Should Sepp Blatter really be prosecuted?

It is ten years since Sepp Blatter finally lost control of football’s world governing body, Fifa. But despite his retirement and advanced years – he has just celebrated his 89th birthday – Blatter has not been able to bow out quietly. In a few days, on Tuesday, Blatter will be in court, in Basel, in his native Switzerland, to hear verdicts on allegations of fraud.

Last month, Blatter spoke to protest his innocence in this case: ‘When you talk about falsehoods, lies and deception, that’s not me… That didn’t exist in my whole life.’ However, this picture of purity is one few football fans would recognise. Because Blatter is a villain of the old school, an inveterate chancer, an oleaginous schemer, a proper wrong ’un. He is like one of those anecdotal continental civil servants of the 1960s who received a salary simply on the basis that their jacket was on the back of a chair. Blatter is a deeply dubious character of the type who would best be played on screen by Peter Sellers or Terry-Thomas.

And to say Blatter’s 17-year stint at the head of Fifa was controversial is like saying Lionel Messi was quite a good football player. The only people in the game who didn’t seem to despise this cartoon villain were the Fifa delegates who were in his thrall – and benefiting from the money swirling around him.

As the fat controller of world football, he presided over a regime that was both incompetent and deeply corrupt. The esteemed football writer Brian Glanville famously wrote: ‘Sepp Blatter has 50 new ideas before breakfast – and 51 of them are bad.’ The only stunt that prankster comedian Simon Brodkin ever pulled that I didn’t find puerile or tedious was when he invaded a Blatter press conference and showered him in fake cash – then after he was arrested protested: ‘Think about the irony of me being the first person to be prosecuted for things that have happened at Fifa headquarters.’ It’s impossible to think of a more unifying hate figure in football: Blatter was loathed by everyone from the terraces to the boardrooms. He’s worse than Millwall – or Leeds.

So how did he get away with it? Blatter built his long-unassailable power base by increasing the participation of numerous smaller countries in world football governance, many of them African, not a few with dubious financial practices. He did little to encourage the grass roots playing of actual football but instead created new delegates with new votes which they then owed to him.

The long-held belief that Blatter’s regime was rotten to the core was finally and spectacularly confirmed by events which saw him suspended from office in 2015. (He remains banned from Fifa for two more years.) It would emerge then that, under his leadership, bribery had been routine with the bidding for the 2010 World Cup alone seeing the amounts involved go as high as $100 million. The two most dodgy Fifa geezers were from Concacaf, the Americas and Caribbean branch. Its president, Jack Warner, and general secretary, Chuck Blazer, admitted receiving illegal payments worth $10 million in return for their bent support of South Africa’s successful bid to host that 2010 tournament. But there were many others complicit – as many as 40 others – in Blatter’s corrupted Fifa.

One has to ask whether all this is worth it for a man who will soon be 90 years old

So that’s the background. Now back to Blatter’s present legal woes. The swizzing Swiss has already won one case on the charge he faces next week. The current legal battle comes after prosecutors appealed the result of that earlier acquittal. The case hangs on the nature of a payment of two million Swiss francs (about £1.7 million) made to Michel Platini – his sometime counterpart at the European governing body, Uefa – and authorised by Blatter. Both men vehemently deny wrongdoing and insist the cash was a legit payment for advisory work carried out by Platini for Fifa rather than a bung. Prosecutors are seeking a sentence of 20 months for both – but it would be suspended.

So, given that there is no prospect of Blatter ever ending up where many would like to see him – behind bars – one has to ask whether all this is worth it for a man who will soon be 90 years old? It’s not like he is a Nazi murderer, after all. Blatter is just an old school villain in a modern world, a pantomime baddie who somehow got his hands on the beautiful game and made it ugly. And this drawn-out criminal case against Blatter feels like the ultimate VAR review, which if anything is a painful distraction.

Fifa hasn’t exactly cleaned up its act in the decade since Blatter finally got his red card. As Martin Samuel pointed out in a recent Sunday Times column: Fifa has, incredibly, become even worse at the big decisions since Blatter quit. Current incumbent Gianni Infantino is apparently seriously contemplating expanding the World Cup to 64 teams, to make it more a money circus than a tournament. And the inexcusable awarding of World Cups 2018 and 2022 to Russia and then Qatar has now been surpassed by giving the 2034 tournament to those famous human rights-loving football fans, the Saudis. Perhaps it’s time to say: you got away with it, Sepp, you rotter. And perhaps it’s this ongoing scandal we should focus on.