FIFA’s Own Goal – Can Sepp Blatter Trust His Team?

“Your father did business with Hyman Roth, he respected Hyman Roth...

But he never trusted Hyman Roth!”

            --Frankie Pentangeli, to Michael Corleone, “The Godfather: Part II (1974)

Sepp Blatter is a dead man.

No, not literally – at least not today. But with the May 27 indictments of senior members of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association exposing as criminal the sordid autocracy that is the sport’s global governing body, the clock is ticking on Blatter’s survival.

Inside FIFA’s gold-plated bubble, Blatter remained defiant as he was elected on May 29 to his fifth term as president – although his failure on the first ballot to obtain the required margin sent the clear signal that rebellion is on the horizon as members no longer fear his ability to punish dissension in the ranks.

There is a separate essay to be written on the law enforcement efforts mobilized to take down Blatter’s minions. Consider briefly:

• The combined Swiss and American forces, spanning the Atlantic and teaming up like Inspector Javert and the Untouchables of Eliot Ness.

• The professional frisson for the cops, at simultaneously staging a raid on the FIFA offices for computers and documents, freezing banks accounts, and rousting their targets for early-morning “perp walks” behind screens of bed-sheets out of their annual convocation at Zurich’s luxurious Hotel Baur Au Lac.

• More darkly, there may be debates on the law enforcement policies brought to bear, when comparing the FIFA adventure, which newly-installed American Attorney General Loretta Lynch carried out because she could, with the plea bargains the prior week over index-fixing by the five large banks, including fines exceeding $ 5 billion but no personal arrests, asset freezes or losses of bank licenses or permits – steps not taken because politically she could not.

But back to Blatter and his continued arrogant denial, and the conclusion that he is fatally exposed, as a pathetic little wizard behind his luxury curtain.

That’s because of the exposed fragility of Blatter’s FIFA feifdom – however financially robust its past history – now that the trust factor is under challenge, with those whose lavish contributions he has smelted over the years to supply the golden eggs.

Elsewhere, valuable businesses are built with very little trust involved – think of local utilities like the phone or cable companies, where little is expected and little received, but where for want of choice it doesn’t matter.

Trust does not matter either, at the level of those whose loyalty can be bought with local favors and bags of cash – like the small-country devotees still singing Blatter’s praises and returning him to office – and whose fawning will quickly dry to dust, with any turn of the spigot on the pipelines of cash. Nor is it the views of the fans and the ticket-buyers – they will continue to be indifferent to football’s administrative structures, so long as the games go on.

The amount of trust does not have to be huge either – Blatter has long been viewed as operating in the ethical shadows. But where commercial choices are available and real money changes hands, loss of public repute carries real consequences. It’s the sponsors and the media outlets – Nike and Coca-Cola and the broadcasters – who can ill afford continued association with someone whose ethical fabric is so frayed and torn.

How long did it take, recall, for Donald Sterling to lose the trust that cost him the franchise of the Los Angeles Clippers, once his casual and unedited racism crossed the line of sponsors’ acceptability? Or for Lance Armstrong to lose his supporters, when the credibility of his long-standing denial of doping finally crumbled?

Or, at the enterprise level, recall the speed with which the Arthur Andersen accounting firm disintegrated in the winter of 2002, when Enron exposed the fragility of its franchise and the flight of its partners, clients and non-US affiliated firms accelerated from a trickle to a flood.

With guilty pleas already in hand and the certainty of more to come, a delicious game awaits, of “who will turn next?” It’s a nice coincidence that the stable-cleaning now started at FIFA came in the week of the death in a taxi accident of troubled genius mathematician John Nash, whose breakthrough work on the “prisoners’ dilemma” now provides the strategic framework for the FIFA targets as they sweat out which of their brethren will be next to crack.

As for Blatter’s continued clueless lack of appreciation for the depth of the chance that he will spend his last years in the custody of legal systems beyond the corrupting reach of his bribes and pay-offs, his lawyers would be well-advised to arrange a screening at the Baur Au Lac of the film, “A Beautiful Mind,” taking note of Russell Crowe in the role of John Nash, working out the dynamics of the game theory under which the confessions of his subordinates will soon leave Blatter rolled up like a rug.  

 

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Comments

[Joe Conneely]

Well Jim if there is hard evidence against Sepp I assume we will hear about it quick enough - until then the legal concept of innocent until guilty might be more in order (unlike the comments made by the UK Football Association after recent events).

Also your article makes no reference to the possible international anti-Russia benefits of the timing of the investigation given they host the event next in 2018 (not that I doubt their hands are clean from articles read around the time of prior events as to how they and Qatar handled promoting their bids).

Ultimately for me this is another sad and tragic example of how the reputations of major international organisations really fail when as per the old Latin quote, like fish they rot from the head i.e. poor leadership. And we both know to our regret the example from first hand experience of a global professional organisation that suffered the final sanction in that regard!