Fifa President Sepp Blatter unexpectedly resigned this week, only days after being elected to a fifth term at the top of global football’s governing body. He will stay as president until a successor is chosen. According to US news reports, the FBI and American prosecutors are investigating him as part of the same operation that led to last week’s arrest of seven Fifa officials, including Blatter’s vice-president, Jack Warner.
What the commentators said
It has long been evident, said The Times, that Blatter “either had intimate knowledge of the corruption infecting his organisation and tarnishing football, or was blithely oblivious to it. The second of these scenarios became less plausible by the day.” He appears to have quit because “the noose of suspicion was drawing close around him”. His second-in-command allegedly paid another Fifa official $10m to persuade him to support South Africa’s successful bid to host the World Cup in 2010.
Blatter may have gone, said The Guardian’s Marina Hyde, but the task of cleaning up Fifa lies ahead. “Investigating it will seem like a picnic compared to reforming it.” But the good news is that it already feels as though something “has changed irrevocably”. It was once an “unassailable hierarchy” – now the spell has been broken.
But “a depressing sub-plot”, says The Guardian’s Nils Pratley, has been the behaviour of Fifa’s sponsors. For years they have been powerful enough to demand pervasive reform and a new president. But they bottled it, and even when this scandal erupted, all they could muster were “mealy-mouthed and inadequate protestations of ‘concern’”. They have been left without even a
“scrap of respectability”.