Sepp Blatter Resigns as FIFA President

A mere four days after winning a fifth consecutive election as FIFA president, Sepp Blatter has resigned. The re-election, while overwhelmingly in his favor, was tainted by a US Justice Department investigation that implicated 14 current and former FIFA executives and made six arrests. Blatter himself was not included in that initial round, but a long rumored history of corruption has followed the Swiss even before these most recent allegations.

What exactly happened between Blatter’s ebullient victory speech Friday and the FIFA press conference Tuesday is anyone’s guess. It could be that the true weight of the allegations against an organization he has been at the head of for the past seventeen years finally sunk in. More likely Blatter’s resignation came with the news that authorities had found evidence claiming to prove that FIFA general secretary Jérôme Valcke was aware of the $10 million payment made to then-CONCACAF president Jack Warner by South African officials. The payment has been characterized by US officials as a bribe.

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While Blatter can and did deny knowledge of the executives’ wrongdoings cited in last week’s probe, it would be a harder case for him to make that he was unfamiliar with what Valcke knew and did. FIFA’s critics long suspected that the rot had reached that high in the organization but lacked the concrete proof to do much about it. Last week’s arrests and Tuesday’s damning evidence might just have been too much for the long-embattled Blatter. It’s doubtful whether his resignation would help his case were he eventually to be implicated in some crime, but at the very least it removes him from the limelight for the time being.

Under normal circumstances the next opportunity for a presidential election would have been next May in the scheduled FIFA meeting in Mexico City. Blatter promised to expedite this process, however, and a new president could be elected as soon as four months from now. It’s unclear exactly who would stand to be elected in Blatter’s place, though Jordanian Prince Ali bin Hussein is certainly the favorite considering he was the sole other candidate in last week’s election. There will no doubt be several others in the coming weeks and months who think they are the best qualified to right FIFA’s severely listing ship.

Regardless of Blatter’s reasoning, his resignation is just another tremor in the seismic shift FIFA have undergone in the last week. The United States and Switzerland seem determined to reform the nonprofit governing body from the outside in. Though the voting members of the organization were clearly content with Blatter’s term in office – they voted him back in by a count of 133 out of 209 members – many outside of international football’s governing structure have been calling for reform for years. The arrests and Blatter’s resignation might finally give the opposition a chance to fix the world’s most popular sport.

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