LONDON — For all the negative light cast on Chuck Blazer, we need to remember he was a mere follower of those in FIFA who had corrupted the so-called Beautiful Game long before he arrived on the scene as the most powerful person in American soccer.
Blazer, sick with colon cancer, was the focus last weekend of an investigation by The Daily News, which reported he had cooperated with the F.B.I. and the Internal Revenue Service as an informant after he failed to pay income taxes on millions of dollars he made from undeclared soccer-related activities.
As one of the top officials in U.S. soccer and the regional ruling body known as Concacaf, Blazer could hardly be avoided in the game. He was a big figure physically and reveled in self- promotion. For two decades he cut television deals as the sport grew in his region, and from his office in Trump Tower in Manhattan, he would greet the great and the good with a colorful macaw, called Max, perched on his shoulder. When he went abroad, he filled his personal website with photographs of himself with Vladimir V. Putin in Russia or on a private jet with Nelson Mandela.
Those two were passing acquaintances. The greater influence on Blazer — his role model in doing business — was the Brazilian João Havelange.
When Blazer got his dream job, as head of the board advising FIFA on its global marketing and TV contracts in 2010, he filled in his own biographical questionnaire on FIFA’s web site with this:
•Which club did you support as a child? “Manchester United.”
•Who was your idol? “Not a player,” he responded, “a majestic symbol of elegance in our sport, Dr. João Havelange.”
Havelange, now 98, was FIFA’s president from 1974 to 1998 and was credited with reforming FIFA’s finances from precarious to overflowing. Havelange accomplished that by adopting the Adidas formula of merging sports with television exposure with global commercial sponsorships.
But Havelange today is persona non grata with both FIFA and the International Olympic Committee, through which he rose up before becoming soccer’s power broker. The Brazilian was one of those named a few years ago by a Swiss court as having taken millions of dollars in kickbacks from FIFA’s financial partners.
Havelange resigned from both FIFA and the I.O.C., rather than face inquiries into his own dealings. His right-hand man through his years as FIFA president, Sepp Blatter, succeeded him in office and, at 78, has said he intends to seek a fifth four-year term next May.
Blatter’s campaign for re-election centers on continuity. Central to his manifesto is that because he is the longtime leader of FIFA, he should be the man to cleanse the group of corruption related to the bidding process that resulted in Russia’s being granted the 2018 World Cup and Qatar’s getting the rights to event in 2022.
Barely a day goes by without FIFA’s having to deal with another accusation about how those bids were won. Blatter’s intended opponent in the last FIFA election in 2011, Mohamed bin Hammam, was shamed and excommunicated before the vote was taken. Others forced out for breaches of ethics included the Caribbean soccer leader Jack Warner, along with other members of the executive committee. Blazer himself was banned 90 days by FIFA for breaking its code of ethics after a report said he received millions of dollars in soccer-related commissions during his time with Concacaf.
Blatter has not been shown to be corrupt himself, but all this happened on his watch and started when he was the general secretary to Havelange.
So when Blazer — who has been called Mr. 10 Percent throughout the Americas for the deals he cut — wrote his biographical homage to Havelange a few years ago, it was indeed a telling line.
FIFA had — and many believe still has — a self-fulfilling legacy from that era.
It also has powerful enemies in the world. Each time its World Cup is granted in a clandestine fashion, there are shouts from politicians and others seeking retribution for a process they see as fraudulent and unlawful.
Two former U.S. federal prosecutors, John P. Collins and Michael Garcia, have been hired by FIFA to mount internal investigations, but their results have never been released from FIFA headquarters in Zurich.
So much of what is known about corruption has come from the media. FIFA attempted to discredit the BBC and The Sunday Times in London after both committed major resources to exhaustive investigations of the 2010 vote that awarded World Cups to Russia and Qatar. When I helped report stories right from the start of the Havelange era, FIFA wrote to my editors and suggested they fire me. None did. They saw the evidence.
Media organizations today are unlikely to stop their in-depth examinations into FIFA’s workings. The latest of those, in The Daily News last weekend, ran under the headline, “Soccer Rat! The inside story of how Chuck Blazer, ex-U.S. soccer executive and FIFA bigwig, became a confidential informant for the FBI.” The story had all the intrigue to be a Hollywood blockbuster, stating that federal officials had equipped Blazer with a microphone hidden in a key chain in the hope they could entrap some leading administrators during the London Olympics in 2012. (Blazer could not reached for comment on The Daily News story.)
It was fascinating, colorful and compelling. But Blazer isn’t the Mr. Big of corruption in FIFA. And never was.