It provides money to member associations of FIFA to implement football projects; be it the building of a training centre, football pitches or something else. Hundreds of millions have been spent on such projects across the world, from Bhutan to Benin, St. Lucia to Somalia.
You may not like him, but this was Blatter’s innovation and millions adore him for bringing improved football facilities to their countries. And it is a pretty good way of winning Presidential elections. So when you wonder how he continues to be elected, put yourself in the position of the head of the Tajikistani, or Nicaraguan Football Associations – the improvements in football infrastructure make a Blatter Presidency an attractive option. This is something very few people in the UK really understand.
Sure, the Blatter years have not been rosy. It was ridiculous for FIFA and Blatter to have decided to hold votes for two World Cups, in 2018 and 2022, concurrently. This simply exacerbated the risk of corruption, as was proven when two FIFA executive committee members, Reynald Temarii and Amos Adamu, were suspended last year after an undercover Sunday Times exposé discovered they were willing to sell their votes for cash before the decision on the two tournament hosts was made. And don’t get me started on giving Qatar a World Cup (though the principle of taking the competition to new lands was a good one, Australia has also never held the tournament.)
Under his watch almost a third of his executive committee have had corruption allegations levelled at them, after Lord Triesman accused Ricardo Teixeira, Worawi Makudi, Jack Warner and Nicolas Leoz of asking for bribes during the 2018 bid campaign. Triesman’s allegations though, were proven unfounded, but next month could see some FIFA members exposed as having taken kickbacks from their former marketing partner, the now collapsed ISL company.
Should documents which Blatter has promised to reveal show what many suspect they will, then the likes of Teixeira could find themselves under unprecedented scrutiny and possibly forced to quit. Teixeira, currently the subject of a fraud inquiry back home in Brazil, is coming up to the point at which he will stand for re-election at the Brazilian Football Confederation, and he is disliked intensely in political circles back home, significantly by President Dilma Rousseff.
Blatter has presided over the most damaging period in the organisation’s history. But to an English audience who are often deprived of any objective analysis of Blatter’s Presidency from a media which is probably more ignorant than intentionally forgetful, it is crucial to understand how he has come to serve for so long as President of the organisation.
Why did only one candidate get put forward against Blatter last year for the FIFA Presidency? It is forgotten that it is quite easy to select someone to stand against him. You find any individual, anywhere in the world (and there are seven billion of them) whom one of the 208 FIFA members are willing to back. That member will then back that individual, and it could be you or me, and they will stand in the election.
Only one candidate, Qatar’s Mohamed bin Hammam, was successful in this last time, though American journalist Grant Wahl put himself forward. Why? Because for any nation willing to put someone forward, there is only a point in doing so if they have the required support to realistically challenge. Wahl, and few others, could not realistically compete against Blatter. Most of the representatives who are part of the FIFA congress support Blatter, and the reasons are logical when you consider the changes in the last 20 years. There are reasons he continues to win re-election, and until we come up with a better counter offer to the smaller nations of the world, we will forever be playing catch up with Blatter and his FIFA cohorts.
