that led to the weekend withdrawal of his rival, Mohamed bin Hamman, from the presidential election. There can be no mourning for the fall of Bin Hamman, the man who has the outrage of Qatar’s World Cup hosting triumph set against his name, but nor can there be an iota of pleasure in the latest triumph of football’s Mr Big.

It is nothing so much as the confirmation of the style that in 1998 first carried him into office on the coat-tails of Havelange, the man whose policy of nurturing the hopes, and no doubt in some cases the bank accounts, of Africa and Asia he pursued with so much zeal and acumen.

For Blatter there is perhaps one unwanted accolade. It is that no one has ever walked so surely into the super league of man-manipulation. Havelange worked for a voting edge to neutralise any growth of scepticism among the major football nations – and Havelange’s strategy has been for so long his own inheritance.

One difficulty in recent weeks has been to see the Football Association as some beacon of reforming zeal.

It scarcely chimes with the 1998 decision to switch its vote from the Swedish contender Lennart Johansson in favour of Blatter – a move widely believed to be closely associated with a promise of victory in the voting for the 2006 World Cup, which went to Germany.

Nor does it sit any easier with the more recent claims that any exploration of Fifa corruption was bound to work against another FA bid – this one for 2018 – and was thus not public-spirited but “unpatriotic”.

The overwhelming conclusion has to be that some of the resignation about the futility of reforming Fifa, of bringing it into the orbit of decency, has to be challenged.

Fifa may be a law unto itself, but it is not one that cannot be undermined, perhaps one day fatally, by a properly motivated and supported campaign by any government that recognises football as more than a pastime.

Of course it is something that can engage the passions of the world. We saw that at Wembley last Saturday night when a huge crowd tuned in to see Barcelona’s gifted team fulfil a perfect expression of a game revered in every corner of the universe.

It is simply not good enough to shrug away the dichotomy between what Barcelona achieved and what Fifa does to the game and its image on a routine basis.

There is a duty to undermine Fifa now with every means. We cannot send in the SAS or the Seals, but we can wage another kind of war aimed at ridiculing and ultimately destroying a sickening empire. – The Independent