By Andrew Warshaw in Zurich
October 20 – Almost five months after being elected for a final term as FIFA President pledging zero tolerance, it’s D-Day for Sepp Blatter who now has to put his money where his mouth is – if you will excuse the unfortunate choice of phrase.
Having promised to radically clean up world football’s governing body after an unprecedented period of corruption that claimed the scalps of many among his inner sanctum and in one way or another affected over a third of them, Blatter’s credibility is now on the line as he prepares to unveil the reforms he hopes will restore FIFA’s reputation.
Blatter’s ideas for restructuring the organisation’s control system, to be announced after the two day Executive Committee meeting, which started hee today, are understood to include a new-look and more independent ethics committee; a change in the way World Cup hosts are chosen after the debacle of 2018 and 2022; and most controversially of all, the possibility of him calling for the release of court documents relating to an investigation into the collapse of FIFA’s marketing partner ISL during the 1990s.
A BBC Panorama programme screened just before December’s World Cup ballots alleged that Brazil’s FIFA member and 2014 World Cup organiser Ricardo Teixeira – currently being investigated by his own national authorities in a more wide-ranging inquiry – and former FIFA President João Havelange both received payments from ISL.
Two other senior FIFA members, Reynald Temarii and Amos Adamu, were banned following a newspaper investigation into their alleged involvement in the 2022 World Cup bidding process.
Even that paled into insignificance of course compared with the cash-for-votes scandal that erupted in May and led to former Presidential candidate Mohamed Bin Hammam being banned for life for bribery and the most senior of FIFA vice-presidents Jack Warner resigning a month after being charged with the same offence.
On the eve of one of the most pivotal days in the world governing body’s controversial history, UEFA boss Michel Platini (pictured below right) called on Blatter to keep his promises for reform.
Platini, like all the other European FIFA officials, hopes tomorrow’s conclusion of the Executive Committee meeting will lead to a new era of transparency.
The Europeans, led by Platini, will push for Germany’s Theo Zwanziger (pictured left) to be appointed as the head of a new body to implement the reforms, and he has already presented Blatter with his five-point plan for change.
“We hope that what Mr Blatter promised us this time becomes fact, and not just ideas,” said Platini, widely regarded as a shoo-in for Blatter’s replacement in 2015.
“FIFA has to have a better image and perhaps after a lot of years of a certain way of how to manage FIFA perhaps it would be nice to have the new things promised by Mr Blatter.
“I get the impression that Mr Blatter is really motivated to change something – we will see.”
If, and it’s a big if, Blatter produces a series of credible reforms, there is just a chance that he can sleep more easily in terms of how the public perceives his leadership of FIFA.
Even then, his enemies within the sport – and there are fair few – will surely be eager to downplay whatever he reveals as clutching at straws.
No doubt the devil will be in the detail but if he fails to deliver, then all the rhetoric in the build-up to his election victory will seem like hollow promises and further damage to his already battered image.
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