Since FIFA president Sepp Blatter won his first election in 1998, he has (allegedly! [lol]) both bribed and received bribes in order to stay in power and award desperate countries international tournaments. Along the way, he has actually and truly ravaged local economies by siphoning public money for useless infrastructure for said tournaments and to line his own pockets, and he has used and he is using and he will use modern-day slaves in order to do all of this. He and his cartel make El Chapo look like Jean Valjean. On June 2, he said he was resigning following an FBI investigation that led to the arrest of some of his minions for corruption. Twenty-four days later, he said that actually, he would not resign. In spite of all the prayers that all the gods and goddesses field from all the men and women and children all over the world, every day, this rich, pink golem just won’t die. He is objectively a bad (soccer) man.
After refusing to travel for fear of extradition and subsequently being thrown in a trashcan, Blatter left Switzerland for the first time since Swiss officers rolled up in a fleet of Nissan Leafs (Leaves? Leafs.) to take in FIFA officials in June, to Russia for the preliminary draw for the 2018 Russia World Cup. There he met with Vladimir Putin, who is the president of Russia, has bad opinions about most things, once Deeboed Patriots owner Robert Kraft for one of his Super Bowl rings, probably slaps people on the back a bit too hard when he is drunk, is a legitimate and literal war criminal, and is objectively a bad (Russia) man. It follows, then, that Blatter and Putin know each other, and are homeboys to boot.
Proper homeboys stan for each other whenever and wherever and to whomever they can, and so Putin took to Swiss TV last night to do so for Blatter, while also talking about building nuclear bombs. (As this is nominally a sports site, someone else can tell you about the bombs.) He laid out the case that Blatter, his homeboy, should win a Nobel Prize. He lauded the “enormous humanitarian contribution to the development of good neighborly relations between people and states,” and said that he did not believe “a single word about corruption regarding him personally.”
“If anyone should be awarded Nobel Prizes,” Putin said about Blatter’s crew, which pillages nations all over the world in the name of sports, “it is these people.”
In addition to money allegedly changing hands, Putin reportedly won Blatter over when bidding for the World Cup by promising “a complete exemption from Russian taxes and customs for Fifa and all other organisations involved in the World Cup, an exemption to the Russian law against alcohol advertising and the right for Fifa employees to bring in and exchange any amount of currency without any limits or customs declaration.”
Blatter has yet to be formally charged with corruption.
[NBC News]
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