elected unopposed as FIFA president Wednesday, promising to use his final four-year term for radical reform of a sport reeling from bribery and corruption allegations. Delegates gave Blatter overwhelming backing to reform soccer's governing body from within, rejecting a call from England to delay the election and then giving the Swiss 186 of the 203 votes cast. “We will put the ship back on course in clear transparent waters,” the 75-year-old Blatter told delegates. Yet even as he received flowers and soaked up the applause Blatter was facing trouble, after Germany called for a review of the process in which Qatar awarded the 2022 World Cup. Blatter, who joined FIFA in 1978 and has been its president since 1998, did not address that issue directly but said he was determined to clean up the sport's governance after a series of allegations that left him feeling personally “slapped”. With Qatari Mohamed Bin Hammam having dropped out of the race — he was subsequently suspended pending an inquiry into bribery claims — Blatter effectively sealed victory when a motion to postpone the vote was defeated by 172 to 17. The actual election was a formality. Blatter traced FIFA's problems back to last year's World Cup vote, when the inner circle of executive committee members chose Russia to host the 2018 tournament followed by Qatar in 2022. Immediately following his election win, Blatter proposed and won the backing of Congress to shift power to award future World Cups to FIFA's full 208-member congress, though the 2026 event will not be up for grabs for another six or seven years. Congress also accepted a proposal to strengthen the ethics committee by separating investigation and decision-making powers and another to create a new watchdog called the “solution committee”. “There was so much doubt leading up to this, there was a lot of talk, but all of that is in the past,” Blatter told Reuters. “Now we have created instruments to fight against all that is bad in FIFA with more transparency.” A large measure of the doubt has been over the decision to award the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, though the bid team has denied any wrongdoing in the campaign. Theo Zwanziger, head of the influential German Football Association, said FIFA could not afford to ignore the suspicions, which have been denied by Qatar's bid team. “There is a considerable degree of suspicion that one cannot simply sweep aside,” Zwanziger told German television. FIFA is facing what general secretary Jerome Valcke agreed was a “watershed moment”, with the crisis being compared to the Salt Lake City corruption case the International Olympic Committee had to deal with in 1998. In another twist, whistle-blower American Chuck Blazer was sacked Tuesday from his position on CONCACAF. An hour later, the organization declared the dismissal invalid but the split deepened Wednesday as acting president Lisle Austin insisted Blazer had indeed been lawfully dismissed. The internal chaos magnified the drama surrounding the FIFA Congress in Zurich.
