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Goodbye 2015, the year Sepp Blatter and Co. faced their fate

By on December 31, 2015

I have seen the future. Football’s future. It does not involve Sepp Blatter.

As 2015 comes to a close, FIFA’s president has finally been shunted out of the organization in ignominious fashion, pinned down by a barrage of corruption allegations. In a year that began with ongoing cries for transparency in the 2022 and 2026 World Cup bidding process and Michael Garcia’s infamous Justice report that has yet to see the full light of day, the scandals blew up amidst the raid of a luxury hotel in Zurich and the arrests of fourteen FIFA officials by Swiss authorities.

That was just two days before Blatter was re-elected for his fifth term as president of the organization, defeating Prince Ali bin al-Hussein, his first challenger since 2002, by a surprisingly thin margin. Within the same few days, Blatter hastily arranged a press conference to announce his resignation from the organization in 2016 under pressure from Swiss and United States authorities.

The United States government then launched a new round of investigations into FIFA, spearheaded by Attorney General Loretta Lynch, which sparked the demise of former FIFA official Jack Warner by the way of disgraced former US Soccer president Chuck Blazer’s whistleblowing.

Finally, just a week-and-a-half ago, amidst lingering doubts over the extent of Blatter’s resignation, the Swiss government dealt the final blow to Blatter with probes into a disloyal payment to ex-UEFA president Michel Platini and FIFA’s own ethics committee handed the pair eight year bans form football. They have gone down kicking and screaming, but the deed is now all but done.

Admittedly, Blatter is only the tip of the rotten, rotten iceberg. There will be much more controversy to witness and it will take years more to rat out all the corrupt officials in FIFA. Their Cameroonian interim president, Issa Hayatou, was once described by Blatter as his closest colleague in FIFA.

Jerome Champagne, former FIFA deputy general secretary (you might remember him from a particular episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver) and presidential candidate is also equally hard to trust. Bahraini candidate Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim al-Khalifa has a muddled human-rights record (he was reportedly involved in the rest and torture of Bahraini players in 2013) and an unappealing view on the current farce.

Ex-UEFA president Michel Platini appeared to be favorite to succeed Blatter, only to be caught up in a scandal of unlawful payments from Blatter and handed his own eight-year ban from the organization. Gianni Infantino, UEFA’s general secretary, has stepped into the race in the wake of Platini’s controversy.

Prince Ali and South African businessman Tokyo Sexwale appear to be the cleanest of the candidates.

Hopefully, fifty or sixty years from now, when the wrongdoers are long gone and the dust has settled on the history books, Blatter’s era will be remembered on balance both for the modernization and commercialization of football as well as the scandalous organization lurking behind the scenes. That all depends on the outcome of the upcoming presidential election and whether FIFA can truly clean up its act once and for all.

2015 offered a glimpse of hope for FIFA, although its future remains shrouded in mystery.

Happy New Year from everybody at Football Every Day!

Photo credit: Marcello Casal Jr./ABr [CC BY 3.0 br (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/br/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons

About Alex Morgan

Alex Morgan, founder of Football Every Day, lives and breaths football from the West Coast of the United States in California. Aside from founding Football Every Day in January of 2013, Alex has also launched his own journalism career and hopes to help others do the same with FBED. He covers the San Jose Earthquakes as a beat reporter for QuakesTalk.com and his work has also been featured in the BBC's Match of the Day Magazine.