Sepp Blatter still odds-on favourite for Fifa presidency

OWEN GIBSON

He has presided over 17 years of chaos, controversy and kickbacks and yet the Fifa president, Sepp Blatter, is still quoted at shorter odds than Arkle to win a fifth term that he previously vowed never to stand for.

There, in a nutshell, is the Blatter paradox that the European power brokers behind a “multi-ball” campaign calculated to inflict maximum damage on the 78-year-old need to consider.

As nominations closed at midnight on Thursday, there were four definite runners in the race: Blatter, the Fifa executive committee member Prince Ali Bin Al Hussein of Jordan , the Dutch FA president Michael van Praag and former world footballer of the year Luis Figo .

All have received the requisite five nominations, including backing for Van Praag from the Scottish FA and a nomination for Ali from the English FA.

David Ginola, who has raised just €8,000 from the public on top of the €330,000 paid to him by a bookmaker, ended his farcical 14-day campaign with a message that all of those who had pledged money would get it back.

Meanwhile Jerome Champagne, the French former Fifa executive and one-time Blatter ally , was coy on whether he had made it over the line. Fifa will not announce the final shortlist until next week at the earliest.

Blatter has been momentarily wrong-footed by the entry of Ali, Van Praag and Figo into a race for which he remains overwhelming favourite. While all three decided independently to stand, with Van Praag making clear on Wednesday that he had not co-ordinated his plans with the other two, there is little doubt that if the Uefa president Michel Platini had asked them not to they would have complied with his wishes.

Platini, having decided not to personally take on Blatter , is hoping that having three credible rivals will catalyse a debate that could yet prove wounding. Closer to the vote on 29 May, one or more could stand aside to unite behind a common anti-Blatter candidate.

All will stand on reform tickets, putting forward various versions of the vision for a new “normalised” Fifa eloquently expressed by Van Praag at his campaign launch on Wednesday.

The theory is that while one could have been easily dismissed by Blatter, taking on three simultaneously will not be so easy. But there is the equal danger that they will cancel one another out.

Blatter will fall back on tried and trusted tactics. Before last year’s World Cup in Brazil, with the media meltdown over the bribery claims that engulfed the bidding race for the 2018 and 2022 tournaments at its height, he played a few of the old tunes.

From the floor of the Fifa Congress - an event memorably described by the FA chairman Greg Dyke as like “something out of North Korea” - his supporters fought off a bid to introduce term limits. Before the Congress he had toured a few of the confederation meetings, denouncing the “racist” British media, promising extra “bonus” payments for football development and in return receiving loud acclamation.

He is diminished by the fallout from the 2018/22 bidding race car crash and the scandals of the last four years - and shorn of some of his most loyal lieutenants. But Blatter can still rely on staunch support from many of the Fifa members in Africa, Asia, Oceania, the Caribbean and even parts of Europe. As the man who has maintained an ever-increasing flow of lightly audited funds to parts of the world that had little in the pre-Blatter era, loyalty runs deep.

The challengers face a huge hurdle in overcoming the perception that they are European patsies amid lingering distrust of the richest, most powerful part of the football world. But if they can, then there is potential for them to sell a new vision. For all the increases in revenue over the past 20 years, a huge proportion of Fifa’s income is wasted on overheads and there could be ways to spread more of it around.

Blatter has allowed a system of patronage and perks to flourish that has left him in pole position to retain a role to which he has become addicted for the profile, prestige, trappings and seven figure salary it affords.

This is a game Blatter has been playing successfully for four decades, one learned at the knee of his one time mentor Horst Dassler and his predecessor João Havelange.

For those reasons he remains the overwhelming favourite, but the prospect of a genuine debate about football’s future and a campaign that could further undermine Fifa’s discredited leadership is to be welcomed. For Platini, who has his own issues linked to his support for Qatar’s World Cup bid, it is a win-win and could yet prepare the ground for his own tilt at the top job in 2019, when he may end up going head to head with Concacaf president Jeffrey Webb.

The looming fight will be cloaked in meaningless buzzwords about football and “fair play” while behind the scenes the tactics will be anything but.

Blatter vowed in 2011 that his current four-year term would definitely be his last. Now he says that his “mission” must go on for the good of the game. The most worrying thing is that he probably believes it.

Guardian Service