Sepp Blatter lives to see another day - actually four more years - but not before severe damage has been inflicted upon the FIFA organization he runs. The two parties vying for the FIFA presidential elections will spin Friday's results. Blatter and his men will say that despite the dawn hotel swoop in Zurich by the US Justice Department just three days earlier that indicted 14 former or current FIFA executives and associates, he still managed to garner almost two-thirds of the vote. The Prince Ali of Jordan corner will say that they can hold their heads high after he collected 73 votes, a third of the total which forced a second tally from which Prince Ali withdrew. By preventing Blatter from securing an outright first-round triumph, Prince Ali did bloody Blatter's nose, and showed that his previous iron grip on the organization has weakened. It is too early to determine to what extent Blatter's rule has been undermined. While he himself was not indicted, the sweeping charges leveled against his associates - racketeering stemming from an alleged widespread culture of bribery and kickbacks, in some cases over decades – should shake any president of any organization, even somebody like Blatter who has seemed impervious, even unreceptive, to all past allegations of FIFA mismanagement and fraud. Blatter is doubtless a survivor and the system helps him. FIFA's one-vote-per-country election, which gives equal weight whether you are China or the Comoros Islands, gave Blatter the victory. Blatter is aided in no small margin by the little folks, retaining the loyalty of the many smaller countries in Africa and Asia, a bloc that is enough to counter his critics in Europe and elsewhere. Blatter has been very generous to Africa in particular, doling out annual grants and bonus payments for World Cups. When voting, they could easily have been concerned that a new administration wouldn't be so generous with them. Some of these countries so badly need the money that many probably don't care if FIFA is indeed corrupt. Which leaves UEFA frustrated. They next meet on June 6 for an extraordinary meeting. Extreme measures, including a boycott of the World Cup, are unlikely. A World Cup without Germany, Italy, England, France, Holland and Spain is not a World Cup. What's happening within FIFA is not so different from the 2002 Olympic Winter Games bid scandal which involved allegations of bribery used to win the rights to host the Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah. In the early days of that scandal, an IOC spokesman said the group could not control all its members, who were spread throughout the world and visited bidding cities on their own, almost the exact same words used by Blatter to exonerate himself: “I can't monitor everybody.” But this is where the similarities end. The allegations resulted in the expulsion of several IOC members, and the adoption of new IOC rules. The IOC has been quiet ever since. That did not happen in FIFA, an autonomous body not affiliated to any government and pretty much not accountable to anybody. But now there is an investigation, including Swiss authorities looking into FIFA's awarding of the 2018 World Cup to Russia and the 2022 tournament to Qatar. They are all just starting. In his victory speech, Blatter portrayed himself as the man who can restore trust in an organization that has been left battered and reeling from years of corruption accusations. But Blatter has been head of FIFA for 17 years, during which allegations of corruption, vote-buying and bribes swirled from day one. If he couldn't fix the problems then, he won't be able to fix them now.
