Fifa: doubletalk, schmaltz and a deep-fried Swiss dictator

http://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/may/29/sepp-blatter-crumbling-empire

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As they made the short journey from luxury coach to congress hall, Fifa’s delegates were asked the same question over and over again by a German television crew stationed just beyond the velvet rope. “Hello, and how much money did you receive for your vote? Yes, how much money? For your vote? Do you have an exact figure? OK! Thanks!”

A little baffled, occasionally pausing to offer some mumbled platitudes, the delegates kept coming, like bad guys from central casting in shades and thrillingly terrible suits. Yes, it’s Fifa family: dysfunctional, beleaguered, living on handouts, and here for the most hysterically received Fifa congress in the ever-more baroque and subterranean 65-year modern history of football’s governing body.

“Football is the game of hope!” Fifa’s in-house PA would announce that night as the opening ceremony wafted across Zurich’s cavernous Hallenstadion, a fug of schmaltz, double-talk and oddly overblown musical performances. It must be said football didn’t particularly feel like the game of hope, good fellowship and all the rest of it as the German TV crew joined the rest of the gathered global media in clattering around the corner to catch sight of President Joseph S Blatter getting out of his Fifa-issue Mercedes.

Blatter is usually pretty good at this. He gives good red carpet: courtly, grinning, a ludicrous old human butterball of a sporting despot who, each year, resembles more and more the World Cup trophy itself, all toasted perma-tan and gleaming gold pate. This time though he looked pale, surprised perhaps by the ferocity of the reception. Blatter has ridden out choppy waters before. He is a master of obfuscation and soft dictatorship. But, with Michel Platini jumping ship earlier in the day, the FBI in the mix and only an unusual alliance of African football and Vladimir Putin offering any public support, this is a rare storm in the 17-year history of Blatter’s extraordinarily bold, extraordinarily successful, cult of presidential personality.

Not that you’d know it in downtown Zurich. Across from the Baur au Lac hotel, last known residence of the Fifa Six, the only notable change from the everyday is the powerful stench of horse manure from the nearby zoo (oddly enough this isn’t actually a metaphor). In true Swiss fashion, the arrest on corruption charges of six Fifa officials on Wednesday morning – surely the first time, even here, a hotel concierge has been heard informing one of his VIP guests, “Sir, we’re going to need you to come to your door and open it for us or we’re going to have to kick it in” – has left little mark on the city.

“Nobody cares,” says Atter Quereshi, a taxi driver. “Switzerland is a very business-oriented country and in business you have to lubricate deals. It is a private company. They can do whatever they like. People here they don’t even care what the Swiss president does. They don’t give a shit. People see celebrities, they don’t even look at them. Tina Turner can go shopping and no one will bother her.” Good news, then, for Tina Turner. And perhaps some comfort for Blatter who, inside the Hallenstadion, was preparing for what had suddenly become a slightly desperate presidential hustings speech. Friday’s vote looks, if not quite neck and neck, then at least like an actual vote. No wonder Blatter looked a little beleaguered.

The last time Fifa held its congress in Switzerland, Grace Jones could be seen cavorting about the stage in a conical purple hat, draping herself across assorted glazed and baffled octogenarian glad-handers, and demanding to know if her audience was “ready to party?” This time there is no Grace, there is no party, but there is, unexpectedly, an actual election to be fought, possibly even an unexpected moment of crisis.

The first real note of shifting sands had come with the morning announcement that Blatter would be convening a meeting of Fifa’s emergency committee, only slightly hindered by the fact that two of the invited were unable to attend because they had been arrested on charges relating to racketeering and fraud. Still, ne’er mend, eh?

Before long, the emergency became clear. This was a biggie. Without warning Michel Platini, the head of Uefa, who has at no point challenged Blatter, or offered anything but public support, had turned. Across town in the UEFA hotel, Platini was singing like a FIFA wonk with a suitcase full of borrowed gold. The news arrived in disbelieving gobbets, like the first day of some distant RAF offensive. “People have had enough,” announced Platini, who had coincidentally only that very morning after years of scandal and innuendo decided he too had had enough. Platini a fellow overlord, had looked into Blatter’s eyes “face to face, man to man” and told him to do a bunk. Et tu, Michel. Et tu.

And so at the Hallenstadion, Blatter would face the wider world looking for a flicker of weakness, and a sense of something stirring within. As the parpings of Fifa’s official anthem died away and the flag-waving Uefa-Kinder were packed away into the wings, the moment finally arrived. And suddenly there he was, behind his plinth, world football’s own improbable 78-year-old deep-fried Humpty-Dumpty dictator. Except, this was a slightly different Blatter. Still impossibly wise and regal, gorgeously inauthentic, but this was Sad Blatter, Disappointed Blatter, Wounded Integrity Blatter. “Dear Friends,” he began.“We are all united tonight on the opening of the 65th Fifa conference …” Ah. But are we?

It is hard, even after all these years, to get a handle on Blatter. There is a theory that, while he may be the dictatorial leader of a furiously corrupt sporting fiefdom, he is himself not that way inclined. Blatter isn’t in it for the money (of which he has vast amounts nonetheless). He’s in it for the kicks, the power, the oddly sensual cultish devotion. Hence his ability to stay clean by proxy, the lack of trail to his door. The FBI case will test this to the full. But here anyway, Blatter did manage to appear disappointed, humbled, saddened by the revelation – who knew! – of apparently vast corruption within the organisation he has moulded to his own image over the last 30 years.

“Dear friends … the events of yesterday … a long shadow over football,” Blatter went on, stressing several times that it was a “tiny minority” on the take. And this is certainly an interesting point of view. Not least when you consider the top table at last year’s Fifa congress, from which two of his own lieutenants were absent from the Hallenstadion, in police custody while Julio “Don Julio” Grondona, the most intimately connected with the dirty TV and marketing deals and a right-hand man in the Argentinian military junta of the late 1970s, has since died.

If this really is a minority, it’s hiding within plain sight of the president. What happens now will be fascinating. The suspicion that Blatter has this in hand, that a little purge now and then is no bad thing, has receded. This is a proper fight. Although quite what football might end up with remains to be seen.