Fifa scandal: The attempts to shore up rotten edifice post-Sepp Blatter are on sheikhy ground

It’s not Sheikh Salman’s fault that he is suddenly the leading candidate in the cesspit

Sheikh Salman Bin Ebrahim al-Khalifa of Bahrain has emerged from the shadows as possibly the favourite to succeed Sepp Blatter as president of the universally loathed Fifa (GETTY)

Let’s start with the legal bit. Sheikh Salman Bin Ebrahim al-Khalifa of Bahrain was not involved in the torture of any footballers. He hasn't even assisted in the arrest of any footballers that were later tortured. As his lawyers say on a daily basis, and who will be saying right now as they read this, any suggestion to the contrary is just an attempt to damage his reputation.

Again, for the record. Those footballers that were tortured in Bahrain during the pro-democracy protests in 2011 – at least according to an independent report endorsed by its own government – Sheikh Salman Bin Ebrahim al-Khalifa, Fifa’s newest knight in shining robes, did not have anything to do with it.

So, wasp-eyed official Bahraini government communications man, up there on the 88th floor of your gigantic glass dildo in the desert, sifting through the morning’s cuttings with your RSI-addled finger hammering away at the “send threatening email” button on your solid gold laptop, you can put this one on the “done” pile.

I’m doing you a favour here. It’s the weekend, it’s hot, we’ve all got bloggers we’d rather be arresting. And we both know there’s a whole stack of stuff about the huge Israeli missile defence system you’re not buying that you need to be getting on with.

Of course, as Sheikh Salman, Asia’s key power broker in the radioactive cesspit that is global sport politics, emerges as arguably the favourite to replace Sepp Blatter at the head of the world’s most universally loathed organisation up to and including Isis, there might be a few lone voices inclined to wonder if a candidate cannot be found who hasn’t even been accused of complicity in the torture of pro-democracy campaigners. But that is not the sheikh’s fault.

It’s also not his fault that he is suddenly the leading candidate. If football’s European powers-that-be hadn’t stampeded down from the moral high ground at such terrifying speed Salman might still be in the shadows.

If Michel Platini, originally Salman’s and therefore the huge Asian Football Confederation’s preferred candidate, could only find a written receipt for the £1.35m payment he only verbally agreed with a 66-year-old man and then didn’t worry about for another nine years, none of this would be happening. And all this as the juddering crisis-gasm that is Fifa reaches yet another explosive climax, this time of the German scheisse movie variety.

If the reports in today’s Der Spiegel end up being only partially true – that the Germany 2006 World Cup bid team bought the tournament with a secret slush fund made available by the former head of Adidas – then everyone from Franz Beckenbauer to Wolfgang Niersbach, current Fifa executive committee member and leader Blatter-critic, must surely have known. (The German Fussball-Bund is investigating the matter, and so far claims to have found no evidence of impropriety.) Even Thomas Bach, now president of the International Olympic Committee and thus sport’s current global monarch, was on the organising committee for that World Cup.

As Fifa’s old secretary general Jérôme Valcke once said, in a brief moment’s pause between signing off on various huge but entirely innocent payments to Trinidad’s very own Mr 110 Per Cent, Jack Warner, “less democracy is sometimes good” when it comes to the administrative matters of the beautiful game.

Perhaps it’s time the Middle Eastern aristocrats had their turn. They’ve been sniffing around for long enough.

There will be those who might imagine that a long 25 years of permanent rolling scandal that has now reached a point at which every World Cup right back to Italia ’90 has had its reputation besmirched, and anyone who has ever passed within 100 miles of Zurich while wearing an embossed blazer has now been either indicted, arrested, banned or suspended, might be sufficient for that old system of backroom deals, of continental voting blocs and mutual back scratchery to have been smashed to smithereens. Not a chance.

Old Issa Hayatou of the African Confederation, who has been jetting his five-star way around the globe under a cloud of proven corruption for long decades now, arrived in Zurich on Thursday to begin his job as “acting president” of the organisation, his first act before his feet were under Blatter’s desk being the cancelling of the press conference that should follow Tuesday’s emergency executive committee meeting. It’s a pity. Not even to have the chance to be formally thrown out of a venue Hayatou is staying in is a sad break with tradition.

In the meantime, Fifa only has a few days before its presidential nominations close. A few days to make a meaningful decision about whether it wants to change, or to carry on being the preserve of the same old cabal of movers and sheikhers.

Don’t be surprised if it proves incapable of making the right decision. There is no one there to make it.