Educating Sepp Blatter

FIFA President Sepp Blatter’s weekend interview with the Swiss Sonntagszeitung was headlined by his announcement that FIFA will form an “independent” anti-corruption committee. So, the world’s football governing body has decided to slap on a condom several hours after completing full sexual intercourse.

Blatter - praying for enlightenment

In classic FIFA fashion, this initiative comes not from any sense that tackling corruption is the right thing to do. Rather, in Blatter’s words, its purpose would be “to strengthen our credibility and re-define our image in the realm of public relations.” For these must always be the prime motivations behind any moral undertaking.

The rest of the interview was the usual self-aggrandizing cant about how he had to struggle to survive from the moment he was born, how he went to a monastery in the Swiss town of Einsiedeln to pray for a successful World Cup in South Africa, and how the marching band in Visp – a ski resort where he owns a flat – apparently is prone to playing a Sepp Blatter March when they parade beneath his balcony (we’d be happy to provide some lyrics for their next procession). He also admitted to having “few genuine friends”, and aired his standard lament about “obsessive” journalists who insist on bringing up FIFA’s long history of corruption. Shame on them.

There was one curious sentence about Blatter’s reasons for staying on (and on and on) as FIFA head. This has nothing, of course, to do with an inability to loosen his grip on the levers of power, or the perpetual need to maintain his outsized ego and his bite-sized intellect at the centre of the football world's attention. Not at all. In fact Blatter, like all deeply insecure gerontocrats, wants a legacy, and so proclaims that he still has “one important task to fulfil”.

What is it, asks the newspaper? “I want football to attain a socio-cultural dimension,” says Blatter. Meaning? “Football is more than a game,” he expounds, perhaps gesturing grandly to the Swiss Alps, and beyond, as he flogs this threadbare wisdom. “Football is also education. Football is a school of life. We have projects with health and school programmes. There’s still much work to do there – and still much work for me.”

He’s right about that. In the same interview Blatter confesses that prior to awarding Qatar the 2022 World Cup, he’d had no idea that homosexuality was illegal in that country. So one of the first re-education programmes would be to send all FIFA staff, including a leader ignorant by his own admittance, on a short geo-political course about the rule of law (or not, in the case of Russia) in the states where FIFA is set to stage its next three World Cups. Because football is more than a game. It’s also an education.