October 30 – In the latest of a series of cherry-picked interviews, Sepp Blatter has lashed out at American-based sponsors for undermining him and his organisation with their adverse comments about FIFA’s corruption scandal.
The FIFA president, who steps down on February 26, is currently under suspension as part of the fall-out from the U.S. Department of Justice investigation into bribery, money-laundering and wire fraud at the sport’s governing body.
Blatter was forced to bring forward his exit from FIFA after a co-ordinated attack from a group of sponsors who called for his resignation.
“It is the American companies,” Blatter told the Financial Times in a reference to sponsors including Coca-Cola Co, McDonald’s, Visa, and Budweiser owner Anheuser-Busch InBev.
“The other companies haven’t said anything. So you are intelligent enough to make the connection with American companies and the American investigation. I do not need to underline that.”
In an interview with Tass earlier this week, Blatter revealed there was a pre-vote deal for Russia and the United States to host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups respectively even though the latter went to Qatar.
He told the FT the decision had not been taken officially by FIFA’s full executive committee but was rather an agreement taken “behind the scenes”.
“It was diplomatically arranged,” he added.
The plan fell apart, according to Blatter, when Platini changed his mind and backed Qatar under pressure from the then-French president, Nicolas Sarkozy.
“If you see my face when I opened it (the envelope containing the winning bid), I was not the happiest man to say it is Qatar,” he said. “Definitely not.”
Blatter repeated his contention that the U.S corruption probe was directly linked with the United States missing out on 2022.
“It took a political dimension. I am looking now to see what were the political reasons. The easiest thing would be to say (they are) bad losers.”
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