Post by staggerstag on Jun 19, 2017 8:49:53 GMT
I saw this this morning and had a good old chuckle over my toast and tea. In the summer of 2016 British journalist David Conn was granted an interview with ex-FIFA President Sepp Blatter. It makes for an interesting if slightly bewildering read and Blatter comes out of it sounding like a deluded man who despite everything that had happened still believed he was master of world football even though world football was no longer subject to his orders, rulings, call them what you want...
"He arrived a little late.
He didn’t look too great. Shrunken, almost frail. He had let the shaving go, and his beard was white and thin. He was wearing a waistcoat over a blue-and-white striped shirt, on which you could just see his initials: JSB. He looked his age, 80."
"I asked him if it was true that he wanted a Nobel peace prize, and he replied with all due modesty that it would not be for him personally, but for Fifa, for the game: 'We had meetings with the Nobel prize organisation. I was there, and what I was asking, really asking, was for the Nobel prize: for football, not for a man. It is the movement, for Fifa.'”
"I asked him how he had felt when he pulled the name Qatar out of the envelope.
'Look at the picture,' he replied, and grimaced. 'I haven’t had a very smiling face.'" (Really?)
"Throughout the conversation, Blatter maintained he did not know that the people around that executive committee table, whose support he nurtured for so many years, were corrupt. He said that after the arrests he had thought he had been 'wrong to trust people' although he admitted that he was not surprised about some of them."
"He is not impressed with whistleblowers in general, even criticising Yuliya Stepanov, who had recently exposed the Russian state doping of athletes, the great scandal breaking over athletics. 'She wants to go to the Olympics, and now everybody says it is a shame she can’t go because she is a whistleblower. Before long whistleblowers will be allowed to go to everything,' he sneered. “Because if you are a whistleblower, it’s not correct as well.”
"Of himself, he believed that the authorities would find nothing to incriminate him. He was still indignant that he had lost the position he worked so hard for, over the 2m Swiss francs payment to Platini."
He had to be off, and he called for the bill. It is always an awkward predicament, the bill when you meet for lunch as a journalist.
I had decided in advance that I would insist on paying – even at these prices, at Fifa’s Sonnenberg restaurant .
“'No,’ Blatter insisted, he had already paid. 'It’s done.'
I said really I ought to pay, as he was giving me his time.
'No, no, not in my restaurant,' he said, and then, through gritted teeth: 'Well, it’s not mine, but I am still the boss here.'"
Lunch with Blatter at the Hitzigweg restaurant, Zurich.