The scandals of the past weeks and months were silenced by triumphal music and a thunderous standing ovation. Mr. Blatter carried a bouquet of yellow flowers, and the coronation was complete. “Together we will have four years, providing the Lord gives me life, the energy and the force to continue on our path,” Mr. Blatter, a 75-year-old Swiss, told the delegates at FIFA’s annual congress.
With that, it was settled. FIFA would counter the controversies swirling around it by putting its future in the hands of the man who has led the organization since 1998. It may be a dysfunctional family — or even a corrupt one, according to some members — but it is Mr. Blatter’s family.
Whatever the outside world thinks of Mr. Blatter and his organization these days, there was little but warmth for him inside the Hallenstadion convention center Wednesday. Perhaps Mr. Blatter’s primary skill has been his endurance as one of the world’s most powerful sports administrators in the face of relentless charges of corruption that have come from inside and outside FIFA.
The string of bribery accusations — at least one leveled at Blatter — are related to the votes for future World Cups and the election campaign that concluded on Wednesday, calling into question the integrity of the world’s most popular sport. FIFA took in $4 billion from television rights fees and corporate sponsorship fees in the four years leading to the 2010 World Cup. Some fans and corporate partners have grown uneasy with reports that their money is being diverted into the pockets of unscrupulous officials who seek to enrich themselves instead of the game.
Mr. Blatter insists that he is just the person to fix the problems. With the world watching, FIFA’s members resoundingly stood behind him, voting for Mr. Blatter on 186 of 203 ballots cast. England soccer officials, the most publicly critical of FIFA in recent days, tried to postpone the vote, but that idea was quashed, 172 to 17.
Under Mr. Blatter’s leadership, FIFA’s financial reserves have grown to more than $1 billion, and he is credited with democratizing soccer, taking the world’s largest sporting event to Africa for the first time last summer. The World Cup is scheduled to make its debut in Eastern Europe (Russia) in 2018 and in the Middle East (Qatar) in 2022.
“With everything going on, it’s hard to step back,” said Alan I. Rothenberg, a former president of the United States Soccer Federation who began working with Blatter in 1984. “But if the measure of FIFA is the progress of the sport, as president Sepp has been nothing short of extraordinary.”
But those votes for Russia and Qatar, last December, sparked the latest scandal that has spread, fire-like, since.
Two of FIFA’s 24 executive committee members were barred after they were recorded soliciting money for their votes. Similar accusations, voiced in the news media and the British parliament, have been made against others, but FIFA has cleared those involved. A recently revealed e-mail shows the secretary general Jérôme Valcke saying that Qatar “bought” the 2022 World Cup. Mr. Valcke said this week that he merely meant that Qatar was aided by its well-financed campaign.
Theo Zwanziger, president of the German soccer federation, called for an investigation of the awarding of the World Cup to Qatar over the United States, saying in a German television interview that “there is a considerable degree of suspicion that one cannot simply sweep aside.”
Last month, two high-level FIFA executives were accused of offering $40,000 each to a couple of dozen officials of Caribbean soccer federations in order to secure votes for the presidential election. One of the men, Mohamed bin Hammam of Qatar, was Mr. Blatter’s only competition for FIFA’s top position. Mr. Bin Hammam dropped out of the race late Saturday. On Sunday, he and Jack Warner, an executive board member from Trinidad and Tobago, were suspended from FIFA indefinitely.
John Branch reported from Zurich.