Sepp Blatter may run an upmarket Sopranos, but he won't be held to account by our craven authorities any time soon
Sepp Blatter should not stand as president of Fifa at Wednesday's meeting in Zurich, let alone be re-elected. But he will stand and be re-elected. Only those blind to the greed and hysteria of world football could regard awarding the 2022 World Cup to Qatar as definitely clean. Blatter knew this, because he was told it over and again. But Fifa is not, as it classes itself, a "world governing body". It is a squalid cartel. The 208 members of Fifa have no interest in rocking Blatter's $1.3bn (untaxed) boat while his rulebook demands a 75% vote to oust him. He can dispense millions to his "electors" and enjoy the security of an autocrat. From his $100m Swiss palace, he calls Fifa "the family within". His nephew, Philippe, controls Fifa's sponsorship and media revenue monopoly.
The UK and its four football associations should have nothing to do with this man, but they are as introverted as he is. When England's FA tried to repair its image by choosing an outsider, Lord Triesman, as its chairman in 2008, he was so shocked that he inadvertently blew the whistle with his allegations. He was vilified by "the family" and forced to resign. The whole business stinks. Even the money stays silent. The four big Fifa sponsors behaved this week like maiden aunts told of a long-secret family scandal: that it was "most distressing".
Last December, David Cameron and Prince William humiliated themselves by going to Zurich to dance attendance on Blatter during the vote on the 2018 venue. Now the FA has returned to the mire by turning up at today's coronation of Blatter's presidency, belatedly trying to give itself some credit last night by calling for the election to be cancelled. International football is run by a self-perpetuating elite, craving the tickets, the lifestyle and, in some alleged cases, the bribes, which have become part and parcel of international sport.
Fifa's senior official under Blatter, Jérôme Valcke, was sacked after being charged by a US court with "repeated dishonesty", and then rehired by Blatter. When he revealed that Qatar's cup bid had in his view been "bought", he protested afterwards that this was not meant as the past tense of "to buy" but rather of "to be efficient". Meanwhile the photographed envelopes containing $40,000 in hundred dollar bills, for each of Fifa's Caribbean voters, were now apparently intended for distribution to the poor. This is ludicrous.
Blatter, who feasts on the adulation of world leaders, has the cheek to warn them to stay out of his business and that of "the family". Only the Swiss authorities might be smirking, with another advertisement for their lax regulation and scope for tax avoidance and corruption that has made them an entrepot for the world's funny money. Blatter may struggle in a reputable corporate climate. As the limousines draw up at Wednesday's meeting, bystanders might wonder if next to arrive is Don Corleone.
Football is no more than a sport and can look to its own. What deserve scrutiny are the murky "international" regulators that huddle mostly in smaller European states and claim sovereignty over everything from sport and culture to science, aid, armaments and world trade. Some bodies hover uncertainly under the United Nations umbrella, performing half-necessary functions such as maritime law or heritage rescue. Others have become puppets of global corporations, such as the World Health Organisation and its 2009 swine flu "pandemic".
Fifa and the International Olympic Committee are stateless cartels, freeloading on the Swiss image of lofty cosmopolitanism. Those who rule these bodies are accountable only to the federations that they themselves run. Juan Antonio Samaranch ran the IOC for 21 years, culminating in a haze of accusations of corruption. Blatter will clock up 16 years following his re-election today. To these men, national governments are dummies run by gullible politicians in thrall to electors so stupid they pay taxes.
In his current BBC TV series, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, Adam Curtis ridicules the restless search for world order of various political and intellectual movements over the past half century. Psychological profiling, internet democracy, climatic computer models and Armageddon predictions are all presented as cynical smokescreens for political and financial power.
Common to Curtis's megalomaniacs is that they strive to be above the realm of national democracies. They dust themselves in the global sovereignty that has appealed to visionaries since the Crusades, the League of Nations and the search for a single computerised human intelligence. They claim to have supplanted politics and governments.
Likewise bodies such as Fifa, whose fatuous mission is "to reach out and touch the world". The idea that Fifa should be a "world governing body" of any sort is as outrageous as Bernie Ecclestone being a regulator of motor racing or Don King of boxing. Fifa is an upmarket Sopranos. The key to its wealth, like that of the IOC, lay in appropriating the commercial rights to events it sponsors, pocketing the money and denying it to host nations. As a result, host nations spend vast sums of money stoking up chauvinist hysteria round "winning the games" by way of compensation.
The syndrome was awesomely displayed when Tony Blair and Tessa Jowell went berserk over "winning the Olympics" for London in 2005, never mentioning that the price for two weeks of minor sport would be £9bn. Despite its avowed internationalism, the IOC requires of its hosts the crude nationalism of lavish opening and closing ceremonies.
Blatter relies on governments lacking the guts to tell their domestic associations to boycott him. No one dares suggest that he be moved to a country where he might be subject to competition law or police investigation. The world of football enjoys a total omerta. Indeed, as revelations of corruption at Fifa began to emerge last year – though rumoured for years – the FA and British government response was to dismiss them and condemn the journalists who reported them.
Nothing will happen. World bodies will remain untrammelled by democratic oversight or legal regulation. There is no evidence that this scandal would have broken surface had Fifa's antics been left to the football authorities or their governments to police. The revelations came from investigations by the UK press, and largely by one journalist, Andrew Jennings, who has hounded Blatter since 2006. It is reasonable to conclude that the only curb on the pomposity and unaccountability of these bodies is not democracy, accountability or the law, but the labours of my own humble profession.