Sepp Blatter

Based on Wikipedia: Sepp Blatter

In the summer of 2015, a Swiss businessman named Sepp Blatter stood at a podium in Zurich and did something extraordinary: he resigned from the most powerful position in sports just four days after being re-elected to it. The man who had ruled world football for seventeen years, who had overseen billions of dollars flowing through the game, who had handed the World Cup to Qatar despite widespread accusations of corruption—this man was finally finished.

But how did he get there in the first place?

The Rise of a Football Bureaucrat

Joseph Blatter was born in 1936 in Visp, a small town nestled in the Swiss canton of Valais. He started life with the given name Josef, though he would later adopt the more informal "Sepp"—a common Swiss-German nickname. After studying business and economics at the University of Lausanne, he embarked on what seemed like a perfectly respectable career in public relations and sports administration.

His early jobs give little hint of the controversy to come. He worked as head of public relations for his home canton's tourist board. He served as general secretary of the Swiss Ice Hockey Federation. He worked for Longines, the watchmaker, handling sports timing and relations—a role that put him at the heart of the 1972 Munich and 1976 Montreal Olympic Games.

Then, in 1975, Blatter joined the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, better known as FIFA—the organization that governs world football and, crucially, decides where the World Cup gets played. He started as technical director. Within six years, he had risen to general secretary, the second-most powerful position in the organization.

He would spend seventeen years in that role, learning every lever of power, every voting bloc, every way to build alliances across six continents. When the time came to reach for the presidency itself, Blatter was ready.

Building an Empire

In 1998, Blatter defeated UEFA President Lennart Johansson to become the eighth president of FIFA. The election was controversial from the start, with rumors swirling about backroom deals and suspicious payments. But Blatter had learned from his predecessor, the Brazilian João Havelange, who had run FIFA since 1974.

The strategy was elegant in its simplicity: expand the game.

Under Havelange and then Blatter, FIFA dramatically increased the number of teams participating in World Cups and other tournaments. This wasn't just about growing the sport—it was about growing political power. Every new spot for an African or Asian team meant another national federation that owed its presence on the world stage to FIFA's leadership. Every federation got one vote in FIFA elections, regardless of size. Tiny island nations counted the same as football powerhouses like Germany or Brazil.

Blatter cultivated these smaller federations relentlessly. He visited countries that European football officials had never bothered with. He promised development money. He expanded tournaments. And when election time came around, he reaped the rewards.

He was re-elected in 2002, despite direct accusations of bribery from Farra Ado, the vice-president of the Confederation of African Football, who claimed he'd been offered one hundred thousand dollars to vote for Blatter in the 1998 election.

He was re-elected unopposed in 2007, even though only sixty-six of two hundred and seven FIFA member federations had bothered to nominate him.

He was re-elected in 2011 after his only opponent, Mohammed bin Hammam of Qatar, withdrew amid bribery allegations—allegations that notably did not extend to Blatter himself, despite bin Hammam claiming that Blatter had known about the payments.

And he was re-elected in 2015, just days before everything collapsed.

The World Cup Goes to Qatar

The most controversial moment of Blatter's reign—and that's saying something—came in December 2010, when FIFA announced that Qatar would host the 2022 World Cup.

This tiny Persian Gulf nation, with a population smaller than Houston's and summer temperatures regularly exceeding forty degrees Celsius, had beaten bids from the United States, Australia, Japan, and South Korea. The decision made no sense from a footballing perspective. Qatar had no football tradition to speak of. It had no stadiums capable of hosting World Cup matches. Its climate would require either moving the tournament to winter—disrupting football leagues around the world—or building air-conditioned stadiums at extraordinary expense.

What Qatar did have was money. Extraordinary, seemingly limitless wealth from natural gas reserves. And in the years that followed, investigation after investigation would raise questions about how that wealth had influenced FIFA's decision.

The bid process itself was later revealed to be riddled with corruption. Reports suggested that senior FIFA officials had received payments from parties connected to various bidding nations. The Council of Europe published findings indicating it would be "difficult to imagine" that Blatter had been unaware of significant sums paid to unnamed FIFA officials in connection with World Cup television rights contracts.

When journalists pressed Blatter about potential human rights issues—Qatar criminalized homosexuality—he responded with what can only be described as spectacular tone-deafness. Gay fans, he suggested, "should refrain from any sexual activities" while attending the tournament. The comment drew immediate condemnation from human rights organizations and LGBTQ advocacy groups.

A Pattern of Controversy

The Qatar decision wasn't an aberration. It was the culmination of a pattern that had defined Blatter's entire tenure.

There were the endless allegations of financial mismanagement. His own deputy, Michel Zen-Ruffinen, compiled a thirty-page dossier alleging that the collapse of FIFA's marketing partner, International Sport and Leisure, had cost the organization up to one hundred million dollars on Blatter's watch. Swiss authorities investigated and cleared Blatter, but the questions never went away.

There were the controversial statements that seemed designed to alienate as many people as possible. In 2004, asked how to increase the popularity of women's football, Blatter suggested female players wear "more feminine clothes like they do in volleyball"—tighter shorts, specifically—because "female players are pretty." The backlash was immediate and fierce.

When the English defender John Terry was caught having an affair with a teammate's girlfriend, Blatter claimed that Latin American countries would applaud such behavior. When incidents of racial abuse occurred on the pitch, he suggested they could be resolved with a simple handshake afterward.

At the 2014 World Cup, during what was meant to be a one-minute silence honoring Nelson Mandela, who had died the previous day, Blatter interrupted the tribute after just eleven seconds. Michael van Praag, chairman of the Royal Dutch Football Association, called his behavior "preposterous."

By this point, public appearances had become hazardous for Blatter. He was heckled at the 2002 World Cup in Seoul. He was heckled at the 2005 Confederations Cup in Frankfurt. He was heckled in his own hometown of Visp in 2011. He was heckled at the 2012 Women's Olympic Football Final. At the 2014 World Cup, organizers simply decided not to have any speeches, presumably to spare everyone the embarrassment.

Technology and the Beautiful Game

One of the stranger battles of Blatter's reign concerned goal-line technology—the use of cameras or sensors to determine whether the ball had crossed the line for a goal.

Blatter opposed it for years. He argued that human error was part of football's charm, that the same rules should apply at every level of the game from village pitches to World Cup finals, that technology would slow things down and change the fundamental nature of the sport.

Then came June 27, 2010. England versus Germany in the World Cup round of sixteen. Frank Lampard struck a shot that hit the crossbar, bounced down clearly over the goal line, and came back out. The referee waved play on. No goal.

Germany won four to one. England was eliminated. And the footage of that ball crossing the line, reviewed endlessly on television, made Blatter's position untenable.

Two days later, he apologized publicly to the English and Mexican football federations—Mexico had also been victimized by a blown call—and announced that FIFA would reconsider its stance on goal-line technology. "It would be a nonsense not to re-open the file," he admitted.

The reversal illustrated something important about Blatter: he could be moved, but only by overwhelming pressure. And by 2015, that pressure had become impossible to resist.

The Fall

On May 27, 2015, Swiss police raided the Baur au Lac hotel in Zurich, arresting seven FIFA officials on corruption charges brought by the United States Department of Justice. The indictments alleged decades of bribery, money laundering, and racketeering totaling over one hundred fifty million dollars. It was the most significant corruption case in sports history.

Two days later, despite the chaos swirling around him, Blatter stood for re-election to a fifth term. His opponent, Prince Ali bin Hussein of Jordan, failed to secure enough votes and withdrew. Blatter was declared the winner.

He had survived again. Or so it seemed.

Four days later, Blatter called a surprise press conference. "My mandate does not appear to be supported by everybody," he said, with what might have been the understatement of the century. He announced he would remain in office only until an extraordinary congress could elect his successor.

The end came faster than anyone expected. In September, the Swiss Attorney General's office announced criminal proceedings against Blatter for "criminal mismanagement and misappropriation." In October, he was suspended from all FIFA activities pending investigation. In December, FIFA's Ethics Committee banned him from the sport for eight years.

An appeals committee later reduced the ban to six years. Then, in 2021, he received a second six-year ban and a fine of one million Swiss francs—roughly the same amount in U.S. dollars—after investigators uncovered massive bonus payments to top FIFA officials.

The combined bans mean Blatter cannot participate in any FIFA activities until 2027, when he will be ninety-one years old.

The Legacy

How should we understand Sepp Blatter's seventeen years atop world football?

On one hand, the numbers are staggering. Under his leadership, FIFA's revenues exploded. The World Cup became the most-watched sporting event on Earth, generating billions in television rights and sponsorships. Football genuinely became more global, with serious investment in developing nations that had previously been afterthoughts.

On the other hand, the corruption was also staggering. The organization Blatter led became synonymous with bribery and backroom deals. The Qatar World Cup will forever carry an asterisk, both for the circumstances of its awarding and for the reported deaths of thousands of migrant workers who built its stadiums. The institution of global football governance was thoroughly discredited on his watch.

Perhaps most tellingly, Blatter's downfall came not from within football but from American prosecutors applying anti-racketeering laws originally designed to fight the Mafia. FIFA had become so insular, so resistant to reform, that it took the threat of extradition to American prisons to finally crack it open.

Blatter himself has never admitted wrongdoing. In statements after his bans, he has maintained that he acted properly and that the investigations were politically motivated. He remains in Switzerland, unable to participate in the sport he once controlled absolutely.

His successor, Gianni Infantino, has promised reforms and greater transparency. The 2026 World Cup will be held in the United States, Canada, and Mexico—a return to football's heartlands after the Qatar experiment. Whether FIFA has truly changed, or merely learned to hide its workings more effectively, remains to be seen.

But one thing is certain: the era of Sepp Blatter, for better and for worse, shaped world football in ways that will be felt for decades. The expansion of the game to new continents, the explosion of money at its highest levels, the normalization of corruption at its core—all of this is his legacy. He built an empire, and in the end, it consumed him.