Sepp Blatter, a legitimate businessman, stepped down earlier this year as President of FIFA, which is essentially Tweed’s Tammany Hall with soccer balls. The deposed chairman sat for lunch with Malcolm Moore of the Financial Times and allowed that he is dishonest but not in the exact way people think he’s dishonest. Oy vey! An excerpt:

As we settle into our conversation, he quickly pinpoints the moment when Fifa’s troubles — and his downward spiral — began. “It is linked to this now famous date: December 2, 2010,” he says, referring the day he pulled Qatar’s name out of the envelope as host of the 2022 World Cup.

“If you see my face when I opened it, I was not the happiest man to say it is Qatar. Definitely not.” The decision caused outrage, even among those who do not follow football. “We were in a situation where nobody understood why the World Cup goes to one of the smallest countries in the world,” he says.

Blatter then drops a bombshell: he did try to rig the vote but for the US, not for Qatar. There had been a “gentleman’s agreement”, he tells me, among Fifa’s leaders that the 2018 and 2022 competitions would go to the “two superpowers” Russia and the US; “It was behind the scenes. It was diplomatically arranged to go there.”

Had his electoral engineering succeeded, he would still be in charge, he says. 

“I would be [on holiday] on an island!” But at the last minute, the deal was off, because of “the governmental interference of Mr Sarkozy”, who Blatter claims encouraged Michel Platini to vote for Qatar. “Just one week before the election I got a telephone call from Platini and he said, ‘I am no longer in your picture because I have been told by the head of state that we should consider . . . the situation of France.’ And he told me that this will affect more than one vote because he had a group of voters.”

Blatter will not be drawn on motives.•