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Reformers should vote against Mr Blatter, but the real need is for the critics to adopt an achievable strategy for the future
Football is the planet's favourite game. But Fifa, international football's global super-body, has become an outright embarrassment to the sport. The catalyst for Fifa's unprecedented current discredit was the extraordinary award of the 2022 World Cup, the single biggest decision the body can take, to Qatar, a country that would struggle to beat the Falkland Islands or the Vatican City in a football match, but which is stonkingly well-endowed with money and the five-star hotels in which Fifa executives and their hangers-on like to spend as much of their lives as possible at other people's expense.
The Qatar decision exposed the dominant culture of Fifa in the era of its longtime president Sepp Blatter to unsustainable strain. Under him, Fifa has become a vastly wealthy organisation, selling lucrative World Cup and international football sponsorship and media rights – worth well over £1bn. The accusation is that this money is recycled, in return for votes, into the pet schemes of the satraps who make up Fifa's self-perpetuating executive. Today, after a gloriously damaging campaign for Fifaland, the discredited Mr Blatter will be "re‑elected" – but not in the manner that football supporters would understand the term.
Unfortunately for football, there has as yet been no equivalent of the Arab spring to topple the system over which President Blatter presides. In an ideal world, today's Fifa election in Zurich would be postponed. The congress would adopt a reform programme with anti-corruption safeguards of the sort that the International Olympic Committee was forced to introduce after its own Qatar moment, the bought decision in 1995 to give the 2002 Winter Olympics to Salt Lake City. These would include a complete clearout of the feuding executives who presided over the discredited Qatar award, the reopening of the 2022 process, strict expenses-only limits on what Fifa members can accept or be offered by bidding nations, term limits and age ceilings for Fifa executives, transparency of voting and accounts, and the addition of a group of independent members to the board, perhaps including such football luminaries as Franz Beckenbauer or Roger Milla to restore public confidence.
Yet it must be faced that we do not currently live in such a world. The indignation felt against Fifa in this country and a few others is not as widely shared as it should be, though a tide may be moving in the critics' direction. But the critics also need to be clearer about what they want to put in place of Mr Blatter's regime. It is easier to make the romantic suggestion that football should be controlled by the fans who pay for their tickets than to say the form that such a system would actually take. If Fifa collapsed, it is more likely that it would be challenged by a system of international football run in the interests of the world's football powers and the major clubs who could attract the sponsors, rather than in the interests of the developing world. Many developing-world countries still feel, not illogically in the case of some influential small ones, that they have more interest in the status quo, with all its faults, than in a challenge to it led by rich and established Europeans. And Europe itself does not speak with one voice. The latest twists and turns of Mr Blatter's rotten rule may have been front-page news in this country yesterday. But the Fifa congress rated only page 11 of L'Equipe and page 15 of Gazzetta dello Sport yesterday – two of Europe's most prestigious specialist sports dailies.
Even if the anti-Blatter mood was more widespread, the chances of putting together an effective challenge to the regime at such short notice are negligible. Reformers should certainly vote against Mr Blatter today, but the real need is for the critics to adopt an achievable strategy for the future. They need a manifesto. They need organisation. And they need a candidate to replace Mr Blatter. At the moment they have none of them. They need to get serious.