News of a Sepp Blatter suspension broke today as the FIFA Ethics committee recommended that the current president of FIFA be suspended for 90 days.
Sepp Blatter has long been a point of controversy. Under him, FIFA has seen its reputation tarnished by accusations of corruption and repeated instances of human rights violations at its World Cup sights in Qatar and Russia. Futhermore, Blatter himself has been widely accused of taking bribes, and enabling a culture of bribery in general.
The recommendation for suspension made by the ethics committee comes in the wake of the Swiss attorney general opening criminal proceedings against Blatter. Switzerland along with the United States have long been investigating FIFA for corruption; it was these investigations that led to the arrest of several top FIFA officials last May.
Blatter’s advisor, Klauss Stohlker, had the following on the news of the Blatter suspension recommendation:
"The news was communicated to the president this afternoon. He is calm. Remember he is the father of the ethics committee.
"This is provisional for 90 days but he is not actually suspended. The committee has not yet made a decision and their meetings continue."
And of course, Blatter is not officially suspended yet, but the feeling permeating the world of soccer is that, should this suspension be upheld, it will mark the beginning of the end of Blatter’s 17 year stint at the top of FIFA.
Throughout this entire process — from the time of the aforementioned arrests last May to today — Blatter has maintained that he is innocent, and to much ridicule. In one of the most public displays against Blatter, a comedian interrupted a press conference involving him and through stacks of fake money in the air, saying that he was paying for North Korea’s World Cup bid in 2026.
Photo: @BigBadEd | Twitter
Swiss prosecutors have said that they will treat Blatter as someone “in between a witness and an accused person.”
We will see where in that spectrum he truly lies.
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