May 30 – He may still be suspended over that infamous CHF 2 million “disloyal payment” to Michel Platini but that hasn’t stopped former FIFA president Sepp Blatter from speaking his mind when it comes to the injustices he feels he has suffered.
Now 82, Blatter, who remains the subject of criminal investigation in Switzerland even though he denies any wrongdoing, is bound to generate considerable media interest when, as seems likely, he takes up an offer by Vladimir Putin to attend next month’s World Cup in Russia.
With precision timing so close to the tournament, Blatter’s eagerly anticipated new book entitled My Verite (my truth) covers a wide range of topics during his 40 years at FIFA including targeting, among others, his successor Gianni Infantino.
Blatter specifically takes at Infantino for getting rid of the ethics mechanism which Blatter claims was doing its job in terms of weeding out corruption – even if he ended up being one of the culprits. In particular he criticises the purging of FIFA’s senior governance officials two years ago, not least Cornel Borbely and Hans-Joachim Eckert, who chaired the investigatory and adjudicatory chambers of FIFA’s Ethics Committee respectively, and chief governance guru Miguel Maduro.
Infantino has long argued, altogether unconvincingly, that they had simply come to the end of their mandates and that FIFA’s ethics apparatus needed a different geographic and gender spread.
But Blatter writes in his book: “I do not understand why Gianni Infantino has wiped out everything that I developed for FIFA.
“He has changed 61 people in the organisation, all the senior and junior management have been swept away. A considerable savoir-faire has been lost and cannot be replaced by famous football players, even if they are named Marco Van Basten or Diego Maradona. We will see what will happen in the election or re-election of the president in 2019 . . . what I do know is that matters cannot continue as they are or it all risks ending badly.”
Blatter is also adamant that Michel Platini, his former trusted adviser turned adversary, did change his vote for the 2022 World Cup even though the Frenchman has long insisted he always supported Qatar and was under no political pressure.
Blatter says Platini told him, 24 hours after a meeting luncheon with then French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Qatar’s Emir-Apparent, that he was switching his vote from the US.
The book also quotes Blatter as saying he was not vengeful against FIFA but nevertheless pulled no punches.
“I am not angry with FIFA the institution but with its present directors: people who used to call to ask me for this or that but who then did absolutely nothing to defend me.”
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