Hired for just £75, he regaled the guests with a stream of corny jokes, crooned a few traditional goat-herders’ folk ballads, and performed a slick, soft-shoe shuffle.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is no mention of Sepp Blatter’s early career as a wedding singer on his grandiose c.v. — yet long before he became the fabulously rich and untouchable Godfather of world football, this was how he bolstered his income.
Only one winner: Sepp Blatter hugs his daughter Connie as his granddaughter Selena looks on, after Blatter was re-elected for a fourth term as president of Fifa
And all the time, one question gnawed away.
How on earth did this balding, bespectacled, rotund little man, whose manner veers between that of a boring bank manager and some zany Eurovision Song Contest host, rise to a position of such absolute authority that he is feted by kings and emirs?
Though Blatter holds court in Zurich, where he keeps an elegant apartment in the most exclusive residential district and works 14 hours a day in FIFA’s vast hilltop fortress, with its football-shaped hedges, stylish auditoriums and gourmet terrace-restaurant, his story does not begin there.
The saga of his vainglorious pursuit of wealth, power — and beautiful young women — starts in Visp, a remote, scenic Alpine town of 6,000 people. Blatter was raised there and still returns, most weekends, to be near his only daughter, Corinne, the wife of a local bistro owner, and his grand-daughter — whom he describes as ‘my biggest gift’.
He makes the two-hour journey by train, stays in a surprisingly ordinary flat overlooking the cobbled main square, and is a heroic figure among his own mountain folk.
They were so hard up they hawked fruit and vegetables from their allotment, and the young Sepp would push this produce to market in a handcart. Their apartment was so cramped that even in their teens he and his brother Peter shared a bed.
Blatter’s father was determined they should escape such indignities and pressed them to pursue the full education he never had. His constant browbeating succeeded, and all three brothers went to university.
Peter and Marco both forged good, if unremarkable careers. From the very beginning, however, Sepp wanted more than simply to make a comfortable living.
Almost everyone I have spoken to this week — friends, football colleagues, and some of the many women in his life — has remarked on his burning desire to be noticed and always at the centre of things.
Centre of attention: Blatter has always enjoyed the spotlight
Though Blatter holds court in Zurich, where he keeps an elegant apartment in the most exclusive residential district and works 14 hours a day in FIFA’s vast hilltop fortress, with its football-shaped hedges, stylish auditoriums and gourmet terrace-restaurant, his story does not begin there.
He makes the two-hour journey by train, stays in a surprisingly ordinary flat overlooking the cobbled main square, and is a heroic figure among his own mountain folk.
His beginnings were by any standards humble. Born in 1936, two months prematurely (he claims this accounts for his ‘fighting spirit’) his father worked in the sprawling chemical plant that dominates the town, earning barely enough to keep Blatter, his brothers, Peter and Marco, and late sister Ruth.
They were so hard up they hawked fruit and vegetables from their allotment, and the young Sepp would push this produce to market in a handcart. Their apartment was so cramped that even in their teens he and his brother Peter shared a bed.
Blatter’s father was determined they should escape such indignities and pressed them to pursue the full education he never had. His constant browbeating succeeded, and all three brothers went to university.
Peter and Marco both forged good, if unremarkable careers. From the very beginning, however, Sepp wanted more than simply to make a comfortable living.
Almost everyone I have spoken to this week — friends, football colleagues, and some of the many women in his life — has remarked on his burning desire to be noticed and always at the centre of things.
A royal appointment: Blatter talks with Prince William in 2006
It is not about the money,’ one of the many FIFA executives Blatter has fired told me. ‘What he really craves, more than anything, is recognition. He won’t be bothered one bit by all the criticism he is receiving now, because it means he is in the spotlight. For him, the worst thing is to be ignored.’
Of course, this isn’t to say wealth doesn’t matter to Blatter, whose name has become synonymous with the worst money-grubbing excesses of international football. He is said to receive £1.7million a year (despite his repeated claims that FIFA’s affairs are ‘transparent’, his salary is a closely-kept
secret) plus a six-figure annual ‘loyalty bonus’.
Then there is his exorbitant expense account. During the late Nineties, when he was FIFA’s general secretary, stories emerged of how it funded his taste for designer suits and even his daughter’s limousine bills on a trip to America.
These claims, among others, were probed by a Zurich magistrate, but he found insufficient evidence to prosecute soccer’s Teflon boss.
But back to his youth. During holidays from university, where he studied business and economics, he would do menial work in Alpine resort hotels. And according to Swiss author Bruno Affentranger, whose intriguing biography of Blatter has not been published in English, it was while waiting on tables that he met a formative influence on his persona: the louche, B-movie actor Eddie Constantine.
American-born Constantine moved to France and won modest acclaim by repeatedly playing the part of a rakish, silver-tongued detective in post-War French films. He is sometimes described as the forerunner of James Bond.
Friends in high places: Blatter flanked by close ally Franz Beckenbauer (right) and Chuck Blazer who accused Blatter's only rival Mohamed Bin Hammam of taking bribes
Blatter has told me he was deeply impressed by this actor — how he held his cigarettes, how he would speak to women, how he dressed,’ says Affentranger. ‘He modelled himself on Constantine.’
He first worked his carefully cultivated charm on a local girl, Liliane Biner, whose sporty physique and good looks caught his eye. They married and had a daughter, his only child Corinne, but divorced long before he began to climb football’s greasy pole. Liliane is now remarried and lives in Germany.
Thereafter, Blatter developed a taste for younger women. Maybe they fell for his languid Eddie Constantine routine.
More likely some were attracted by the perks of being a football mogul’s trophy — the five-star hotels, the champagne receptions in the Oval
Office and Number 10, the soirees with rock stars, the hot-towelled luxury of private jet travel.
Blatter’s second wife was Barbara Kaser, the pert, twenty-something daughter of FIFA’s former general secretary Helmut Kaser.
During the late Seventies, she lived with her parents on the third floor of the old Zurich villa that served as the organisation’s base (before Blatter had it demolished and built a palatial new HQ) and after being recruited as a project manager he began to woo her.
Barbara’s romance with the suave, nakedly ambitious newcomer, with his flashy kipper-ties and doublebreasted white sports coat, did not meet with her father’s approval.
He did not attend their wedding, and according to Kaser’s widow he wept on the big day. By 1981, Helmut Kaser’s humiliation was complete, for, having taken his daughter’s hand, Blatter took his job as general secretary, and his fatherin-law was sacked from FIFA.
For reasons no one close to Blatter seems willing to explain, however, his second marriage ended after 10 years, and in 1999, when she was only 52, Barbara died from complications after an operation.
Ever the ladies’ man, Blatter, meanwhile, enjoyed other romantic dalliances, some more fleeting than others. Then, in 1995, when he was secretly preparing to challenge for the top job at FIFA, he played tennis with Ilona Boguska, a platinum blonde friend of his daughter’s, and soon they were a love match.
Blatter was then already a paunchy 59-year-old with a longterm back problem, and Ilona, who had moved to the Alps from her native Poland and married as Swiss, was 30 years his junior. But soon she was appearing on his arm at top soccer games and faraway football conventions, and if she relished the chance to swap her humdrum life in the mountains for FIFA’s excesses, who could blame her?
They were together for seven years — the first time around. In 2002, however, Blatter locked on to a very different target, a self-styled ‘dolphin therapist’ named Graziella Bianca.
Graziella, who was in her early 30s and also friendly with his daughter at first appeared unimpressed with Blatter’s jet-setting lifestyle, and they hardly seemed compatible.
However, he worked the old charm and within a few months she became his third wife. Blatter tried to persuade Pope John Paul II to grant him a special dispensation so that the marriage could be blessed in church, despite being twice divorced — but even he could not sway the Vatican.
‘Graziella and Sepp came together when he was under great pressure at FIFA, and she was a great comfort to him,’ a friend of the third Mrs Blatter told me. ‘He didn’t try her dolphin therapy (which involved swimming with them in a pool, supposedly to relieve stress) but she uses other types of healing, such as balancing the right and left centres of the brain and kinesiology (the science
of human movement) and he was very interested in her work.
‘When he was with Graziella, Sepp showed a different side of himself. They would go walking in the mountains to escape and they went to the Gulf of Mexico on holiday. Graziella said she could make the dolphins come to her just by sending out “thought patterns”, and he was amazed when it seemed to work.’
Amazed by Graziella’s powers he may have been, but almost as soon as the marriage began it was over — for Blatter went back to the altogether less ethereal Ilona.
Graziella was, and remains, heartbroken. She has told friends that they divorced because Blatter was a workaholic and only really wanted to be ‘married to football’.
The relationship with Ilona ended two years ago, when she returned with her teenage daughter to her native Poland to run a shop in Warsaw.
It is not about the money,’ one of the many FIFA executives Blatter has fired told me. ‘What he really craves, more than anything, is recognition. He won’t be bothered one bit by all the criticism he is receiving now, because it means he is in the spotlight. For him, the worst thing is to be ignored.’
Of course, this isn’t to say wealth doesn’t matter to Blatter, whose name has become synonymous with the worst money-grubbing excesses of international football. He is said to receive £1.7million a year (despite his repeated claims that FIFA’s affairs are ‘transparent’, his salary is a closely-kept
secret) plus a six-figure annual ‘loyalty bonus’.
Then there is his exorbitant expense account. During the late Nineties, when he was FIFA’s general secretary, stories emerged of how it funded his taste for designer suits and even his daughter’s limousine bills on a trip to America.
These claims, among others, were probed by a Zurich magistrate, but he found insufficient evidence to prosecute soccer’s Teflon boss.
But back to his youth. During holidays from university, where he studied business and economics, he would do menial work in Alpine resort hotels. And according to Swiss author Bruno Affentranger, whose intriguing biography of Blatter has not been published in English, it was while waiting on tables that he met a formative influence on his persona: the louche, B-movie actor Eddie Constantine.
American-born Constantine moved to France and won modest acclaim by repeatedly playing the part of a rakish, silver-tongued detective in post-War French films. He is sometimes described as the forerunner of James Bond.
Blatter has told me he was deeply impressed by this actor — how he held his cigarettes, how he would speak to women, how he dressed,’ says Affentranger. ‘He modelled himself on Constantine.’
He first worked his carefully cultivated charm on a local girl, Liliane Biner, whose sporty physique and good looks caught his eye. They married and had a daughter, his only child Corinne, but divorced long before he began to climb football’s greasy pole. Liliane is now remarried and lives in Germany.
Thereafter, Blatter developed a taste for younger women. Maybe they fell for his languid Eddie Constantine routine.
More likely some were attracted by the perks of being a football mogul’s trophy — the five-star hotels, the champagne receptions in the Oval
Office and Number 10, the soirees with rock stars, the hot-towelled luxury of private jet travel.
Blatter’s second wife was Barbara Kaser, the pert, twenty-something daughter of FIFA’s former general secretary Helmut Kaser.
During the late Seventies, she lived with her parents on the third floor of the old Zurich villa that served as the organisation’s base (before Blatter had it demolished and built a palatial new HQ) and after being recruited as a project manager he began to woo her.
Barbara’s romance with the suave, nakedly ambitious newcomer, with his flashy kipper-ties and doublebreasted white sports coat, did not meet with her father’s approval.
He did not attend their wedding, and according to Kaser’s widow he wept on the big day. By 1981, Helmut Kaser’s humiliation was complete, for, having taken his daughter’s hand, Blatter took his job as general secretary, and his fatherin-law was sacked from FIFA.
For reasons no one close to Blatter seems willing to explain, however, his second marriage ended after 10 years, and in 1999, when she was only 52, Barbara died from complications after an operation.
Ever the ladies’ man, Blatter, meanwhile, enjoyed other romantic dalliances, some more fleeting than others. Then, in 1995, when he was secretly preparing to challenge for the top job at FIFA, he played tennis with Ilona Boguska, a platinum blonde friend of his daughter’s, and soon they were a love match.
Blatter was then already a paunchy 59-year-old with a longterm back problem, and Ilona, who had moved to the Alps from her native Poland and married as Swiss, was 30 years his junior. But soon she was appearing on his arm at top soccer games and faraway football conventions, and if she relished the chance to swap her humdrum life in the mountains for FIFA’s excesses, who could blame her?
They were together for seven years — the first time around. In 2002, however, Blatter locked on to a very different target, a self-styled ‘dolphin therapist’ named Graziella Bianca.
Graziella, who was in her early 30s and also friendly with his daughter at first appeared unimpressed with Blatter’s jet-setting lifestyle, and they hardly seemed compatible.
However, he worked the old charm and within a few months she became his third wife. Blatter tried to persuade Pope John Paul II to grant him a special dispensation so that the marriage could be blessed in church, despite being twice divorced — but even he could not sway the Vatican.
‘Graziella and Sepp came together when he was under great pressure at FIFA, and she was a great comfort to him,’ a friend of the third Mrs Blatter told me. ‘He didn’t try her dolphin therapy (which involved swimming with them in a pool, supposedly to relieve stress) but she uses other types of healing, such as balancing the right and left centres of the brain and kinesiology (the science
of human movement) and he was very interested in her work.
‘When he was with Graziella, Sepp showed a different side of himself. They would go walking in the mountains to escape and they went to the Gulf of Mexico on holiday. Graziella said she could make the dolphins come to her just by sending out “thought patterns”, and he was amazed when it seemed to work.’
Amazed by Graziella’s powers he may have been, but almost as soon as the marriage began it was over — for Blatter went back to the altogether less ethereal Ilona.
Graziella was, and remains, heartbroken. She has told friends that they divorced because Blatter was a workaholic and only really wanted to be ‘married to football’.
The relationship with Ilona ended two years ago, when she returned with her teenage daughter to her native Poland to run a shop in Warsaw.
Gift wrapped: Blatter hands a bouquet of flowers to his assistant after being re-elected
Given all this toing and froing, we might have expected both women to despise Blatter.
It is perhaps a testimony to his legendary diplomatic skills, though, that neither will say a bad word against him. Indeed, Blatter still meets up with Ilona when the FIFA gravy train heads east.
Too old to go carousing, he now lives alone and is said to be lonely, driven only by his undiminished lust for power. So, to return to that gnawing question — how did he achieve it?
Despite his fierce ambition, his rise was far from meteoric.
He was still treading the boards on the wedding circuit in his mid-20s. Visp construction company boss Remo Imboden, 74, recalled this week how he performed — ‘wonderfully’ — at his sister’s ceremony, as late as 1962.
After working as a sports reporter, he became the head of PR for the Valais regional tourism office, then general secretary of the Swiss Ice Hockey Federation.
Surreally, he also accepted the ‘presidency’ of a society whose sole aim was to lobby women to continue wearing stockings and suspenders at a time when pantyhose were becoming more fashionable. (This Benny Hill-style chauvinism surfaced again more recently, when he urged women footballers to enhance their sex appeal by wearing shorter, tighter shorts).
Blatter’s big break came in 1975, when he was 39 and a departmental director
watchmaker and sports timing device company Longines.
At that time football was still a relatively clean, Corinthian game played for pride and honour. However, a few sharpeyed businessmen were waking up the potential for turning it into a lucrative money-spinner by sponsorship, promotion, endorsements and the sale of TV rights to big games and tournaments.
With his flamboyant outfits and slick marketing-speak, Blatter stood out a mile from the blazered time-servers who ran football’s then low-powered governing body.
And for all his flaws, one can well imagine how someone with his dynamism, political cunning, flair for publicity and eye for the main chance moved smoothly up the ranks.
His fluency in all manner of European languages — he slips effortlessly between English, French, Italian, Spanish and his native German — was another asset.
The precise machinations of how the man from the Mattahorn foothills reached the summit of the world’s most popular game are too complex to detail here. But critics accuse him of stabbing his old mentor, Havelange, in the back.
And he first won the FIFA presidency, in 1998, by defeating the Swedish candidate Lennart Johanssen (who had ironically run for office on the promise of ending corruption) in an election allegedly rigged by backhanders — top African football official Farah Addo claims he was offered $100,000 to support Blatter’s candidacy.
There is no proof that Blatter was personally involved in corruption, for as Addo says, there was nothing to suggest he knew anything about this bribe, much less orchestrated it, and the FIFA boss has always denied any knowledge of it.
However, so many murky scandals have emerged during his 13 years as head of what he calls his ‘FIFA family’ that if he wasn’t wise to them, then he damn well ought to have been.
How has he survived amid all the sleaze? Perhaps it is his good fortune to operate in a country where privacy is a virtual religion and no one ever asks awkward questions, personal or professional.
For another thing, his enemies within football are terrified he might expose them.
His biographer Bruno Affentranger says Blatter has told him he keeps what he calls his ‘poison box’ — a bulging file containing all their dirty secrets.
Blatter has also turned FIFA into a hugely profitable corporation whose revenues have doubled to well over $1billion (£600m) in the past five years.
And the members of his global ‘family’ love money.
So, for at least another four years the former Alps wedding singer will gaze down imperiously from the summit of the world’s favourite game, savouring every moment of the power he has pursued so remorselessly since his youth.
It is perhaps a testimony to his legendary diplomatic skills, though, that neither will say a bad word against him. Indeed, Blatter still meets up with Ilona when the FIFA gravy train heads east.
Too old to go carousing, he now lives alone and is said to be lonely, driven only by his undiminished lust for power. So, to return to that gnawing question — how did he achieve it?
Despite his fierce ambition, his rise was far from meteoric.
He was still treading the boards on the wedding circuit in his mid-20s. Visp construction company boss Remo Imboden, 74, recalled this week how he performed — ‘wonderfully’ — at his sister’s ceremony, as late as 1962.
After working as a sports reporter, he became the head of PR for the Valais regional tourism office, then general secretary of the Swiss Ice Hockey Federation.
Surreally, he also accepted the ‘presidency’ of a society whose sole aim was to lobby women to continue wearing stockings and suspenders at a time when pantyhose were becoming more fashionable. (This Benny Hill-style chauvinism surfaced again more recently, when he urged women footballers to enhance their sex appeal by wearing shorter, tighter shorts).
Blatter’s big break came in 1975, when he was 39 and a departmental director
watchmaker and sports timing device company Longines.
At that time football was still a relatively clean, Corinthian game played for pride and honour. However, a few sharpeyed businessmen were waking up the potential for turning it into a lucrative money-spinner by sponsorship, promotion, endorsements and the sale of TV rights to big games and tournaments.
The pioneer was Horst Dessler, then the dynamic young owner of adidas. To make a big move in the market, he needed an ‘in’ at FIFA — tenure of which had just passed from the incorruptible ex-Watford Grammar School boy Sir Stanley Rous to Brazilian Joao Havelange, who has since been accused by Panorama investigative reporter Andrew Jennings of accepting bribes.
Dessler had been impressed by Blatter when they met on sports-related business, and encouraged FIFA to hire him to manage its new Coca-Colafunded coaching and refereetraining programme. Put up your dukes: The FIFA President has never been afraid of a fight
With his flamboyant outfits and slick marketing-speak, Blatter stood out a mile from the blazered time-servers who ran football’s then low-powered governing body.
And for all his flaws, one can well imagine how someone with his dynamism, political cunning, flair for publicity and eye for the main chance moved smoothly up the ranks.
His fluency in all manner of European languages — he slips effortlessly between English, French, Italian, Spanish and his native German — was another asset.
The precise machinations of how the man from the Mattahorn foothills reached the summit of the world’s most popular game are too complex to detail here. But critics accuse him of stabbing his old mentor, Havelange, in the back.
And he first won the FIFA presidency, in 1998, by defeating the Swedish candidate Lennart Johanssen (who had ironically run for office on the promise of ending corruption) in an election allegedly rigged by backhanders — top African football official Farah Addo claims he was offered $100,000 to support Blatter’s candidacy.
There is no proof that Blatter was personally involved in corruption, for as Addo says, there was nothing to suggest he knew anything about this bribe, much less orchestrated it, and the FIFA boss has always denied any knowledge of it.
However, so many murky scandals have emerged during his 13 years as head of what he calls his ‘FIFA family’ that if he wasn’t wise to them, then he damn well ought to have been.
How has he survived amid all the sleaze? Perhaps it is his good fortune to operate in a country where privacy is a virtual religion and no one ever asks awkward questions, personal or professional.
For another thing, his enemies within football are terrified he might expose them.
His biographer Bruno Affentranger says Blatter has told him he keeps what he calls his ‘poison box’ — a bulging file containing all their dirty secrets.
Blatter has also turned FIFA into a hugely profitable corporation whose revenues have doubled to well over $1billion (£600m) in the past five years.
And the members of his global ‘family’ love money.
So, for at least another four years the former Alps wedding singer will gaze down imperiously from the summit of the world’s favourite game, savouring every moment of the power he has pursued so remorselessly since his youth.
From : dailymail.co.uk
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