Joseph “Sepp” Blatter, the president of international soccer’s governing body since 1998, on Tuesday announced his resignation at a press conference from FIFA headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland. The resignation, Blatter said, will give FIFA the opportunity to undertake serious reforms, though questions about how and whether it can do that remain.
Blatter’s decision to step down will take effect once FIFA holds a new election at an “extraordinary congress,” which under FIFA regulations cannot take place for at least four months. His announcement comes amid a week of controversy for FIFA, after Swiss authorities, in cooperation with the U.S. government, arrested seven international soccer officials in Zurich on U.S. corruption charges. In total, the U.S. indicted 14 people — nine soccer officials and five sports marketing executives — in connection with alleged corruption. The Swiss are also conducting their own investigation into potential corruption around the awarding of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar, respectively.
The problems escalated this week after the New York Times reported Monday that Blatter’s second-in-command, FIFA secretary general Jerome Valcke, may have been tied to one of the payments involved in the American corruption case. According to ABC News, Blatter himself was also the subject of an FBI investigation. Both the U.S. and the Swiss are continuing their investigations, and it is possible they will unearth even more.
Blatter’s critics have repeatedly called for his resignation since news of the allegations and arrests broke.
“He has to step down. Seventeen years at the helm, and corruption has increased to the point where two national authorities are bringing charges. And he says he’ll stand again? It’s untenable,” Sharan Burrow, the general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, told ThinkProgress last week, before Blatter scored an overwhelming victory to a fifth term as FIFA president on Friday.
ITUC has emerged in recent years as one of FIFA and Blatter’s fiercest critics over its selection of Qatar as the 2022 World Cup host and the rampant worker deaths that will occur there in the build-up to the event. With Blatter in charge, Burrow argued, FIFA simply couldn’t undertake the types of “major reforms” it needs.
Now, Blatter has done exactly that, and in doing so, has theoretically opened the door to reform.
Blatter said his resignation would allow FIFA to undertake the “profound restructuring” it needs. Domonic Scala, the chairman of FIFA’s audit and compliance committee, spoke after Blatter and said also that the coming resignation “created the opportunity for FIFA to go farther than it has before to fundamentally change the way FIFA is structured.” He and Blatter both spoke of several proposed governance reforms, including transparency in executive pay, increased ethics checks, a revamping of the executive committee, and term limits for top FIFA officials.
Blatter’s looming resignation creates one fundamental question for the organization he has overseen for 17 years: is FIFA capable of reforming itself?
FIFA members, as the New York Times noted, have previously rejected the types of reforms Blatter and Scala spoke of Tuesday, and the World Cup and other international events remain lucrative in a way that almost invite corruption into the process. FIFA’s small but powerful executive committee, its voting and bidding process, and its structure — a collection of national federations and regional confederations, many of which believe that “our business is our business,” in the words of Jack Warner, one of the officials indicted in the U.S. investigation — pose challenges to reform as well. Whether the ongoing investigations and Blatter’s sudden change of course will create a greater appetite for governance reforms — not just at the FIFA level but in the confederations that comprise it — remains to be seen.
The most pertinent question might be what happens in Qatar. Last week, Burrow called for an “immediate re-run of the votes” for the 2022 World Cup in the wake of the corruption allegations. The Qatari bid has long been the subject of criticism amid corruption allegations and major human rights concerns, from the country’s treatment of LGBT people to working conditions that could claim the lives of an estimated 4,000 workers before the World Cup there even kicks off.
Blatter, however, remained a consistent defender of the Qatari bid despite a growing amount of a criticism, but his resignation has led to speculation about its future. It may be too late to reverse course in Russia, another bid that invited corruption claims and international criticism, but could a changing of the guard and the pressure of the ongoing Swiss investigation cause FIFA to explore a change in Qatar, even though such a move over human rights issues would be unprecedented in its history?
And then there are questions about whether Blatter’s resignation could have a lasting impact on larger, longer-term effects of its biggest events. Around both past and future World Cups, the FIFA Way has demanded tax breaks for itself and sponsors and the ability to rewrite or ignore domestic laws. It has ignored human rights violations like those in Qatar and perpetuated existing problems by demanding resources for stadiums instead of for necessary public works projects, as protests in Brazil brought to the forefront of that tournament.
Blatter has found himself at the center of many of these controversies (not to mention others) and his priority to expand the World Cup to new places — Asia, Africa, the Middle East — while perhaps noble in intent, has also made many of those problems worse, as the labor problems in Qatar and the white elephant stadiums dotting Japan, South Korea, and South Africa attest. FIFA has already begun moving toward adding a human rights clause to its bidding process. Will a reform-minded FIFA change course on the other issues too, hosting World Cups in places that are already capable or creating the type of sustainable event that more countries can capably host?
“FIFA has clearly lost any sense of moral compass,” Burrow said last week. “And so people will continue to question their legitimacy.”
She was speaking of a FIFA with Blatter at the helm, and perhaps his resignation is the first step to fixing it. But for now, questions remain about whether the organization’s biggest problems are creations of Blatter’s FIFA or FIFA itself, and whether the organization that will have a new president for the first time in nearly two decades is capable of actually addressing them.
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