He’s done it again. The mouth of suspended FIFA President Sepp Blatter must have a very special sort of gravity—and lots of it—because despite being the subject of worldwide ridicule, an official suspension, and a criminal investigation into his complicity in corruption and bribery, the Swiss septuagenarian simply cannot manage to keep his foot from his maw.
In an interview with Russian news outlet TASS published this week, Blatter admitted (seemingly oblivious to the gravitas of his admission) that the result for FIFA’s vote on the 2018 and 2022 World Cups had been agreed before the vote took place. Such an agreement means that the actual voting, and the bidding process that preceded them, was essentially a sham, a multi-million dollar soap opera.
“In 2010 we had a discussion of the World Cup and then we went to a double decision. For the World Cups it was agreed that we go to Russia because it’s never been in Russia, eastern Europe, and for 2022 we go back to America. And so we will have the World Cup in the two biggest political powers. And everything was good until the moment when [then French President Nicolas] Sarkozy came in a meeting with the crown prince of Qatar, who is now the ruler of Qatar. And at a lunch afterwards with Mr Platini he said it would be good to go to Qatar. And this has changed all pattern.”
Needless to say, those whose World Cup bids were predestined to fail are none too pleased with Blatter’s cavalier confession. The chief operating officer of England’s 2018 World Cup bid was outraged, claiming that the FA have “every right to bring legal action against Fifa” in light of Blatter’s comments. Having spent more than £2o million on the bidding process, Johnson’s frustration is clearly merited.
Sepp Blatter’s apparently casual manner in revealing the prearranged “double decision” to hand the World Cup to Russia and America casts some light on not only the shady dealings among FIFA executives, but on Blatter’s own oblivion to outside opinion. And then, his conspiracy theories take that bit of illumination into Blatter’s oblivious mania, and snap on the floodlights.
“And you are from TASS” Blatter said in the interview, “and you know what are the problems between your country [Russia] and the U.S. The FIFA World Cup or the FIFA president is a ball in the big political power game…If the USA was given the World Cup, we would only speak about the wonderful World Cup 2018 in Russia and we would not speak about any problems at FIFA.”
Here we have the captain of a sinking ship, casually admitting to his crew as the vessel goes down that he’d agreed to take on an illicit shipment of 23 tons of lead, then turning around to curse the sea’s plot against him, damning the waves themselves as conspirators.
If Blatter were a Syrian refugee, then perhaps he could make some claim as to feeling caught up in “the big political power game” of American and Russian foreign policy. But FIFA is hardly the arena of no-fly zone discussion for these two world powers.
Certainly, US Attorney Loretta Lynch must care about the state of diplomacy between the United States and Russia; additionally, Lynch may even privately be a fan of soccer; but if Sepp Blatter believes for a moment that the United States Attorney General helped oversee an investigation for the better part of a decade simply as revenge for a lost World Cup, as a pawn in her country’s global political posturing, or for any reason other than prosecuting fraud on American soil, then his grip on reality is tenuous at best.
Perhaps this is all part of a grand strategy Blatter’s cooked up, hoping to sling mud at Platini, hoping to point the figure elsewhere for the tragic flustercuck that is the 2022 Qatar World Cup. But when I look the comments Blatter has made, and the manner in which he’s made them, I don’t see a Bond villain, a sinister mastermind playing his rivals off one another. I see a terrified man in the grip of paranoia. I see Ahab on deck in the storm, wrestling with the rigging of his own harpoon.