FORTY YEARS AGO is when it all began, maybe even before. A brash Brazilian, Joao Havelange, was campaigning for Fifa’s top job. Facing the gentile, thoughtful Englishman Sir Stanley Rous, he toured the world looking for votes. He promised much, too much. But this was the decade of excess and Havelange had identified football as the next big international product. He spoke of inclusiveness and openness and targeted African support in particular.
In a hotel room on the eve of the presidential vote, head of Adidas and long-time Fifa ally Horst Dassler, stood opposite Hevalange. Earlier that evening, as he prepared to back Rous, the German had been informed that the African votes would swing the election in Havelange’s favour. Faced with a dilemma, he made his way to Havelange to thrash out a deal.
Dassler had influence within the game and Havelange knew it. He needed cash to push through all those promises he made. An agreement was made between the two and Fifa never looked back. The following day, Havelange beat Rous by sixteen votes.
Soon, ISL (International Sport and Leisure) – a marketing company – was formed as Dassler and Havelange went about maximising football’s global appeal. TV rights, advertising and sponsorship all became intrinsic to the future of the game and the sport’s governing body and its key allies were giddy with excitement. The 1978 World Cup in Argentina was a thrilling spectacle but 1982 in Spain was an even greater success. As Fifa mutated into a bloated, ruthless money-making cartel, Sepp Blatter got a promotion.
Arriving at Fifa in the mid-70s, Blatter’s ascent owed much to his relationship with Dassler whom he met while working in PR for Swiss watchmaker Longines. To many, Blatter was seen as a lacky, a dogsbody. But he was immensely useful to Havelange and Dassler who desperately wanted the organisation’s then-General Secretary – an old-fashioned, straight-laced German called Helmut Kaser, to move on. Kaser never saw eye-to-eye with Havelange and had issues with how the organisation was flippantly and flagrantly throwing its money around.
Blatter, who started out as a member of Fifa’s technical department, began a relationship with Kaser’s daughter Barbara – much to her father’s despair. He never liked Blatter, never trusted him. When Blatter married Barbara, Kaser stayed away from the wedding and in 1981, he left Fifa for good. But there was still time for one final insult: his son in-law replaced him as General Secretary.
Blatter would later reveal that Dassler taught him ‘the finer points of sports politics’ though there’s a more significant aspect to the pair’s relationship. The Dassler family was a dysfunctional business empire and Horst oversaw the back-biting, bitterness and everything in between. Blatter learned how to monitor and control a large group and began to understand that a dictatorship was the only way. Havelange lasted twenty-four years on the Fifa throne without facing investigations or inquiries. Blatter aspired to something similar.
In 1998, with his mentor Havelange watching on (Dassler died of cancer in 1987), Blatter ran for Fifa president against Uefa head Lennart Johannson. Like Havelange in 1974, Blatter promised much in return for votes, including a World Cup for South Africa. But there was controversy – claims from Farah Addo, the VP of the Confederation of African Football that he had been offered $100,000 to vote for Blatter. He declined but said at least 18 African delegates took the bribe. Johannson lost the election.
Ever since, Blatter has stood firm. He’s been relentless and ruthless. He will be in charge of Fifa into his ninth decade – just like Havelange was. And, in a perverse way, he’s done a remarkable job in ensuring the entire house has stayed upright. With every World Cup bid, there’s been a litany of corruption allegations. Added to the mess, Havelange’s legacy has been ripped to shreds and trampled in the dirt. In his dotage, he was forced to relinquish his honorary role at Fifa and his membership of the IOC after being found guilty of accepting bribes from ISL (as was his son in-law Ricardo Teixeira – what is it about son in-laws and Fifa?) – the company Horst Dassler set-up in the 70s to cash in on football’s rapidly growing international business appeal.
Many have attempted and succeeded in shining a light on the dark and sinister inner-workings of the Fifa machine. But it never goes anywhere. In something reminiscent of an old-school James Bond film, anyone stupid enough to have got caught answers to Blatter first and must deal with the consequences of their actions. They disappear quickly, never to be heard of again. Since 2010, 12 of the 24 people who voted on the bidding for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups are no longer involved in the FIFA ex-co – that’s a damning indictment but also a reflection of how Blatter does business.
Jack Warner was a long-time ally of Blatter’s but double-crossed him in 2011, throwing his support behind the Qatari candidate Mohammed bin Hammam. Unsurprisingly, Warner was caught in a corruption scandal and both he and bin Hammam were banished, quickly fading into obscurity.
And therein lies the biggest problem at Fifa. As much as Blatter is seen as the symbol of what’s wrong, it’s the low-hanging fruit that drives the sullying of reputations. At local levels, many self-obsessed megalomaniacs grow accustomed to the fame and fortune. They want the bribes and the freebies. They enjoy the good life. But they lack the most important leadership quality: self-preservation. They slip up, make schoolboy errors and go begging to the top table in a desperate search for forgiveness.
Blatter plays a role to perfection: that bumbling, contrary character – the mildly inappropriate relative at a wedding. But knowing many who have been in his company, he’s an impressively charming man and forceful too, a cunning politician. Like Nixon, any opportunity to deflect a question is done effortlessly – turning the answer into self-praise and an endorsement of a relative Fifa success. The hard questions are sometimes avoided through a gormless, crooked smile and a generic one-line answer. Blatter seems a neat extension of the sprawling Fifa HQ – it’s immensely tough to get in.
But he knows how to play the game. He celebrated when cleared of any wrong-doing in the ISL bribery case though the report was damning in how ignorant he was to the entire affair. But in the aftermath of such embarrassment, he acknowledged calls for more transparency at Fifa and set up an Independent Governance Committee. It sounded great in theory but one of the members, Alexandra Wrage – an expert in anti-bribery – resigned in protest at what she perceived as the Fifa ExCo consistently ‘undermining the recommendations we were making’.
The majority of the recommendations were either rejected outright or rendered meaningless. Where they were not rejected, they were massaged to do less than they intended.”
There was no change. After forty years of the same thing, Fifa aren’t interested in doing things differently. But Blatter knows the organisation must be seen to take some action – which is exactly what the latest Fifa report into allegations of corruption into the 2022 World Cup bidding process is about.
Nothing was ever going to come from it but Blatter has fulfilled a basic requirement by doing it. Fifa, as ever, is a stubborn entity but as a FBI investigation ticks away quietly in the background, many hold out hope that it can can be knocked to the ground and Blatter rounded up. It sounds great. But he’s spent the best part of forty years learning from the best at how to survive.
The likelihood is that he and Fifa will be just fine.
