Sepp Blatter agreed to see me in Zurich in the summer of 2016, six months after he was banned–summarily expelled–from football’s world governing body, whose inner workings and culture he had mastered over forty years. Looking at the long course of his time at Fifa, and talking to people about him and the organisation, I had seen that there was another dimension to Blatter and Fifa itself than the arch villains of popular caricature. That photograph of him marooned in a blizzard of dollars, thrown as a stunt by the English comedian Simon Brodkin, could now be endlessly reproduced as the defining image of his tenure, but I can recognise that his record is more complex. He had arrived at the old House of Fifa in 1975, at the start of the watershed João Havelange presidency, and become president twenty-four years later, when fistfuls of dollars were always going to rain on football. His first job had been to orchestrate Havelange’s promised development programme, and, for all the scandals and criticisms, nobody can credibly deny that over his four decades there had been a major concrete legacy of global improvement. So far, through a ferocious and complete investigation of all Fifa’s books, he was not accused, as he had maintained he would not be, of taking any money corruptly, while all around him football’s chiefs were helping themselves to it. He was accused more persuasively of having known it was going on but done nothing to address it for many years, of keeping the crooks on the executive committee happy, and the cash flowing to the national FAs, to maintain his prime purpose: his own position and longevity as the head of Fifa. Personally, there seemed to be more to him as well, than the consiglieri-turned-don portrayal of him at the head of the Fifa family. People who knew him said that along with his wiles, ambition and ruthlessness were charm and a sense of humour, and that he did really love football.
Blatter and his press adviser, Thomas Renggli, had named a place we could talk and have lunch: Restaurant Sonnenberg, they said, at Hitzigweg 15. In the flurry of preparing, and noting down the long list of allegations I needed to put to Blatter, from his ‘clumsy’ handling of the ISL payment to Havelange, the alleged vote-buying in 1998, to the Platini payment and the general perception that he knowingly presided over endemic corruption, I didn’t quite register the significance of the location. It was hot in Zurich, and I took a tram up the hill from Central, next to a couple of the private banks which stand impassive on every corner. The restaurant was a steep walk up from the tram stop, through a suburb of grand old Swiss-style houses with ample gardens, well settled, comfortable and quiet.
The restaurant staff knew I was meeting Mr Blatter there; we were expected. I was early, and they sat me on the terrace outside, looking down to the lovely lake and the beautifully appointed city around it, just so under a blue sky. There was a flag at the front of the restaurant I couldn’t quite make out over the parasols, then I moved and saw it properly. Here, flying high at the top of the hill, dominant above Zurich, it was a Fifa flag, bearing its motto: ‘For the game; For the world’. A smiling young waitress in the uniform of polo shirt, tracksuit and trainers brought me some water. It took me a while to click that the shirt had the Fifa logo on it, the interior was Fifa themed, and to realise this must be Fifa’s own restaurant. This was Hitzigweg, of course, and next door, looking very 1970s in modernist lines, was the old Fifa House, where Sepp Blatter had arrived as a kipper-tied thruster, and made his considerable way in the world. After his ban, this was where he still chose to meet, at the place where he was king, before the fall.
He arrived a little late, driven up with Renggli in the back of a black Mercedes, to emerge and be greeted respectfully by the restaurant staff. He didn’t look too great. Better than at that alarming press conference the day after his ban, a bit of colour in his cheeks, but shrunken, almost frail. He had let the shaving go, and his beard was white but very thin, so you could see his chin through it. The plaster from his cheek was gone, but the doctors had removed another growth from his nose and covered it with some skin from his ear, he would tell me; the graft looked like a fleshy plaster across his nose. He was wearing a waistcoat, over a blue-and-white striped shirt, on which you could just see, when he sat down, his initials: JSB. He looked his age, eighty; like an old granddad who had clearly been a twinkly-eyed rascal in his prime, currently recuperating from some troublesome ailments.
When we began to talk, he told me immediately, in English with that famous Swiss accent of his, in a tremulous voice, that it was true: under the pressure of the arrests and the ethics charge against him, he had suffered a breakdown.
‘I had this collapse on 1 November and this was at the cemetery,’ he said. ‘The Catholics, we always go to the cemetery to pay honour to our parents, all the families in the same grave, and I was there, I felt very bad at that time. They brought me immediately back to Zurich in a clinic; they have realised that my immune system has collapsed.’
When I asked him about the arrests staged at the Baur au Lac, devastating the week of his fifth coronation as president, and whether he was bitter at the US attorney general Loretta Lynch’s description of Fifa as a racketeering investigation, he replied: ‘I was not bitter, I was shocked. And I have never recuperated about the shock.’
Now, he said, he was back up and battling; appealing to the Court of Arbitration for Sport against his ethics committee ban, defending his record to the Swiss investigators. He was that day off to prepare for a meeting with Fifa’s lawyers about the alleged $10m bribe to Warner from South Africa. He had time on his hands now, though, for the first time in his life, and we would have three hours or so, with lunch in the middle. In that time, he would indeed be quite funny at times, sharp, scathing of some who had crossed him, like Michel Zen-Ruffinen, and tell me he had done nothing wrong. He would decry all his accusers, blame the investigations on the Qatar vote which he had not wanted, and on England and the USA being ‘bad losers’; and denounce the very principle of whistleblowers. It would become clear to me as I listened, and when I thought about it afterwards, that his whole perspective, from commanding this remarkable, historic organisation for the promotion of football across the globe, was very often narrowed to its power political dynamics, and how he navigated them to remain on top.
He could not understand why the USA had gone for him, he said, when he had supported their bid to host the 2022 World Cup. Then he confirmed what had so often been speculated, that this plan was part of his ultimate aspiration, described as a fixation by some, to claim a Nobel prize at the end of his career, to be thereby recognised to have made a major contribution to world peace. Fifa began to work formally with the Nobel Peace Centre in 2014, agreeing a contract to roll out a ‘Handshake for Peace’ programme at the World Cup in Brazil.
‘My idea then–and I had already spoken about it with high-level politicians,’ Blatter explained, ‘could we have Russia and USA in the World Cup. It would be good for these two countries, these powerhouses; they don’t like each other–then with football they can make a handshake for peace. And this was the missionary Blatter was thinking about that.’
I asked him if it was true, then, that he wanted a Nobel peace prize, and he replied with all due modesty that it was not for him personally, but for Fifa, for the game:
‘I have never–and this is even registered–we had meetings with the Nobel prize organisation, I was there, and what I was asking, really asking, was for the Nobel prize: for football, not for a man. It is the movement, for Fifa, what Fifa has done in the world, not for a man.’
Discussing Blatter’s fall, one senior figure at Fifa observed to me that it was ‘the greatest anti-climax possible’. There he had been at seventy-nine; still always conscious of his provincial beginnings, flourished and risen in a complex, cut-throat and intensely public arena, made it to the very top, prime ministers and presidents bent the knee to him, he survived every challenge. And he thought he was about to top it all by clasping his hands on the Nobel prize, when it was all snatched away, imploded in disgrace and he was out. The Nobel Peace Centre in Oslo, Norway, told me they cancelled the contract with Fifa in June 2015, shortly after the indictments.
On the terrace at the restaurant, the humid Zurich weather broke; there was a thunderstorm and we moved inside. Blatter hailed some people he knew at other tables–one, Renggli told me, was a very prominent banker in Zurich–and I sensed a slight discomfort in their parties as they stood and smiled and shook hands with him, now the tarnished former president, trailing scandal. He was quite cheery, flirted a little with the waitress, true to his reputation as an old-style charmer with the ladies, and we ordered. She recommended the côte de boeuf, and when it arrived, rare, it was a tremendous joint of meat, served with sauté potatoes and mushrooms, porcini, of deep flavour. Blatter ordered some white wine, and we carried on talking about the events of Fifa.
His chippiness about his provincial roots was clear after all these years, a need to show he had proved himself; even at eighty, he referred to being from an Alpine region considered a backwater. He believes some of his troubles stemmed from jealousy in his country:
‘In Switzerland, you should never be too successful otherwise they don’t like that,’ he said. ‘Especially in the German part of Switzerland [where Zurich is]. It is envy and jealousy, because we are in a paradise in Switzerland, if somebody is a little bit higher or gets a bit more attention.
‘And I am from this part of Switzerland, the Valais, where they think we are still people from the mountains, mountaineers, and we are behind the moon,’ he said, sitting in the smart restaurant in Zurich with the Fifa flag at the front. ‘I have a better image in most of the countries of the world than here.’
It was instructive, when I asked him about his career and the early days, that the details he gave, for which he still had icy clarity, were almost all about the politics, as he worked his way up the network of sports administration bodies housed in Switzerland. After his first jobs in hotels and the Valais tourist office, then military service, he had two years as the secretary of the Swiss ice hockey federation. He described it as a ‘terrible time’. That was because of the politics: three members of the central committee had gone for his job, he recalled of so long ago, and they had ‘boycotted’ him instead of working together. He went to the Swiss Olympic Committee, which was too much administration, then to become head of marketing at Longines, ‘because the former boss had a problem with the director-general’. He told a long story about dealing with the watchmakers’ union before the 1972 Olympic Games, and fixing the problem to everybody’s satisfaction. He said that the president of Swiss Timing, Thomas Keller, who was also the president of FISA, the world governing body for rowing, had told him about the Fifa job in 1975, informing him: ‘The new president at Fifa is looking for a man who knows football but who specifically could sell a development programme, because they have no money.’
Blatter told me one of his strategies for getting on in life, getting ahead of other people, and it was a little like the phrase from the Longfellow poem which Jack Warner had chosen as the title for his autobiography, reaching the heights by ‘toiling upward in the night’ while everybody else slept.
‘I was a workaholic,’ Blatter said. ‘When I was in Zurich, I started at seven o’clock in the office; there was no need but it was a principle, and to be the last one who left the office. I liked this advance in the morning, waking up, listening to the news on the different radios, then in the office on the computer. So when people arrived in Fifa, they knew that I already had the knowledge of messages and information.
‘And if you do that during so very many years, not only at Fifa, all my life; you have always a bit of an advantage of time, and also advantage of knowledge. This is important; this was my way.’
I invited him to talk about the record of development, the great progress around the world, whether he would argue this was his legacy. He said it was, and he told the story about meeting the Coca-Cola executives at the Parc des Princes, and going to Atlanta to close the deal. But he did not greatly enthuse about the development work itself, the houses of football they built all over the world, in some of the neediest and poorest of countries. He drifted back to the politics as if by reflex, referring to the involvement of Mohamed bin Hammam and Platini in the genesis of the GOAL project, then on to their support in the 1998 election.
‘Bin Hammam was one of the supporters,’ he said, ‘but the biggest supporter I had in 1998 was Platini.’
On the vote-buying allegations of his first election in 1998, he flatly denied it, finally saying that nobody from his camp needed to pay anybody, because they had the votes pledged to them already. His European rivals had it wrong when they believed the night before that they had 110 votes–he did, he told me.
Now, Blatter blamed Platini, and the crucial votes from European executive committee members which Platini took away from the US, for, as Blatter saw it, the disastrous vote for Qatar. He, who knew Fifa and the executive committee best, argues that it is a distraction to look for bribery when it comes to the World Cup votes. His argument is that the confederation heads are accused of indulging in kickbacks on their own turf, when selling TV rights, but he did not believe such practices determined World Cup votes:
‘The World Cups are not bought; they are influenced by political pressure,’ he reflected. ‘The brilliant French president Sarkozy changed everything. He asked Platini to look for the interests of France and vote with his colleagues. [Platini] informed me before, he told me three votes will change, but it was more, it was four.’
Blatter complained, seethed, that Platini should not have been influenced by his head of state, and he believed that had been Platini’s only reason for changing his vote.
‘Some weeks before that, he told me that we can’t go to Qatar because everybody will say we [must] have been under pressure to go to Qatar–that we were paid, or pressurised. Then he comes with that…’
I asked him how he had felt when he pulled the name Qatar out of the envelope.
‘Look at the picture,’ he replied, and grimaced. ‘I haven’t had a very smiling face.’
He is convinced that the US investigations began from then, and he railed at the Swiss authorities for cooperating so fully, at the unfairness of it all. He accepted that the American investigators appeared to have found major corruption, mentioning the kickbacks on the Copa America television deals with Traffic, but he argued that had nothing to do with Fifa itself, it involved the confederations, over which he had no control.
‘So why the hell then should the Fifa president bear all the charges, the responsibility and the blame; how can he be the moralist to go into the conscience of these people?’
He singled out Jeff Webb, as many involved in Fifa do, as the most breathtaking scoundrel of all. Blatter recalled being at the publication of the Concacaf integrity report, which identified the alleged frauds of Chuck Blazer and Jack Warner, and that Webb presented himself as the president for a new era of fair play and respect.
‘Jeffrey Webb was answering that [committee report]; he had tears coming down his face, saying: “I am humbled, I accept it; I promise I will do that.”’ Blatter, warming up, did a little impression of Webb, and mimed the weeping. He then gave a revealing insight into his regime of patronage, saying that after Webb became the Concacaf president, he put him in as the chair of the anti-racism committee. Webb asked for ‘a better committee’, Blatter said, so he ‘gave him a committee’. Blatter said he promised Webb the development committee eventually, ‘which is the big one, and you have privileges’.
Then, on that morning at the Baur au Lac: ‘The first one arrested was him,’ Blatter said. ‘How can you be misled by that or by yourself to say this man is a correct man? I was already thinking that he could be tomorrow the president of Fifa, a good person, a strong man.’
Throughout the conversation, Blatter maintained that he did not know the people around that executive committee table, whose support he nurtured for so many years, were corrupt. He said that after the arrests he had thought he had been ‘wrong to trust people’, although he admitted that he was not surprised about some of them. Even then, talking about the compendious criminal charges against people with whom he worked so closely and was entrusted to run world football for so long, he diverted back to politics. When I asked about Nicolás Leoz, who took ISL bribes in the 1990s and is charged with having been the instigator of the corruption of Traffic in South America at the same time, Blatter instinctively recalled only that Leoz hadn’t thought him the right candidate in 1998. Several of the long-serving executive committee members, he said, could not adjust to his move from being secretary general to president, from being at their service to being their boss; ‘not directly, but you can feel it’.
Of Jack Warner, Blatter insisted he had not known or suspected him of wrongdoing either. Again, the point at which he said he stopped trusting him related to Blatter’s own position when he was standing for the presidential election in 2011 and whether Warner was supporting him, rather than any of the alleged frauds:
‘No, Jack Warner and his wife, both of them were schoolteachers, at the level of college, good educated people, and he was a good speaker also,’ Blatter assured me. ‘And I would say he was a pleasant guy in contact. All the pleasant guys from time to time they have a question mark–but I couldn’t imagine the volume of problems he has created.’
I asked him about the handing out of the cash in Trinidad, which really generated the major US investigation, and Blatter’s take on that was still electoral:
‘At a certain time I stopped believing him, because he was saying that he did this special meeting there [for bin Hammam] but [said] it doesn’t matter, [the Caribbean delegates] will all vote for you.’
Blatter said they did all vote for him anyway in the end, because the scandal had been uncovered and Warner had suddenly stepped down.
Asked about the alleged $10m bribe from South Africa to Warner, Blatter said that Thabo Mbeki had decided himself to have a legacy fund for the African diaspora, the Caribbean was the natural place for it, and Fifa did not pay the money itself, only deducted the $10m from the organising committee’s budget. The idea had been a surprise to him, he said, and anyway the money was paid a long time after the vote, so was not connected to it. When I put to him that Chuck Blazer himself had told the US law enforcement authorities that it was a bribe, Blatter replied, quite quickly:
‘I am not involved in this case. I have not even seen that [the money] has passed from Fifa.’
Asked about the ISL bribery, when he was shown the payment to Havelange, which Eckert said may have been only ‘clumsy’, Blatter pointed out that he had been cleared. He said he had not known Havelange, Teixeira and Leoz were being paid so much money.
‘One amount came for Havelange and we sent it back the next day.’
Then he offered the longstanding explanation that, anyway, this was not a crime in Switzerland and then:
‘At that time, it was so-called commissions–it only came in 2003 to forbid it. Not only was it permitted, you could deduct it from taxes. So come on…’
He had an interesting way of dismissing Michel Zen-Ruffinen, and the litany of allegations made against him in 2002:
‘Zen-Ruffinen? He is silly. He thinks he is a combination of… James Bond and Don Juan, and he is the most intelligent man, best looking and so on. He’s just a fool.’
He was not impressed with whistleblowers in general, even criticising Yuliya Stepanova, who had recently exposed the Russian state doping of athletes, the great scandal breaking over athletics.
‘She wants to go to the Olympics, and now everybody says it is a shame she can’t go because she is a whistleblower. Before long whistleblowers will be allowed to everything,’ he sneered. ‘Because if you are a whistleblower, it’s not correct as well.’
I was quite shocked at that statement, and asked him to clarify it; was he saying that he thought whistleblowers were not correct?
‘No,’ he confirmed. ‘At the school level, primary school, if you had somebody who was a whistleblower towards the instructor or the tutor, then…’ and he trailed off, as if it was obvious.
‘Do you still think that about whistleblowers now?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
‘That they are like a snitch in school?’
‘Yes, yes,’ he said.
He was scathing about Blazer, and the US criminal investigation using him as an informer after his arrest: ‘Blazer was at the Olympics as a representative of Fifa, and he was wired by the FBI. So, what is such a country trying to give us lessons in how to honestly do a job?’
‘Do you think that is deceitful?’ I asked him.
‘How can you do that? [Blazer] accepted because it was his escape, but it is incredible.’
Of himself, he believed that the authorities, which were turning over every last document of his forty years at Fifa, would find nothing to incriminate him. He was still indignant and disbelieving that he had lost the position he worked so hard for, over that payment to Platini. He argued there was nothing wrong with the 2m CHF payment except a failure to note their oral agreement down at first. It had nothing to do with the presidential election of 2011; Platini had already said he was staying at Uefa, and the ethics committee found it was not corruption or bribery. He disagreed even that it was a conflict of interest at the time. He said Platini told them Fifa still owed him money, he had presented an invoice to Markus Kattner, Blatter had agreed they did, and they paid him through the books. He argued there was a pressure to get him:
‘The day the media started to condemn the Fifa president to say he is a corrupted man. The payment to Platini was a payment which was due to an oral agreement. There is nothing wrong there. If I am using my prerogative as president of Fifa to use 2m for an item, and this has been registered through all the financial control system, so what is wrong then?’
The famous press conference he called for the day of the ethics committee decision, when he looked so suddenly ashen, rough-shaven, with that plaster on his cheek, he said he had called it because he was convinced that he would be cleared.
‘When I was banned I was so much surprised,’ he said.
I told him that he did seem quite relaxed, considering everything, the battalions of lawyers inspecting every step of his record over forty years with the money, issues and characters he dealt with, some of them now exposed as industrial-scale crooks. His reply was instructive, too, of how he sees himself:
‘I am relaxed, because I would have stopped all the matters if I feel really guilty and that something could happen to me in a criminal case,’ he said. ‘I would have stopped everything, taken a rucksack, I would be somewhere in a Valais alp with my pipe or cigar, I would have radio and television, I would be there. I would be like the Greek philosopher when they come to visit him and they say: “Can we do something for you?” and he says: “Yes, you can go away, so the sun comes directly to me.”’
That was his vision, and there was something a little odd that he pictured it like this, that if he was ever caught out, with his fingerprints or signature on some incriminating act, he would not be in jail, but it would just entail him leaving his adventures and successes in the world, and he could retire back to the obscurity of the Valais. Listening to it, I felt then as I have with many of the old football men whose careers and reputations I have seen curdle when they have stayed on too long: that he should have taken that option, retired, and lived that vision some years ago. A pipe, radio, feet up, a bit of sunshine in the Alps. Rather than be here at the age of eighty, his life in the hands of lawyers, using up all his resources still battening down against endless waves of allegations from the decades of buccaneering.
He had to be off, to his appointment at 2 p.m., and he called for the bill. It is always an awkward predicament, the bill when you meet for lunch as a journalist, when you are meeting somebody you have to write about as a subject, particularly in these circumstances of his. I had decided in advance that I would insist on paying–even at these prices, at Fifa’s Restaurant Sonnenberg, at the top of the world above Zurich, where everything is expensive.
‘No,’ Blatter insisted, he had already paid the bill. ‘No, it’s done. Not in my restaurant.’
I said really I ought to pay, as he was giving me his time, for an interview for my book.
‘No, no, not in my restaurant,’ he said, and then, through gritted teeth, he added almost to himself as he stood up: ‘Well, it’s not mine, but I am still the boss here.’
When I had been sitting there waiting for him, on the terrace looking out at Lake Zurich and the wealthy city spread over the hills and in the valley, I had realised that a part of me wanted to believe in him, in Fifa. It is a phenomenal story, of football and this organisation, formed by seven earnest Europeans in 1904 to play a simple, marvellous sport, moved to Switzerland in 1932. From this most discreet of havens they could have nestled complacently in their plush and comfortable ‘house’, but they did not. They ventured out constantly, to the whole world, and saw football develop everywhere, while keeping it together as one sport, just one official FA affiliated from every country, participating together in one World Cup, just as the amateur founders envisaged all those years earlier. But in these decades of its modern development, since the World Cup was first broadcast in colour television in the 1970s, Fifa became bloated and had corruption woven in, throughout Blatter’s forty years. It all culminated finally in mass arrests, criminal charges, significant guilty pleas, bottomless shame.
At the end of a pleasant lunch at which he gave his version of events–he had made a remarkable journey from a childhood in the Valais, where he is still a hero; smartly orienteered the politics of sports governing bodies, partly by putting more hours in than everybody else; he was guilty of no wrongdoing, he knew of no wrongdoing, he saw no wrongdoing; he had been a success and implemented major development work; whistleblowers are snitches, and England and the USA should learn to lose–Sepp Blatter said his goodbyes. The chef and staff of the restaurant loyally came out to line up and shake his hand, the ageing, tainted, one-time president. Then he was ushered back into the black Mercedes, and driven down the hill again, to face his meetings with lawyers.
Sepp Blatter’s time is finally done; he is not the boss any more. And nobody can say what the future holds: for Fifa, for the game, for the world.