They call Afghanistan the graveyard of empires, but history might judge Qatar to have been Sepp Blatter’s fatal act of expansion.
In awarding the 2022 World Cup tournament to the tiny desert kingdom, his FIFA might be argued finally to have strategically overreached itself. For those more comfortable with conspiracies than complexities, that picture of Blatter holding the open envelope to reveal the word “QATAR” will be forever read as a come-and-get-me plea to the US authorities, the US having been among the disappointed World Cup bidders.
Was that when it went ineluctably tits up, if you will forgive the reliance on one of Edward Gibbon’s stock phrases? It is certainly pretty to think so — which is to say, miles too glib. However, one thing on which all might agree on is how astonishingly quickly empires can fall when they do.
By way of a consolation sop to Blatter’s vanity, let us stick the outgoing FIFA president on a par with the Ming Dynasty, which ruled for 276 years and collapsed in barely a decade.
As someone who physically resembled the man behind the curtain even when he was the great and powerful Oz, Sepp Blatter did not appear unrecognizably different as he delivered his surprise resignation speech on Tuesday evening last week. And in one sense, nor did the house he ran for 17 years and helped shape for four decades. The ultimate machine politician might be gone, but the machine remains, and investigating it will seem like a picnic compared with reforming it.
Nevertheless, it already feels as if something about FIFA has changed irrevocably with his departure, just as something about Rupert Murdoch’s empire changed forever when the latter was forced to close the News of the World. What had so long felt like an unassailable hierarchy suddenly no longer did, and for all that other imperial business was got on with as usual, there was an immediate and enduring sense that the high water mark of a certain culture had passed. A spell had been broken.
One minute Rupert was the most feared power in the land, who could stalk into Downing Street via a haunted mirror whenever he wanted, and then, well, he was not. It just was not the same.
And so with FIFA. Not long ago, it was riding so high that it appeared able to do anything: appropriate any funds, dictate any terms, override any country’s constitution, ignore any criticism. Only on Saturday last week I was waffling on about how Blatter’s victory against the backdrop of the FBI probe recalled former US president Richard Nixon’s landslide re-election during the middle of the Watergate investigation, and speculated whether he would make it the full two years that the former US president managed before he was forced to resign. The morning after victory, Blatter declined any attempt at striking a note of humility, telling a TV interviewer: “I forgive everyone, but I do not forget.”
Four days later, he was on the way out (leaving himself a few months to “not forget” a few enemies, one imagines — even as reports suggest that FBI investigators are hoping some of his enemies will decide it is in their interests not to forget him). The vast structures of FIFA are still systemically corrupted, but the authorities are pursuing it as never before. If anyone goes to see United Passions — the preposterous vanity movie Blatter commissioned about his works — when it gets its US release this week, they will do so wearing the grins usually reserved for those posing with the tacky statuary in a very recently deposed dictator’s palace.
Of course, it was not really that sudden — and the FBI criminal probe, while being the most devastating, was not the only malfunction of FIFA’s system. Whichever way you shake it, something odd was happening by the time of the Confederations Cup in Brazil two years ago, as mass public protests against the government began explicitly linking the language of Brazil’s bid for the following year’s World Cup — “FIFA standard” — to the comparatively hopeless state of the country’s public services.
I was only being half-facetious when I described this as FIFA’s Arab Spring, which saw even members of his fabled “football family” such as Romario turning on a governing body they declared parasitic. Blatter did not explicitly cast the dissenters as insurgents, but it was difficult to avoid the sense that his once-unquestioned imperium was failing to smooth all in its path.
“When we say football connects people, it connected people in the stadium. Perhaps unfortunately it also connected people in the street,” blathered Blatter of these protests.
He may find instead the social media network did that — the same new technology that has made consent harder to manufacture than once it was. That same network does not permit, for instance, the deaths of hundreds upon hundreds of nameless migrants building Qatar infrastructure to be a missable footnote, as once they would have been.
FIFA’s presentational challenges have metamorphosed. By way of one example, these days a single graphic comparing Qatar 2022 construction deaths to those incurred for other mega-events is not simply shared, but reproduced around the world, used to attack sponsors and taken up by the US’ hottest comedy show. Different hierarchies are at work and Sepp Blatter’s regime lacked a strategy for dealing with them.
Of course, there is sadness to his demise. For instance, it is too early to say for sure, but it is possible we will now have to rule out his receipt of the longed-for Nobel for bringing peace to the Middle East via the medium of soccer.
However, a spell has been broken and it is impossible not to take heart that things are just not the same.
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