It was a day when the leaders of two of the world’s greatest “faiths” went eyeball to eyeball. When Fifa president Sepp Blatter was received in a papal audience at the Vatican yesterday, he told Pope Francis, “in all modesty” that football had quite a few followers worldwide.
“I said that in football we have 300 million active participants and if you include their families that makes it 1.2 billion people. He said to me, don’t be modest, I have no more than one billion followers.”
In what Blatter described as a meeting between two "sportsmen", the two men shared memories of the former Real Madrid ace, Argentine great Alfredo di Stefano, who is a friend of football fan Francis. They also spoke of the fact that the pope is a supporter of Argentine side San Lorenzo whilst, by way of a tribute, President Blatter made a present of a Latin edition of the Fifa Weekly magazine to the pope, a Latin edition that contained a long article on San Lorenzo.
Intrepid
Blatter
Nor did the intrepid
Blatter limit himself to football because, at one point, he also asked the pope if the founder of the Jesuit order, St Ignatius Loyola, would not now be displeased with him because he had chosen the name Francis as pope. To which the pope replied: “No, no, he will understand . . .”
During their brief audience, both men agreed that many of football’s outstanding problems, such as fan violence and the use of performance enhancing drugs, come not from within football but from the societies in which football is played. Blatter said that he was happy to meet the pope in the light of Francis’s call (in August) for football to assume its social responsibilities: “Fifa will do what it can. You can see from my face that I was very happy to meet the pope and it was really a meeting between two sportsmen, or at least between two football fans if you don’t want to call me a sportsman. However, one thing I did not ask him was: is God a Brazilian or an Argentine?”
As for more mundane matters such as football, Blatter repeated many of the things he has said in recent weeks. The 2022 World Cup in Qatar may well still be played in the winter months of November, December or January rather than in the 50-degree plus summer heat of the Middle East. Thirty two teams remain the maximum number of finalists even if he still believes that Fifa should consider a redistribution of the final places in order to make more places available to non-European and non-Latin American countries.
Football mad
Brazil 2014 will be a huge success, he said, because "this is one opportunity that Brazil will not miss". The desire of football mad Brazil to make a success of this tournament is so strong, he said, that problems such as the riots which marked this summer's Confederations' Cup will not be repeated.
Finally, when asked by The Irish Times if this would be his last term of office as Fifa president, a position he has held since 1998, Blatter said: "I am just halfway through my presidency at the moment and for the time being I don't have the necessary energy to step down."
