10 Things Sepp Blatter Wants You To Forget

By Dale Armitage / May 30, 2015

Sepp Blatter has had quite the eventful week. 

The FIFA presidential elections went as planned, with Blatter winning an unprecedented fifth term as the Grand Overseer of the most popular sport on the planet. This was always going to be the case. The fact every other candidate bar Prince Ali of Jordan pulled out of the running with weeks to go indicated the election was a foregone conclusion. 

What Blatter can’t have anticipated was the announcement of the FBI inquiry into systemic FIFA corruption that has made both front and back pages of newspapers the world over.

Then again, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at all, given every man and his dog has known of FIFA’s corrupt ways since time immemorial. So maybe it’s the scale of the scandal that has really raised eyebrows, or perhaps the grandiosity of the announcement, allusive to everything from The Sopranos to A Game Of Thrones. Either way, the spotlight is now fixed firmly on Sepp Blatter and FIFA as the world waits to see how this scandal unfolds.

Chances are Sepp will come out at the other end, unchanged and insistent. He has, after all, made a habit of enduring controversies. So in honour of the biggest of all FIFA scandals to date, let's recount ten other things Sepp Blatter wants you to forget.

10. Previous Corruption Scandals

The general reaction of the world in response to the FBI’s allegations of FIFA corruption is one of shock and disgust. Yet these latest revelations are hardly... well, revelatory, when you take a look at just some of the other corruption scandals that have dogged FIFA in recent years. Here are just a couple of allegations that have occurred during Sepp Blatter’s reign as FIFA president:

- Former FIFA Vice-President Jack Warner was revealed to be the recipient of over £720k in bribes from a company controlled by a former Qatari football official. Jack Warner’s sons also received payments in the hundreds of thousands.

- Paraguayan Nicolas Leoz and Brazilian Ricardo Teixeira both resigned from positions in FIFA after it was revealed they had accepted illegal payments from ISL, a marketing company who secured World Cup rights in the 1990s. Honorary FIFA President Joao Havelange also resigned over similar wrongdoings.

Sepp Blatter’s recent response to the FBI’s latest allegations was to predictably deny all knowledge of any wrongdoings. The effect is a curious kind of catch-22, in that it leaves people wondering if Sepp is either just as corrupt as those officials so far incriminated on corruption charges, or just too incompetent to notice. Either way it doesn’t fill us with confidence over the prospect of a less morally reprehensible footballing future.