Battle lines drawn at Fifa but ramifications of fight hard to interpret

Dispense with the tactics board, send for the Risk-style war room. If battle lines were not already drawn jaggedly between football’s superpowers (and its many minnows who share equal voting rights) after the damning US indictment of 18 football executives on 47 corruption charges, they certainly are now.

It is a once-in-a-generation tussle for power and control of world football that will play out over the coming months and could decide whether Fifa is reformed from top to bottom or ends up an even more compromised version of the dysfunctional beast ridden by Sepp Blatter for the past 17 years.

As the FBI continued judiciously leaking details of its investigation, it casually lobbed a new grenade that will have caused apoplexy from Doha to Durban to St Petersburg, where they are already planning next month's preliminary draw for the qualifying phase of the 2018 World Cup.

In extending its investigation into Fifa corruption to the bidding process for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups it opened up a new front and increased the chances of a re-vote. But it played into already undisguised fury in Russia and elsewhere at the perception the US is acting beyond its jurisdiction as the world's policeman and meddling in the affairs of other nations.

"It's not about Russia or Qatar, it's about respect to football players," said the Russian deputy prime minister, Arkady Dvorkovich. "Any political interference into football affairs is illegal."

Now that US investigators have joined the Swiss in confirming they are actively looking into the bidding processes surrounding the 2018 and 2022 World Cups they have intensified the war of words between those celebrating the demise of Sepp Blatter and those bemoaning it.

In all the glee from most of western Europe, the US, Canada, half of South America, Australia and New Zealand at Blatter’s downfall, it has gone almost unremarked that two-thirds of Fifa’s 209 member nations still voted for him in Friday’s election despite the “World Cup of fraud” alleged by the US.

Unchartered territory

Some will have done so out of fear and would not necessarily back his chosen successor. We are in uncharted territory but progress towards a brave new world is not a given.

An alternative narrative is championed by Blatter and his camp, by Vladimir Putin and by those in Doha nervously wondering whether their World Cup bid may ultimately prove a bridge too far in their grand nation-building experiment.

It is one that paints the US investigation and western media interest as part of a plot by bitter losers to gain revenge for the outcome of a bidding race they never really understood how to win. By this reading Bill Clinton and the rest of the humiliated American bid team returned to the States nursing a grudge that they turned to the FBI to develop.

It may have a kernel of truth but does not really fit the facts – the FBI began by looking at large-scale tax evasion and racketeering on US soil and simply followed the money trail until it found that it led to the dark heart of Fifa’s culture of backhanders and Mr Ten Percenters.

Likewise, claims the English never recovered from the humiliation of that snowy December night in Zurich in 2010 have some truth.

All involved, from David Cameron to former FA executives, go pale when you raise the subject. Every time corruption allegations tip into calls for England (or the US, or Australia) to step in, it cannot help but seem like special pleading.

And there is a lack of understanding and empathy about the extent to which Africa felt under-appreciated until Blatter came along.

Isha Johansen, the head of the Sierra Leone FA and one of only two women among the 209 who voted on Friday, supported Blatter from the conference dais on Friday and, following his departure, tried to articulate the reason he engendered such loyalty.

“This was a man in Europe, from Europe, at the helm of football power who said: ‘No, Africa, you have just as much if not more talent than the rest of the world, you don’t have the structures – I will build so you become a force to be reckoned with.’”

Stopping corruption

Stopping corruption at Fifa need not be incompatible with growing the game around the world even if there is work to be done in shifting perceptions of European arrogance.

We can expect more of the same from both sides in the months to come. More allegations of wrongdoing and calls for fundamental reform from (much of) the west.

More accusations of sour grapes, racism and political interference from (much of) the rest.

It is to the former that reforming candidates will attempt to appeal, to the latter that those who would like to see the model minted by Joao Havelange and further moulded by Blatter persist.

It is an inexact division. In an ideal world a consensus candidate might be found from Asia or Africa who could bridge the gap.

But the continued uncertainty over those two World Cups adds a heady new dynamic to the mix and makes that ever more unlikely even at this early stage.

The danger is that the future of world football becomes part of a grander game between the US and Russia in the new landscape created by intervention in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, the American extradition process will take its course and more indictments seem sure to follow. The voluble support of Michel Platini for Qatar 2022, and the fact it was largely European votes that helped secure a 14-8 victory over the US in the final round of voting, further complicates the picture.

Plotting and waiting

So while Platini and European powerbrokers – with backing from the US, Canada and elsewhere – appear in the box seat after toppling Blatter, safe in the knowledge they can sit back and watch justice take its course and what is left of the president’s power ebb away, they will also be well aware that other confederations will also be plotting and waiting. Guardian Service