Zurich---Sepp Blatter has always loved maritime analogies. He promised to guide FIFA into a safe port, but on Tuesday his ship foundered on the rocks after 17 years at the helm of the world's most popular sport.
The 79-year-old Swiss stunned the watching world with his resignation announcement just four days after being voted to a fifth term and repelling the pointed questions of his fiercest critics, the British media.
Blatter said in his election victory speech he would be the "commander" who would take FIFA "out of the storm."
While Blatter has seen off mutinies by discontented FIFA members, he could not hold off US and Swiss investigators.
Blatter has not been named as a suspect. But their inquiries into bribes and the award of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups led to him walking the plank.
It has been an incredible turnaround for a man who last month was compared to Jesus, Moses, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln by Dominican Republic FA president Osiris Guzman at a Central and North American confederation (CONCACAF) meeting.
It was the arrest of CONCACAF president Jeffrey Webb last Wednesday -- as part of an American investigation into tens of millions of dollars of bribes -- in Zurich that started the process that ended in his walking away from an organisation he has been involved with for 40 years.
Unapologetically divisive, Blatter has had to deal with scandal virtually since his first day in office in 1998.
He came through allegations about 'brown envelopes' handed out before his 1998 election and the collapse of the ISL sports marketing empire.
AFP
