Like all politicians Fifa-President Sepp Blatter too collected many more accolades, decorations and prizes, among them his Honorary Citizenship of Texas, the South African Order of the Companions of O.R. Tambo in gold, the Order of the Rising Sun, the German Grosses Verdienstkreuz, the Global Award for Peace, the Humane Order of African Redemption or the Honorary title of Datuk Seri from the Sultan of Pahang and former President of the Asian Football Confederation, Sultan Ahmad Shah of Pahang.
A movie about Fifa
At the recent Cannes Film Festival Fifa celebrated itself. «United Passion», a movie depicting the beginnings of Fifa has debuted that sees French actor Gérard Depardieu as the World Cup creator Jules Rimet, Jurassic Park star Sam Neill as the former Fifa-President João Havelange and British actor Tim Roth («Pulp Fiction», «Grace of Monaco») as Sepp Blatter. The film cost a reported £ 19 million to make, with Fifa said to have pumped £ 16 million into the project portraying the officials as visionaries and icons of the global game.
The movie hits the theaters just before the World Cup kicked off in Brazil. Sadly, the film wasn’t well received by the audience. It wasn’t the visions and the great game that caught the media’s and the public’s attention, but Fifa’s long list of failures that doesn’t go well with the glorification of its mentors. Thus the football association, which in essence for the last 39 years was not much more than the ruling foreman Sepp Blatter, is anxious to look to the congress in São Paulo that began on June 11. There is a lot to do before Sepp can finish his «mission that never ends» as he recently said in an interview.
Playing for time
But most of his time Mr. Blatter is like soccer players in the final minutes of a game trying to play for time. According to the report of a Swiss attorney Blatter’s predecessor João Havelange and his son in law Ricardo Teixeira (until 2012 head of the Brazilian football association) «unlawfully used committed assets to enrich themselves… it is out of question that Fifa knew of illegal payments to persons of its member organizations.» But since both quit their jobs in Fifa they will never be punished. Teixeira is now hiding out in Miami with a reported $ 100 million pile of loot.
It’s only four years ago that «at least five possibly even more» test games in preparation of the last World Cup in South Africa were rigged, reported the New York Times. Referee Ibrahim Chaibou was known to award penalties for a player touching the ball with the hand when a hand was nowhere near the ball. Fifa again played for time and began to investigate only in March 2012 when Chaibou had reached the mandatory retirement age of referees of 45 years. Accordingly it wasn’t Fifa’s responsibility anymore to punish the referee.
It’s only three and a half years ago that Russia and Qatar won their bids for the World Cups 2018 and 2022 respectively. Recently the Sunday Times began to publish «over a million of documents» including «emails, faxes, phone records, flight logs, documents and accounts» which lay out, in detail, a campaign of bribery, payoffs and graft conducted by the former head of the Asian football association, the Qatari Mohammad bin Hammam on behalf of the Qatar bid. He had distributed millions of dollars in Africa and Asia to secure the votes of African and Asian representatives.
In Europe where open bribery is considered unethical Qatar did much lobbying. It commissioned the German railway company Deutsche Bahn to build a 17 billion Euro railway system in the desert. Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy – a fan of Qatari owned Paris Saint Germain – invited Uefa-Boss Michel Platini and encouraged him to vote for Qatar, and German football Kaiser Franz Beckenbauer met several times with Bin Hammam. Worse was to come.
Slaves for the World Cup in the desert
In November last year Amnesty International and the British newspaper Guardian revealed that dozens of Nepalese construction workers in Qatar had died this summer in conditions described as «modern-day slavery». Sepp Blatter has admitted world football cannot «turn a blind eye» to the deaths of hundreds of construction workers in Qatar. Again he played for time. Unmoved by the plight of those workers, he claimed that there was still plenty of time to resolve the issue. This «is totally inadequate and fails to put in place any plan to stop more workers dying», the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) said. 4’000 construction workers could die before the 2022 tournament if conditions do not improve for the labourers working on infrastructure projects worth an estimated £ 137 billion.
Who’s next?
At the 2011 Uefa congress in Paris Sepp Blatter officially declared, that his fourth term as Fifa president would «definitely be his last». Now, three years later the 78 years old wants to run a fifth time for Fifa-president. Finally he still has to fix all these problems or at least to transfer them into the future when it won’t hurt anybody anymore.
The only problem is, the crowd wanting to end Blatterism in world football is growing. «For us in the DFB (German Football Association) as for all Europeans his word still stands, that this is his last term», said DFB-president Wolfgang Niersbach. And Uefa-President Platini is fiercely determined to challenge him.
Whatever the outcome, in Brazil Blatter’s Fifa once more was able to enforce new laws. Until recently alcoholic beverages were banned in Brazil’s stadiums. To secure the profits of the Budweiser brewery (It is one of the official sponsors of the World Cup.) the colonial power established itself in Brasilia as legislator and asserted the right to serve Budweiser beer in the stadiums. 2022 it might be the Muslims turn to bow to Fifa’s rules and to drink Budweiser.