Taken at face value, it was just a harmless – and rather imaginative – public relations stunt. But I wonder whether FIFA President Joseph Blatter’s present on Friday to the head of the Roman Catholic church of a Latin edition of the FIFA Weekly, the governing body’s new publishing venture, doesn’t offer us a deeper glimpse into the mind of the man who has run world football these last 15 years, even though it was an idea of the FIFA communications division.
For quite a long time now, I have felt that the Swiss master sports politician has been preoccupied with convincing people of the power of the game of football, and by extension of the man who runs it, to be a social, and even political force for good.
There is plenty of circumstantial evidence that might lead you to this conclusion: FIFA’s slogan, “For the game, for the world”; the attention lavished on development of the sport in Palestine; Blatter’s recent visit to Iran, coinciding with a particularly significant point in the country’s nuclear dealings with the west, and the emphasis he put on the importance of allowing Iranian women access to football stadiums; the Executive Committee meeting on Robben Island in 2009; the very request for an audience with Pope Francis itself.
I believe this quest is part of what motivates Blatter, a man now deep into his eighth decade, to keep going in his mentally gruelling, globe-trotting post.
Now if you set such ambitious goals for your sport, a bit of history can come in very handy; intelligently deployed, it can vest your enterprise with the same aura of respectability and permanence that a marble foyer bestows on a bank.
With its mid-nineteenth-century origins (earlier if you include the village-against-village free-for-alls to which some trace the sport’s beginnings), football doesn’t do badly in the history stakes.
But its longevity, of course, pales into insignificance when set against another sports movement with which Blatter is extremely familiar.
The first ancient Olympiad is generally dated at 776BC, just the 2,639 years before the foundation of the Football Association.
If truth be told, the parallels between what went on at Olympia and a modern Olympic Games are strictly limited.
For example, the raison d’être of the Ancient Olympics was overtly militaristic, which is certainly not the case today, however frequently athletic success might be pressed into the service of nation-making.
And no attempt has been made by modern Games-makers, so far as I am aware, to recreate the goings-on at the ancient shrine of Zeus, as colourfully evoked by Classical specialist Nigel Spivey in his book, The Ancient Olympics.
“Oxen were brought in by the hundred to be sacrificed to the god,” Spivey writes. “Their bellowings resounded down the valley as they were axed before a crowd and the precincts steeped black with their blood. Ash, bones, and bovine offal piled up over centuries into a huge pyramid; it must have reeked to high heaven.”
You get the point.
And yet these ancient roots have been pressed most effectively into service to invest what actually is a highly successful multinational business with an aura of elemental dignity, simplicity and virtue.
This was most evident, for fairly obvious reasons, in the Athens Olympics of 2004.
But the umbilical link between ancient and modern is re-established ahead of every Games when the Olympic flame is rekindled at Olympia from the sun’s rays.
It is a stroke of luck that the cradle of Olympism also happens to be the cradle of democracy.
But, while the International Olympic Committee (IOC) of which Blatter is part, has become adept at warding off importunings to meddle in non-sporting affairs when it suits it, the movement’s ancient heritage has specifically been utilised to legitimise a biennial sortie into the minefield of international diplomacy.
This is what is known as the Olympic truce. And while it is hard to imagine a national leader confronted by a perceived casus belli taking a blind bit of notice, it is equally hard not to approve of the sentiment underpinning it: that a period of peace be observed for the Games’s duration to enable participants to journey there with peace of mind.
Much as Blatter might wish it were otherwise, there seems to be zero grounds for thinking that games of “pediludum” were among the entertainments laid on for the delectation of spectators in the Roman Colosseum.
Yet I cannot help wondering whether the Olympic Movement’s masterful use of its ancient heritage wasn’t somewhere in the mind of the FIFA President on Friday when he handed the fruit of FIFA’s playful excursion into the classics to a pontiff who, one suspects, might have preferred a Spanish version.
Blatter’s subsequent comments would certainly buttress the arguments of anyone thinking that part of the reason for requesting the audience with one of the world’s foremost faith leaders was to add legitimacy to his own efforts to push beyond the bounds of sport.
The Pope, he said, “asked me personally to give hope to the poor through football.
“He also requested that we use our footballing efforts to promote, intensify and continue to strive for world peace.”
Or as a Latin scholar might put it, “pax vobiscum”.
David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 World Cup and London 2012. Owen’s Twitter feed can be accessed at www.twitter.com/dodo938