There is a publicity picture taken for the 1998 election campaign, of Sepp Blatter with Michel Platini, each placing a hand on an Adidas football, promoting with fixed smiles Blatter’s bid for the Fifa presidency. Blatter, going up in the world, looks in the pink of health, sleek, smart, savvy, knowing exactly where he is heading and how he is planning to get there. Platini looks boyish next to him, taller, with more hair, his smile brighter and more genuine, like a young guy being treated to a day out by his wealthy uncle. Blatter looks like he belongs in a suit, which fits him like a second skin, his silk tie perfect. Platini’s jacket is ruffled up slightly on his shoulder, and his tie is askew to the right, like a freer spirit who has fished out the smart outfit he keeps for the odd stuffy occasion. Still, he looks pleased with the opportunity for advancement presented by hitching himself to Blatter’s climb up the organisational ladder. Looking at the picture now, after the fall of both men together in December 2015, in a scandal which dates right back to this first entanglement, you wonder if Platini really had a clue what he was getting into.
Platini had come to know Blatter and work with him while he was the president of the organising committee for the 1998 World Cup in France, and Blatter clearly saw the advantage of having his support. That tournament, and the victory by a France team of diverse, multi-cultural backgrounds, led by its star and captain of Algerian descent, Zinedine Zidane, was felt in the ecstasy of celebration to have united modern France. Platini, the former playing legend, captain and coach, now a central figure at the tournament mingling with the other dignitaries at the new Stade de France, was admired in a new incarnation.
Their alliance was forged in January 1998, when Platini has said that Blatter approached him in his hotel room in Singapore and asked: ‘Can you imagine being Fifa president?’
Platini had at that point held no official position at Uefa or Fifa, and took the blandishment to be flattery from Blatter–although forever after he did always appear to feel that he was set on the administrative path to be Fifa president when Blatter finally tore himself away, destiny for a guy who always reached the top. Platini’s account is that he told Blatter he was not interested in running for Fifa president, and that Blatter said he would run, but he needed his support. Platini was at his side then, charming FAs on their travels and taking away from Johansson French and other European support, and when Blatter won he would give Platini a job as his international adviser. The terms they agreed, how much Platini would be paid by Fifa, and how they documented it, would become a timebomb quietly ticking in the filing cabinets of Fifa House, finally blowing both men up and out of football, seventeen years later.
Sunk in gloom at his ban from football, which has been his whole life, Platini barely appeared in public during 2016 and although I interviewed him twice while he was the Uefa president and saw him at events and press conferences, he declined to be interviewed for this book.
By 1998, the world governing body formed in the backroom on the rue St Honoré ninety-four years earlier by amateur gentlemen from seven European nations had grown to a federation of 200 countries’ football associations, a historic phenomenon and an undeniably great achievement. The politics had never been changed from one country, one vote, for major policy decisions taken at the annual congress. This system of admirably equal, basic democracy has never been subjected to a sustained challenge despite, as some European FAs exasperatedly observe, a great football power like Germany, for example, with a population of eighty million, therefore having the same say as Trinidad, with a population of one million.
The national associations elect the president at a congress on the same one country, one vote basis. Hence the need for any candidate, as Blatter absolutely understood, to gain the support of as many countries, including developing nations, as possible. In 1998, the Confederation of African Football had fifty-two voting countries, the Asian Football Confederation had forty-four. In Asia, they were scattered across a huge geographical area, and spread of political and economic circumstances, from Indonesia, its football association formed in 1972, to Qatar, the UAE and the other kingdoms of the gulf, to Uzbekistan and three other small former territories of the broken-up Soviet Union. Concacaf, of which the president was Jack Warner with Chuck Blazer long installed as his secretary general operating out of New York, had grown through the 1980s and 1990s, with the addition of some tiny islands, like Turks and Caicos, population just 33,000; Anguilla, with 15,000 people, and Montserrat, population 4,900, which joined Fifa in 1996 and had the same voting power as every other country. Warner always tried to lever maximum influence at Fifa by encouraging the Concacaf countries to vote as a block, and in particular his Caribbean Football Union grouping of islands, so wielding an influence way beyond their proportionate status. The vote for president invests the national associations with power, and they are entitled, indeed required by their football populations, to use it with a view to what a president will do for them, for development.
Blatter knew intimately how all this worked, having been engaged from the very beginning of Havelange’s rule, when many African FAs did not have the money to send anybody to the congress to exercise their voting rights, or even to pay the $150 annual Fifa affiliation fee. Through running the Coca-Cola-sponsored programmes to developing countries he had come to know and help the presidents of associations across Africa and Asia. Warner was an ally, his votes necessary. Since that coaching and educational development programme had been developed from 1976, Fifa’s income from TV rights and sponsorships had grown steadily but now, between the World Cups of 1998 and 2002, it was set to grow exponentially.
Fifa’s financial figures show that in the four-year cycle, as Fifa accounts for its income, leading to 1998, Fifa’s revenue from the World Cup was $308m, including $162m in TV rights. After that came the dramatic escalation of income, when ISL, which continued to be the marketing company tightly close to Fifa after Horst Dassler died in 1987, bought the future rights for both the 2002 and 2006 tournaments. ISL went bust in 2001 but Fifa managed to secure the rights and sell them on to one of the German Kirch media companies, which also subsequently went bust. Fifa itself sold the sponsorships for the 2002 World Cup to a now-familiar roster of corporate partners, including, of course, Adidas and Coca-Cola, who were said to have paid £9m each to burn their brands into the consciousness of the football-watching global village. The income recorded for the four-year cycle to 2002 was $1.5bn, a fivefold increase, including TV rights sales alone of almost $1bn.
Yet many African associations were still impoverished, according to Emmanuel Maradas, of African Soccer, who actively worked for Blatter in the 1998 presidential elections:
‘For years, it was impossible to make even a phone call to the football associations; many of them had nothing. In my country, Chad, there was no money. Egypt’s FA had a headquarters, but most countries did not, maybe a room underneath a local stadium, in a very poor way. Blatter understood this, and the need to promise that he would help the Africans.’
Johansson also understood that it was necessary, and a core part of Fifa’s purpose, to use the money which it generated to help with development in countries which had no other access to funds. He had forged Uefa’s alliance with CAF and its president, Issa Hayatou of Cameroon–still the president even now–and his commitment was that the development funds would go through the confederations to administer, for FAs which needed investment. His presidential credentials were, however, fundamentally undermined by references he made in an interview with the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, widely condemned as racist, for which he made a public apology. Following a trip to South Africa to discuss the country’s then idea of bidding to host the World Cup in 2006, Johansson had said: ‘The whole room was full of blackies and it’s dark when they sit down together. What’s more, it’s no fun when they’re angry. I thought if this lot get in a bad mood, it won’t be so funny.’
Johanson said he could not remember speaking in those terms, but said: ‘I am not a racist. I apologise to anyone who interpreted it as if I was one.’
Uefa sought to dismiss the fallout, claiming there had been ‘some kind of misunderstanding’, but, given the history of African football’s battles and relationships with European administrators, including Rous, it was a dreadful episode, not wholly mended by Uefa’s new engagements with CAF.
Blatter’s initiative, later described by Fifa itself as his ‘visionary proposal’, was more direct, and appealing: simply to promise very big money to every Fifa member country’s football association, directly. A ‘financial assistance programme’ would eventually provide $250,000 a year to each of them for running costs, including paying salaries to staff. In addition, there was what became the ‘GOAL’ programme, in which Platini was involved with Blatter from its conception, making $400,000 available to each association to build new facilities, including a headquarters. This was an offer to share Fifa’s great mountain of dollars, amassed in Zurich from the proceeds of selling the rights every four years to the greatest televised sports show on earth, so substantially that it could transform the threadbare fortunes of member FAs around the world–and the lives of the people who ran them. The presidents of the associations, promised such transformational cash, were voters in the election.
Blatter, as he admits himself, did not stint on the campaign, having the use of a private jet to fly around the world, including to the minor football nations of Africa, to personally assure voters of the benefits his presidency would bring. It was said at the time that the plane and significant financial support came from Qatar, and from Mohamed bin Hammam, a construction magnate grown super-wealthy in the state’s building boom, and a rising figure in football politics. Bin Hammam, a Qatari football enthusiast, had become a significant power in the Asian Football Confederation and, from there, a member of the Fifa executive committee from 1996. In this 1998 election he was a key supporter of Blatter’s, but Blatter told me that bin Hammam did not provide the plane, although the Emir of Qatar gave him one ride in his:
‘The only thing that was done–not by bin Hammam but by the state of Qatar–was that one day I could use their flight [by private plane], which was in Paris, to go, I think, to Senegal. But to come back I had to take my plane, because the other plane, from Qatar, was going further. This was the only one where I can say Qatar helped me directly,’ he said. ‘And I was not the only one on the plane.
‘It is not true that Qatar flew me around; it was one flight. I had a personal sponsor who later offered me, from the airport of Paris, a bourgeois, he gave me a plane.’
Although it has been widely understood that his backer was a wealthy individual from the Gulf, Blatter said that he had never confirmed who his backer was. ‘The people were not involved in football,’ he said, ‘but they were my sponsor, who knew somebody with a plane.’
Blatter said ‘the state of Qatar was a supporter’ and began to support him after 1995, when Qatar hosted the U20 World Cup. That was very shortly after the new Emir, Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, began to work towards the modernisation of the country. Blatter believes that the excitement generated by the U20 tournament in a country which had remained conservative and underdeveloped under the old Emir, prompted his understanding of sport’s prestige and the germ of the idea to host an actual, grown-up World Cup.
‘We were looking for a country who could [host the tournament]; it was hard to find a country,’ Blatter told me. ‘We were happy to play there, at the last minute. At the time it was not a well-developed country; not a lot of cars or rich people. The building had not even started; some hotels but I remember even the city [Doha] was a small city.
‘I think at that time, the Emir was thinking: football could be good.’
In the vote for president of Fifa’s nations at the Equinox Hall in Paris in June 1998, Joseph Blatter, who still, aged eighty, talks about having come from a small-town background in the obscurity of the Swiss Valais, ascended to the highest administrative role of the world’s richest and most popular sport. He beat Johansson in the vote with the support of 111 countries to 80. The victory was then and has always afterwards been subject to accusations of bribery and vote-buying, again focused on African delegates, alleged to have received money the previous night in the Meridien Hotel, to switch their vote from Johansson to Blatter. Blatter denied it then, responding to the accusation of corruption at a press conference with the retort: ‘The match is over. The players have already gone to the dressing room. I will not respond.’
In 2002, before his next election battle, Blatter obtained a court injunction to prevent Farah Addo, president of the FA in civil war-torn Somalia, repeating his allegations that votes were bought by Blatter’s side in the election. Addo, who died on 19 November 2008, had told the journalist Andrew Jennings for his book FOUL! that he had been offered money by a middleman from the Gulf to vote for Blatter. Jennings put to bin Hammam the rumoured allegations that he was behind other instances of paying inducements, and bin Hammam, while acknowledging that he ‘helped Mr Blatter immensely in his campaign in the 1998 election’, denied there was any bribery.
In his interview with me, Blatter denied it completely again, while accepting it is a story which has always lingered, and throwing out some allegations of his own.
‘No,’ he said, ‘you will never bring this thing away, but it is not true. I was never in the hotel. It was not bin Hammam–nobody from my group was going to pay anybody.’
And then the reason he gave was profoundly revealing of his approach towards the electoral politics of Fifa; he spread his hands and smiled: ‘We had the votes.’
Blatter rejects the claims that Johansson had more votes pledged the night before the vote, which he recalled being made by Johansson’s key ally, the president of the German football federation, Egidius Braun.
‘We had the votes. When I was announced in the first round, I expected at least one hundred and ten. But then Braun said something is wrong; that we [Johansson’s side] had one hundred and ten [votes guaranteed], but now Blatter has them, so [the allegations against Blatter started]: he paid. And they won’t bring it away.’
Dr Paul Darby, a reader in the sociology of sport at the University of Ulster who has extensively researched and written about the politics and development of football in Africa, gave this assessment of the 1998 election win achieved by Blatter, with Havelange’s backing:
‘Whilst financial inducements may or may not have impacted upon the election, it is clear that Blatter and Havelange demonstrated considerable political astuteness throughout their campaign. Of particular significance was their skill in reading and ability to manipulate internal Confederation of African Football politics in order to convince at least half of the African voters that a policy of continuity represented a better option for safeguarding their interests within world football.’
That first election was the crucial victory won by Blatter; although, as he acknowledges himself, he was still perceived by many as the secretary general fixer figure rather than a man of presidential heft like Havelange. But then, with the vast new income from World Cup TV rights galactic compared to the pennies being earned when Havelange took over in 1974, he was able to make the money flow straight away. The financial assistance programme, already approved under Havelange, began immediately in 1998, and between then and 2014 when totals were published, Fifa says it distributed $778m to the 200-plus national FAs, $331m to confederations: $1.1bn altogether. The GOAL programme was started, fulfilling Blatter’s election promise, in 1999, and by 2014, $284m had been spent on 668 projects around the world. Most, 191, were to build new FA headquarters and facilities in Africa; 158 were initiated in Asia. With other programmes, featuring dedicated support for FAs to improve their administration, education, women’s football, and $120 million for special projects, mostly in Africa, including the installation of forty-five artificial turf pitches, Fifa stated that from 1999 to 2014 it had distributed more than $2bn to associations and confederations.
Platini was duly given a job straight after the election victory, as promised–football adviser to president Blatter, and he became the deputy chairman of the GOAL programme. Bin Hammam, promoted in importance by Blatter following his support with the election, was made the chairman, the wealthy Qatari dispensing Fifa’s money to poor, grateful FAs around the world, and in the process building and extending his own political alliances.
Telling the story in the folksy way he likes, as if the implementation of a $2bn global development programme at the governing body of world football was like a neighbourhood park scheme worked up by friends over coffee in the Valais, Blatter said it was bin Hammam’s idea to dedicate money to building headquarters.
‘He is an entrepreneur in construction, he is one of the biggest constructors in his country. He said: “Why should we not build something?” And then the three together [Blatter, Platini and bin Hammam], we came out: yes, start first with the house of football.
‘After me coming as president with this famous GOAL project, all national associations got a house of football. It was important, to instil the importance of football in every country. When I have visited a lot of these countries they had no house of football; they had an office or two offices perhaps, in a stadium but in an old stadium, no furniture, or offices in a business building. So it is a must: the importance of football; you must have a house of football.
‘So in the first congress after ’98, an extraordinary congress in Los Angeles, I said: “Give everybody a house.”’
To critics of this whole machinery constructed at Fifa by Blatter, pouring money into the FAs which had a presidential vote, his perceived political devilry at surviving and repeatedly remaining in power on a majority of their votes, the GOAL and financial assistance programmes look like giant slush funds. There is also a suspicion, even an assumption, that the programmes are rife with corruption, with football officials in the recipient countries very often pocketing the dollars rather than investing them for development.
Mark Pieth, Professor of Criminal Law at Basel University, who, after the first erupting scandals in 2011, was asked by Blatter to helm a Fifa reform programme, turned into an arch critic of the way Blatter operated to cement his electoral favour. While recognising that the GOAL programme did produce ‘houses of football’ and other significant development around the world, Pieth says it did clearly act as a vehicle for ensuring support.
‘It was a presidential programme,’ Pieth observed, ‘it operated under the auspices of the office of president. So you can understand how Sepp Blatter and Mohamed bin Hammam, acting as the bagman, were going round Africa buying votes with it.’
In an official interview with bin Hammam, by then the president of the Asian Football Confederation, posted on its own website by Fifa in April 2003, he confirmed the essential details set out by Blatter, that the proposed GOAL programme had been a promise of the 1998 presidential campaign.
‘Up until 1999, I wasn’t involved in the programme, but at the end of that year, the president asked me to chair the bureau, and I gave him the idea of building an infrastructure for national associations.’
He related his proposal to Blatter that they build countries a ‘house of football’ and he explained it as a strategy for ensuring they left permanent reminders of Fifa’s help.
‘I told him… we can have ongoing courses but after a year or two, people will forget what we have done. If, however, we start building headquarters or training centres, it is a structure that will remain.’
Asked about the memories he himself would have of a trip to Uganda, where he had just ‘put scissors to ribbon’ for the new, GOAL-funded headquarters in Kampala, bin Hammam said:
‘I can’t remember how many projects I have inaugurated, but I always receive a tremendous welcome. Uganda has been no exception and I feel they have opened the door to everybody. There could have been ten thousand people at the ceremony yesterday, and it is the same all over the world. The project was well received from top to bottom in Ugandan society, and this is particularly gratifying. I enjoyed the joy of the people and to say that, as a member of Fifa, you have been able to add something physical to the country.’
Fifa itself, even after bin Hammam’s and Blatter’s defenestrations, rejects strenuously the accusation that the development programmes were principally about buying presidential votes. The organisation points to the concrete facts of development having taken place as its most important purpose: pitches laid, headquarters built, all over the world, including in many of the world’s most difficult countries. The development department points in particular to recent investment in Somalia, which had an artificial pitch funded by Fifa at the Banadir Stadium in Mogadishu that was severely damaged, along with other facilities, in the long and vicious civil war. In 2013 Fifa ran a development course in the country for the first time since a mission had last visited Mogadishu, before all the bloodshed, in 1986. The pitch at the Banadir Stadium has been refurbished, hosting matches in a Somali league of ten teams, and two further GOAL development projects are planned: a technical centre at Mogadishu’s College University Stadium, and another artificial pitch.
In Afghanistan, over the course of a decade from 2003, despite the war-torn conditions in the country and continuing presence of the Taliban, Fifa says it has invested $1.5m in two standard GOAL projects in Kabul: a grass pitch at the Afghan football federation complex, and the building of the AFF’s ‘house of football’. The Afghan Premier League launched in 2011–12 with eight teams, all matches being played in Kabul for security reasons, almost 20,000 footballers were registered in the country, the national team has improved strongly in the Fifa rankings and there has, remarkably, even been progress in developing women’s football, with twenty-three clubs open to women.
The Afghanistan women’s national team captain, Zahra Mahmoodi, said: ‘Our objective is to build a powerful women’s national team to compete at an international level. We want to show the other face of Afghanistan to the world.’
The AFF president, Keramuddin Karim, did thank Fifa for making the investment in this development: ‘Eight years ago, Afghan football was almost dead,’ he said. ‘However, through strategic planning in the area of infrastructure we have been able to set up the basis for the future. Fifa’s first GOAL project was fundamental since it provided us with an artificial pitch we are currently using for our league matches in Kabul.’
Mark Gleeson, the authoritative South African journalist and broadcaster who has travelled through Africa covering football for thirty years, told me it had to be recognised that the Fifa investment had made a dramatic difference in the continent.
‘You take a country like Lesotho,’ he said, ‘they literally do not have access to another source of money. They have to pay, rather than be paid, for their football to be shown on television. In general there are stories of corruption in Africa and some of the development money not going where it should, of course, but overall, there is a picture of development.’
Emmanuel Maradas says that Blatter clearly had political self-interest in distributing the cash to Africa, and did gain support and votes for having done so, but he is credited with a genuine understanding of the countries’ needs, and, after he was voted in at that 1998 congress, for delivering:
‘Some of the money might have disappeared into people’s pockets,’ Maradas says, believing there was too little accountability for it, particularly at first, ‘but the bulk of the money is there in facilities, overall it helped Africa a lot; it is like night and day compared to where they were in the 1980s. You go to national associations now, they have headquarters, they are well organised–it is amazing.’
Francis Oti-Akenteng, the technical director at the Ghana FA, who has been involved in implementing GOAL and financial assistance programmes in the country, confirmed that assessment from his own experience:
‘This Fifa money is very important to Africa, especially the west and east,’ he said. ‘From my travels I can personally deduce that. For Ghana without it, football development programmes would have suffered severely, especially the grass roots, youth football and women’s football.’
Oti-Akenteng said that the Fifa funds are not as vulnerable to corruption as is commonly perceived: ‘Fifa has been very strict with the financial assistance programme [FAP],’ he said. ‘Fifa auditors check every detail of expenditure, and there are itemised headings; you cannot even juggle them–if it is money for youth development, it must go there, not any other item. Failure to do that, you would be punished. You may lose the next instalment. I think it is not as easy to make use of the FAP money for your own pocket as people are thinking.’
Domenico Scala, the Swiss corporate executive who was recruited by Fifa in 2014 to head the governance reforms, and became chairman of the audit and compliance committee, told me that when he started people pointed to the development programmes as a hotbed for corruption and the basis for a stinking system. He said that he investigated, and they conducted audits, and did not find it to be the case.
‘In fact there was not as much corruption as people thought,’ Scala said. ‘There is clearly a concrete record of development with the money, the evidence is there on the ground. But it was a system of patronage, by which the president distributed money to the electorate. Blatter was a master of playing the electorate, and the Fifa system.’
The development programmes do seem to have entrenched, perhaps inevitably, a culture at Fifa of less well-off countries, federations and their presidents asking the wealthy for money, to help them with development. And that culture clearly bought the loyalty of football associations and their presidents to Blatter throughout his seventeen-year tenure at the top, which was buttressed by his facility for allocating many comfortable and nicely paid committee posts. Later, bin Hammam, harbouring presidential ambitions himself, was found to have liberally indulged in largesse to Asian and African FA presidents asking for aid. As the investigations into the discredited bidding process for hosts of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups showed, this culture of patronage infested the executive committee, too. Presented as an objective process to responsibly choose the best country to host a tournament, the long and wastefully expensive beauty parade was exploited by some confederation representatives on the executive committee, Jack Warner, brazenly, foremost among them, to make demands of the countries bidding for their vote.
At the 2015 congress in Zurich, Mario Semedo, for sixteen years the president of the FA in the tiny islands of Cape Verde, off the west coast of Africa, delivered a set-piece speech which captured the flavour of the Fifa system hatched under Havelange, then Blatter. It combined a record of genuine, admirable development, with a toe-curling public vote of thanks to Blatter, and the then Fifa secretary general Jérôme Valcke–before he too was banned in 2016 for multiple financial offences. Semedo described dramatic progress, a leap up the Fifa rankings for Cape Verde from 179th place to 37th, becoming the sixth strongest football nation in Africa. In front of the assembled FAs gathered to vote for the president, he solemnly thanked and praised Blatter. Semedo said Cape Verde had had no grass pitches in 1998, and now had twenty-five, five of them funded by Fifa.
‘Thanks to the impetus of the international federation, its financial assistance, the projects we have been allocated, plus the training and expertise–all under the leadership of president Blatter,’ he told the assembly, with Blatter smiling humbly on the platform, ‘we have been able to secure funding from the government and other bodies which would never have contributed to our development in the past. We have been able to invest in our youth, in all those young people who dream of being able to play football.’
Blatter himself pointed to the performances in the 2016 European Championships of Wales, who reached the semi-final, and Iceland, who strongly beat England, both of whose FAs gave credit to the investment for development they had received from Fifa. He said Fifa did audit the programmes–the rules were tightened gradually over the years.
‘I was not giving them money,’ Blatter said, a little strangely, ‘I was giving them ideas to develop football. And what do you say now [that] they pay four times more than in my time?’
Gianni Infantino, the former Uefa secretary general under Platini’s presidency, who won the Fifa presidential election in May 2016 held after Blatter and Platini were banned, stood on a promise to quadruple the money going to the FAs forming his electorate.
‘I have done it because I have promised,’ Blatter said, ‘and then [the FAs] agreed that what I have done was good. The president of Iceland said the progress is only because of the development programmes we have made. Definitely this is too easy to say: Blatter, he gave the money to the national associations, that they would vote for him. So you have a politician, and he wants to be head of state or a region, and he says: “What I want to do now when I am elected, I will make better roads, more security and help you in educational programmes.” They vote for him, and he does it, and so what: he has to be in the corruption, or what?
‘You know in football, people are mad. Football makes people mad.’
After 1998, however, while Platini worked as the football adviser to the president from an office in Paris and flew on occasional official visits with Blatter, Johansson and the Europeans on the executive committee did not let up their opposition. Concerns that Blatter was secretive about Fifa’s financial situation, and had formed a tight sub-bureau of the finance committee–peopled only by him, the Argentinian FA president Julio Grondona and Jack Warner–were deepened after the collapse of ISL in 2001, Horst Dassler’s marketing company having spectacularly overpaid for other sports rights including the tennis ATP tour. The fallout from this insolvency would ultimately, years later and after a cover-up by Fifa, reveal the endemic corruption which had taken place throughout Havelange’s time.
Blatter faced, then, in 2002, a seriously confrontational, elemental battle, his enemies rallying around a dossier worked up by a whistleblower at the very heart of the operation, the new secretary general, a Swiss lawyer, Michel Zen-Ruffinen. He alleged criminal mismanagement by Blatter, supported by a twenty-one-page dossier and 300 pages of internal documents. The charge sheet included that GOAL projects were prioritised for personal political advancement by Blatter, particularly to Concacaf, where Warner provided his crucial block of voting support. Zen-Ruffinen remade the claims that votes had been bought for Blatter in the 1998 election, and he also advanced evidence alleging that Blatter awarded TV deals for less than their commercial value. A whole section was reported to have been devoted to Warner, claiming that financial favours were given to Warner and his family, including overgenerous deals on World Cup TV rights for the Caribbean, and that a £6m loan was improperly written off.
At his own press conference, calling for a criminal investigation, Zen-Ruffinen said it was time for Fifa to ‘clean its house’. He claimed: ‘It wasn’t a case of the president being bought, but it was a case of the president buying.’
David Will, the Scottish representative of the British associations on the executive committee, alleged that Fifa’s loss from the ISL collapse had been £300m rather than the £37m claimed by Blatter, and that Fifa was effectively insolvent. He and his allies, European and African members of the executive committee, succeeded in forcing an internal audit committee report into Fifa’s financial situation, but Blatter deftly managed to have it delayed until after the presidential election in May.
Blatter’s opponents, prepared to fight to the political death with him, made a criminal complaint alleging fraud, corruption and mismanagement to the Zurich prosecutor’s office. Eleven of the twenty-four-member executive committee joined the complaint, led by Johansson, Per Omdal of Norway, Will, and Issa Hayatou of Cameroon, who accused Blatter of ‘illegal’ and ‘reprehensible’ practices. Hayatou was the rival candidate in this election against Blatter, backed by Johansson and other European power brokers, who hoped that the candidacy of an African would play better in Africa than Johansson’s own bid had, four years earlier.
Blatter retorted by denying any malpractice, and denouncing his critics. His backers and allies on the executive committee then included Warner, Nicolás Leoz of Paraguay, since found by Fifa to have received bribes from ISL, Grondona, who was accused of massive corruption in the US criminal indictment after his death in 2014, Ricardo Teixeira–Havelange’s son-in-law–of Brazil, and Chuck Blazer.
The Zurich prosecutor, Urs Hubmann, announced in December 2002 that he was taking no action, saying that several of the allegations were about financial transactions which the executive committee had themselves approved, calling that ‘reprehensible’ and ‘bordering on false accusation’. In FOUL!, Andrew Jennings quoted Hubmann saying that while dismissing all but two of the allegations, he discontinued those two for lack of sufficient evidence. In December 2015, after Blatter’s ban, a spokeswoman for Hubmann declined to elaborate, citing ‘professional confidentiality’.
Omdal and Johansson told me then that they believed the prosecutor had missed an opportunity to clean up Fifa in 2002, and that action at that time could have avoided more years of mismanagement.
‘I feel we, Fifa and football were let down by the Swiss authorities,’ Johansson said. ‘They had evidence, we filed a complaint in court asking for an investigation, we had Swiss lawyers helping us to present the case, but we lost and Blatter somehow kept everything under control.’
In 2015, the Swiss attorney general, Michael Lauber, announced that he was investigating Blatter for potentially criminal wrongdoing in a 2m CHF payment to Platini, and for World Cup TV rights sold for one dollar to Warner. The written-off £6m loan alleged by Zen-Ruffinen was confirmed in 2013 in a devastating report for Concacaf, which concluded it was part of a massive fraud by Warner over his personal ownership of a training complex in Trinidad, funded by Fifa, and christened the Dr João Havelange Centre of Excellence.
Blatter argues that he did nothing improper when paying Platini, and that the TV contracts with Warner were favourable to Fifa because they included a clause that Fifa should receive 50 per cent of any profit made. When I talked to him, he was confident that he would not be charged with any criminal offence, despite the multiple investigations by the US and Swiss authorities, their possession of every financial and computer record, email and file, subjecting to microscopic scrutiny all his affairs at Fifa, over forty years.
In the teeth of that battle in 2002, with the Zen-Ruffinen file at the prosecutor’s office and not yet dismissed by Hubmann, and eleven of his executive committee united so fiercely and accusingly against him personally, Blatter nevertheless comprehensively won a majority of the vote, 139 to 56, to continue as president. Clearly, whatever he had been doing, it was working for the vast majority of the world’s national football associations. After surviving the attack and winning this second term of four more years from the wider football ‘family’ of Fifa, Blatter vowed to ‘throw Zen-Ruffinen out of the door’, pricelessly denouncing him to the Swiss newspaper Blick as ‘Mr Clean’.
It was meant as a scathing insult.