FIFA’s top job: Less gravy train, more treadmill

For most of his 17 years at the helm of FIFA, Sepp Blatter travelled the world to be feted like a head of state, with VIP treatment for his private jet, police escorts to whisk his limousine to the best hotel in town, and gala banquets in his honour. Whoever is elected to succeed him as FIFA president in Zurich tomorrow will inherit a very different organisation and a very different job, where crisis management skills are more important than delivering grandiose speeches to fawning audiences. And, far from providing a platform to dispense largesse in return for loyalty, the position should come with tougher demands and closer scrutiny, thanks to a set of institutional reforms set to be passed just before the next president is chosen.Had it not been for the sensational arrests of FIFA officials on suspicion of corruption in Zurich last May at the behest of the US Department of Justice (DOJ), Blatter would most likely have carried on in the same fashion until 2019. Then, either Frenchman Michael Platini or Cayman Islander Jeffrey Webb, previously the heads of the European and North American soccer federations, UEFA and CONCACAF, would most likely have succeeded him in a smooth, co-ordinated transition. And Blatter would probably have been named honorary FIFA president, and indulged with a platform at big events. But Webb, now under house arrest in the United States, is among the 41 individuals and entities that have been indicted by the DOJ on corruption or fraud charges. And Platini and Blatter have been banned from the game for eight years by FIFA’s own Ethics Committee, caught up in the same whirlwind of legal and media scrutiny. Itself under investigation from the DOJ and Swiss authorities, FIFA as an organisation badly needs to rebuild its reputation, whichever of the five candidates becomes president. “Everyone recognises this is the last chance to get it right,” said one of the candidates, Jordan’s Prince Ali bin al-Hussein. “We don’t want a situation where, two years down the line, more scandals come out.” Top of the agenda will be implementing the reform package. The fact that it will be passed before the election largely deprives the new president of the chance to shape the organisation in his own image, while leaving him to manage a complex and untested new set of structures. Blatter’s power was admittedly always far bigger than his formal constitutional role; the huge commercial success of the World Cup ensured a steady growth in revenue throughout his tenure and meant he could keep his support base happy by distributing development grants to federations around the world. But the new system of oversights, with a full independent Audit and Compliance Committee and a revamped Finance Committee made up of members with genuine qualifications, should limit the scope for what Blatter’s critics labelled a “client system”.Professor Alan Tomlinson of the University of Brighton in Britain, author of “FIFA - The Men, The Myths and The Money” and a long-time critic of FIFA, praised what he called “a quite radical set of principles and structural reformations”. For the president, Tomlinson feels, that means implementing, with FIFA’s own staff, none of whom have been indicted, a strategy reached after debate in the FIFA Council and the committees. “It all sounds very boring, but it is how you could do it,” he says. Let’s wait and watch.