Just last week, as he was rolling to re-election to a fifth term as president of world soccer's governing body, Sepp Blatter said: "Why would I step down? That would mean I recognize that I did wrong."
On Tuesday Blatter stepped down, leaving FIFA in a crisis of leadership and purpose at a critical moment in its history.
After U.S. authorities announced a sweeping indictment last week alleging corruption at the highest levels of FIFA House in Zurich, Attorney General Loretta Lynch pointedly refused to comment when asked about Blatter. She and other federal prosecutors said the investigation was still in its early stages.
A source familiar with the investigation confirmed to NBC News that the FBI is looking into possible wrongdoing specifically by Blatter. While he isn't named in the indictment, it makes it clear that the Justice Department holds the president of FIFA "responsible for the implementation of [its] decisions."
Under that cloud, Blatter will remain in charge of FIFA for as long as 10 more months while it organizes a new presidential election, which it said could be held as late as March 2016.
In the meantime, FIFA faces a mountain of challenges with a lame-duck president whose own credibility is deeply doubted and a roster of replacement leaders who must learn quickly on the job.
Because of the delay, the job of rebuilding and rehabilitating FIFA will be enormously complicated. As many as a half-dozen serious contenders to succeed Blatter could emerge in the next months, and important decisions will have to be made with an eye toward what the next president might want to do or change.
Those decisions must satisfy a number of FIFA's stakeholders, who frequently don't see eye to eye.
The soccer world is divided very broadly into two camps: One comprises the traditional soccer powers of Europe and South America, most of whom have demanded Blatter's ouster for years. The other encompasses the smaller soccer nations in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the Caribbean, which flourished under Blatter and voted heavily to keep him as president last week.
The next president faces the conundrum of figuring out how to balance the demands of the smaller nations, which share equally in voting power and revenue distribution, with the yearning of most of the traditional European and South American powers — which have won all 20 World Cups — to take back some of the authority they lost under Blatter's presidency.
- Blogger Comment
- Facebook Comment
Subscribe to:
Post Comments
(
Atom
)
0 komentar:
Post a Comment