Do you believe Sepp Blatter as another FIFA term looms?

I believe Sepp Blatter will run for another term as FIFA president.

That’s about all I believe when it comes to the word of Sepp Blatter.

It’s impossible to be even vaguely enthused by Blatter’s strongest indication yet that the USA would be an ideal venue for the 2026 World Cup, since it’s just the latest statement in the long-running plate-spinning act that is Blatter’s FIFA career — a career that has been defined less by delivering on his promises and more by endlessly deferring the moment of reckoning for his failure to do so.

Blatter was in Manchester on Monday for the latest installment — offering the suggestion that a “North American” bid would fit the natural cycle of rotations of World Cups, while not forgetting to throw some vague encouragement England’s way. He also liberally sprinkled the ideals of “fair play” and of course the “FIFA family” — a family whose hair he likes to ruffle indulgently from the patriarchal chair, while fondly instructing them in the ways of the world.

Evidently he’s not ready to give up the chair just yet. Blatter also used Monday to announce, of course in a totally unrelated statement, that he intends to run for another term as FIFA president. Sample quotes from the interview announcing that include, “My mission is not finished,” and the relating of an apparent plea from FIFA delegates at their recent congress to “please, go on — please be our president in the future.”

The point is, Blatter running again, even after running the last time with the claim that his current stint would be his last, shouldn’t be the story. Blatter’s pater familias (Blatter familias?) bluster could be faintly comical and eyeroll-inducing, were FIFA a broadly functional family whose head happened to be prone to occasional bouts of say, sexism, or possessing a slightly unworldly confidence in the processes of his colleagues.

Blatter has been FIFA president since 1998 and is set to serve for a fifth term.

In that scenario, Blatter would be able to make a statement like this and have it received at face value:

“It’s not important who is the president of FIFA. If England wants to have again a competition then they bid — whoever is the president of FIFA. And they should listen a bit about what is called fair play.”

England, under FA chairman Greg Dyke, have already said they won’t bid while Blatter is the president, and U.S. Soccer, under Sunil Gulati, have been cautious about committing to any further bid process without a confirmed change in the process that saw them lose out surprisingly to Qatar for 2022 (the voting for which reportedly saw Blatter vote for the USA, a detail that became apparent well after the fact, when the details of the Qatar bid began to be subjected to scrutiny).

You can’t blame either party. Blatter’s FIFA have plundered across borders, in soccer’s age of globalization, like a multinational company following the neoliberal model, and with a similar level of accountability. Tax breaks, suspension of worker rights, short-term infrastructure/long-term white elephants, national debt legacies — check.

Some of these are demanded, some are just the cultural and economic logic of FIFA expecting no impediments to their operations. Blatter and FIFA didn’t directly demand the 34 UPP “police pacification” units deployed to the favelas at the Brazil World Cup for example, but without them, Blatter wouldn’t have offered breezy rhetorical questions such as, “Where is all this social unrest?” when speaking in a sanitized Rio during the tournament.

And Blatter also has another rhetorical weapon that would be the envy of any multinational company or bank trying to move their presence in and out of territories with minimum friction: his ability to vaguely invoke positivity and lean on the romantic myths of the sport to ensure there is always enough smoke in front of some very expensive mirrors, to keep FIFA moving — sorry — rotating.

– Marcotti: Blatter needs to be challenged
– Report: Blatter backs trial of in-game television referral system
– Report: FIFA VP Webb says football’s image has been tarnished

Blatter invoked rotation on Monday in his apparent encouragement of a US 2026 bid (“If you look at the rotation of the World Cup, then it should go back to Africa or go to the Americas”). Funnily enough, he was responsible for ending rotation as a FIFA policy, supposedly as of 2018, as per a FIFA briefing in October 2007 (“The rotation principle has served its purpose,” Blatter claimed at that time). But when it comes to dangling a carrot, it’s apparently still a useful word to deploy strategically.

Not that the once-bitten Americans or English are convinced just yet. The wounds of the 2018 and 2022 debacles have not healed. Nor are they likely to soon. In Blatter’s world, when outrage occurs about due process, it’s dismissed or deferred to interminable inquiries whose results never seem to arrive in any kind of actionable timeframe — that’s of course assuming that the inquiries themselves are governed by “what is called fair play” (a concept Blatter appears to believe is synonymous with “time heals everything”).

In relation to fair play, you’d think that the arrest, a few days ago, of Canover Watson, the CONCACAF vice president and a member of FIFA’s audit and compliance committee, as part of a Cayman Island’s police probe into corruption, would at least have Blatter on the defensive on Monday, but instead it was business as usual and more grandstanding from the great man as he announced his candidacy.

So now Blatter’s standing as FIFA president again, with UEFA’s Michel Platini confirming that he won’t run against him (incidentally, as someone old enough to see Platini play for the brilliant French team of the early ’80s, for whom he was the creative talisman, there have been fewer more depressing sights than watching a genius on the field become slowly mired in, then help perpetuate, the deathly institutional politics of the world game). That leaves us with the vision of Blatter as the unity/institutional inertia candidate.

“Solidarity is what makes football so interesting,” Blatter claimed on Monday. Which is up there among the best of his triumphantly meaningless platitudes. Yet it’s probably about as meaningful as his apparent support for a U.S. World Cup. Don’t hold your breath.