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World football body under the glare of global scrutiny as two senior officials suspended over corruption allegations Fifa, the world governing body of football, was writhing under the glare of global scrutiny as two of its most senior officials were suspended over corruption allegations while its president, Sepp Blatter, was cleared to stand unopposed in the organisation’s presidential elections. Mohamed Bin Hammam, Qatari president of the Asian Football Confederation, was last week immersed in a promising campaign for election to the Fifa presidency. This morning, his football career is in tatters after Fifa’s ethics committee imposed a “temporary exclusion” from his football posts while it refers evidence to “forensic investigators”. Jack Warner, the controversial Fifa vice-president whom England 2018 accused of having pledged his vote only to switch it to Russia’s successful World Cup bid at the ballot box, has suffered a similar ban. A Trinidad & Tobago government minister, Warner was also the longest serving of Fifa’s vice-presidents. But claims that he was party to illegal payments made to members of the regional Caribbean Football Union gave Fifa’s ethics committee sufficient grounds to bring about his temporary suspension. Blatter, the incumbent president, had cause to smile despite the crisis engulfing his organisation. His coronation on Wednesday for a new four-year term is now assured. He was exonerated by the ethics committee of breaching his duty of disclosure of allegedly corrupt acts. “The Fifa ethics committee has reached its decisions,” he said in a statement. “I do not wish to comment in detail but simply to say that I regret what has happened in the last few days and weeks. Fifa’s image has suffered a great deal as a result, much to the disappointment of Fifa itself and all football fans.” Bin Hammam, who previously labelled the investigation into the allegations as a “tawdry manoeuvre” aimed at destabilising his election campaign, muttered still more darkly. “It is unfortunate but this is where we are,” he said. “This is Fifa.” After nearly 13 years as the president of Fifa, Blatter has in the eyes of many football fans come to personify all that is wrong with the world’s most popular sport. But at Fifa’s congress in Zurich on Wednesday he will be returned by acclamation. Acclaim, though, may be harder to find after an affair that has shot through the heart of Fifa. The politics of football have long been accompanied by a background hum of corruption claims, but in recent times it has become a cacophony. When asked if the reputation of Fifa was now at its lowest ebb, the general secretary of Fifa, Jérôme Valcke, who owes his place at the top table of the game to Blatter, said: “Maybe it’s not at the highest, that’s clear. It’s sad. Definitely there is a need for change. I’m not a Fifa president so he is the one who must decide what he wants to do and Fifa must make the necessary changes so that the institution has systems in place to avoid that something like this happens again.” Valcke talked of this being a watershed, of introducing new rules, but his words will ring hollow to many fans who will recall how often Fifa has been forced to respond to accusations of corruption. Last October, when confronted by accusations from the Sunday Times that several football officials had discussed inducements from World Cup bidders, Blatter said: “Our society is full of devils and these devils, you find them in football.” Within weeks, two of Fifa’s 24 most senior officials, executive committee members from Tahiti and Nigeria, were banned from all football activity for a year and three years respectively. They had allegedly solicited bribes in return for their votes in the World Cup host-nation decision. With those suspensions, Fifa considered the matter closed. Today’s events, which mean that four of Fifa’s 24-man ruling executive committee are currently serving bans or suspensions for allegedly corrupt activity, suggest it was not. The scale of the latest accusations have made this a compelling drama that has drawn the attention of the world’s politicians. Hugh Robertson, the UK sports minister, describing a “farce” at Fifa, believes its problems are systemic. “Sports governing bodies have to be transparent and accountable and change has to happen for the good of world football,” he said. “Fifa needs to urgently reform in the way that the IOC did after Salt Lake City.” Even some of football’s most senior political figures are beginning to question whether Fifa can survive in its current form. Michel Platini, the three-times former European footballer of the year, is now the president of Europe’s football confederation, Uefa, having spent years as a personal adviser to Blatter at Fifa. “I think that Fifa is like the International Olympic Committee was some years ago, I think we are at the end of a system based on politics,” Platini said. “The future of this big international sports company is owned by people who are specialists – not political people, like you have Juan Antonio Samaranch in the IOC, [Blatter's predecessor, Joao] Havelange, Blatter, who comes from politics, and you have many companies like that in sport. “I think it will finish in the next few years and we will have people from the sport. I think Fifa has to come back to football.” That will take four years at least, and long before then the din of corruption allegations may reverberate again. Even before the decision was handed down by Petrus Damaseb, a senior judge from Namibia who was chairing the ethics committee investigation, Warner had issued a message of menace for Fifa. “I tell you something, in the next couple days you will see a football tsunami that will hit Fifa and the world that will shock you,” he told the Trinidad Express. “The time has come when I must stop playing dead so you’ll see it, it’s coming, trust me you’ll see it by now and Monday. I have been here for 29 consecutive years and if the worst happen, the worst happen.” Sepp Blatter Fifa Jack Warner Mohamed bin Hammam Football politics Matt Scott guardian.co.uk