Can it be that the great fantasy kingdom of Fifa has finally collapsed? Is this the fall of Oz? Is it possible that this vast sporting organisation – one that has survived for so many years on sheer effrontery – is now on collision course with reality?
The Swiss police’s dawn raid on the headquarters of the organisation that runs football across the world, arresting some of its most prominent citizens on charges of corruption, must surely bring revolution and destruction in its wake.
That is what happens in the end to most fantasy kingdoms. It’s what happened to the International Olympic Committee, but Fifa never took the warning. Sepp Blatter, Fifa president, assumed that it would go on like this forever: no doubt, like Louis XVI, he wrote this morning in his diary the single word rien.
Revolution came to the IOC when it was finally, uncompromisingly and unduckably made clear that the organisation was stinking, putrid and rotten with corruption.
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