Fifa corruption arrests: An interruption to the party, but not the end of President Sepp Blatter

Police raids bring yet more shame on Fifa, but Sepp Blatter looks set for fifth election as president

Fifa’s director of communications takes questions from the media (Getty)

The Swiss police officers were wearing jeans and trainers when they wandered up to the reception of the Baur au Lac hotel in Zurich at dawn and politely dropped the biggest bomb ever to land on Fifa.

The room keys procured, they headed for the lifts, and within minutes were dragging some of football’s most powerful individuals out of bed – leading them out in front of the world’s media with only white bedsheets preserving their dignity.

And then there was Jérôme Valcke, Fifa’s secretary general, striding into the lobby just as the hotel staff were throwing journalists out of it. “I know nothing,” was all he could say.

What he and everyone else would find out soon enough is that this was two culminations come at once.

The Swiss officers were acting on behalf of the US Department of Justice, who after years of investigation and with the assistance of Fifa executive-turned-supergrass Chuck Blazer, had issued extradition proceedings against 14 football officials and businessmen. The charges relate to alleged money laundering, wire fraud and racketeering in the award of huge marketing, broadcast and ticketing contracts, stretching back years.

But at Fifa headquarters, high in the hills three miles away, the Swiss authorities arrived demanding documents, which were duly handed over. Moments later the Swiss issued a statement claiming their investigations into corruption in the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bidding process had revealed “criminal mismanagement and money laundering”.

The beginning of the end, you might think, of both President Blatter and the Qatar World Cup. Not so.

Summoning the world’s press to Fifa HQ, the organisation’s director of communications, Walter di Gregorio, claimed it was Fifa that was the “damaged party”, that the arrests were “welcome” and part of its “reform process”.

He is right, at least, that Fifa’s party has been damaged. The 65th Annual Congress starts on 27 May, at Zurich’s Hallenstadion, a grand concert venue which has previously hosted One Direction and Justin Bieber.

President Blatter was looking forward to his fifth election victory, a formality that was due to occur on Friday. Last time round, in 2011, Grace Jones sang. Whoever is providing the music on Thursday night will face a tough crowd. It didn’t take the president long to cancel his public appearances. He had been expected to attend annual meetings of Fifa’s Latin American and African Confederations at Zurich hotels, but failed to show. He was, we were told, “calm”. “Not dancing around his hotel room, but calm.” It has been written countless times that Fifa’s reputation cannot sink any lower, yet time and again it does, and it has not done shaming itself yet. There is little reason to imagine Fifa’s 209 delegates won’t go ahead and re-elect Mr Blatter on Friday afternoon for a fifth term, extending his scandal-hit reign into a third decade.

These arrests will not shake the allegiance of the heads of the football federations in minor African, South American and Caribbean football federations to President Blatter. Before he came along, many of them had to run their nation’s football affairs out of their own homes. Now they receive millions of dollars, both their share of World Cup profits and through Fifa’s development programmes. And even if they did, who would they vote for? There is only one other candidate – Prince Ali bin-al Hussein of Jordan, standing at the behest of Uefa, who don’t expect him to win.

President Blatter is one of few people at Fifa to “span two generations”, to borrow a phrase used by the US Attorney General Loretta Lynch in her ferocious indictment, as she pointed out endemic corruption at the organisation spread across more than two decades. In fact, Mr Blatter spans three.

Jeffrey Webb, Fifa’s North and Central American President, was heralded as the man to salvage his region’s reputation from the mire it had been dragged into under his predecessor, the disgraced Trinidadian Jack Warner. Instead, Ms Lynch claimed, “he used his various roles to solicit and collect bribes”. This was supposed to be his biggest glad-handing week of the year. But he spent it in police custody.

President Blatter is not directly implicated, and almost certainly never will be. But it was he, and his predecessor Joao Havelange, who built Fifa this way, an international joke, stripped of all dignity. Don’t expect him to discover humility now.