SEPP BLATTER has led a charmed existence as the president of FIFA, football’s global governing body, since winning a surprise election victory in 1998 to lead the organisation. In his book “How They Stole the Game”, David Yallop claimed to have uncovered evidence that FIFA delegates had accepted bribes totalling $1m to fix that result—claims that Mr Blatter denies. Controversy has dogged Mr Blatter and his organisation ever since. In 2002, Michel Zen-Ruffinen, FIFA’s general secretary, accused Mr Blatter of financial mismanagement. He was duly squeezed out of his post within a month. In 2010 undercover reporters filmed members of FIFA’s executive committee apparently offering to sell their votes to award the right to host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. Michael Garcia, an American lawyer, was eventually tasked with investigating alleged corruption in the bidding process for those events. FIFA never published his full report, instead releasing a brief summary claiming it had been cleared of wrongdoing. Mr Garcia disagreed. He later resigned from FIFA’s ethics committee, claiming FIFA’s version contained “numerous materially incomplete and erroneous representations of facts and conclusions”.

The decision to award the 2022 World Cup to Qatar has proved controversial in other ways too. In 2014, the Guardian reported that on average, one Nepalese construction worker was dying every other day while working on the country’s World Cup infrastructure. By that time, Mr Blatter had long since won a fourth term as president, standing unopposed in 2011 after his only challenger, Mohamed Bin Hammam, was suspended on suspicion of corruption. Despite saying that would be his last stint in the top job, Mr Blatter decided to stand again in 2015. Those plans hit a snag when Swiss police, at the request of American prosecutors, arrested seven FIFA officials, though not Mr Blatter, on suspicion of receiving bribes totalling more than $100m.