Blatter, Platini suspensions bring uncertainty to FIFA presidential election

Longtime FIFA president Sepp Blatter's 17-year run in power was interrupted on Thursday when he was suspended for the first time in his four-decade career at soccer's global governing body. Unending corruption allegations finally caught up to the 79-year-old Swiss when he was disciplined by the Ethics Committee, an arm of FIFA once created by Blatter himself.

The chairman of the committee's adjudicatory chamber, Hans Joachim Eckert, enacted the recommendation of the investigatory chamber that Blatter be provisionally suspended from all soccer activities for 90 days – with a possible extension of another 45 days. In the past week, Blatter had rejected calls from four major FIFA sponsors to step down immediately, rather than in February, as he has said he plans to.

UEFA president and FIFA vice president Michel Platini was hit with the same disciplinary action, as was FIFA general secretary Jerome Valcke, who had already been placed on mandatory leave last month.

For years, allegations of graft, abuse of power and bribery had dogged Blatter. But no evidence had ever been found, and no accusations ever stuck or materialized into real charges. This time around, however, the Swiss Attorney General has opened criminal proceedings into a pair of transactions.

The first was to former CONCACAF president and FIFA vice president Jack Warner of Trinidad and Tobago. He was charged in the Department of Justice's May 27 indictment and is currently fighting extradition to the United States. Blatter is accused of awarding Warner regional broadcast rights to the 2006 World Cup at a well-below-market rate for Warner to sell on at a profit.

The second is a payment of 2 million Swiss francs made to Platini in 2011 shortly before the Frenchman announced that he wouldn't be challenging Blatter for the FIFA presidency that year after all. They have both claimed that the payment was for work Platini had done as an advisor for Blatter from 1999 to 2002, although neither man has managed to explain why it took nine years for the bill to be paid.

Valcke, for his part, had already been relieved of his duties on Sept. 18 following allegations that he had passed his personal allotment of 2014 World Cup tickets on to a broker in order to be sold above face value, breaking FIFA's in-house rules.

FIFA's internal investigations into actions by Blatter, Platini and Valcke are ongoing. All of the accused claim they are innocent, of course. Members of both FIFA and UEFA's executive committees have called for emergency meetings.

The suspensions are as ill-timed as could be for the principals involved. Blatter has already announced that he would give up his presidency on February 26 – although he's since been wishy-washy on whether he'll actually follow through – when a new election will be held.

Blatter had won a fifth term on May 29 but said he would resign just four days later in the wake of the DoJ's sweeping indictment, which charged several longtime Blatter allies and implicated him by association – or at the very least posed troubling questions about the corrupt culture he had allowed to fester during his 17-year-reign. Blatter will now be barred from his office, or any other soccer office or stadium, for the bulk of his remaining term, if not all of it.

Platini has long been seen as the heir apparent to Blatter and had been biding his time in the UEFA presidency until the supreme job opened up. He was considered a frontrunner even after the Swiss investigation was announced.

Valcke, too, had aspirations of making a run at the presidency.

South Korea's Chung Mong-joon, meanwhile, who is also a former FIFA vice president and another man with presidential aspirations, was fined and banned from soccer for six years on Thursday, knocking him out of the quickly thinning field. He was found guilty of several rules violations in the bidding process for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.

It's unclear whether Platini or Valcke – or even Blatter, if he stages a surprise reelection bid – would still be eligible for the presidency if they remain suspended when the election is held. Or whether they can still declare their candidacies, since the deadline is Oct. 26. (Platini filed his paperwork on Thursday, when his suspension came down.) Or indeed whether any of them could pass the background check newly required of candidates for president or the executive committee members, a sort of investigation into their dealings.

Following Thursday's suspensions, which weren't any less stunning for having been leaked on Wednesday, the most pressing question is who steps into the power vacuum. Now that the game's three biggest power brokers have been barred from their respective offices for at least the next three months, soccer's multi-billion-dollar institutions are reeling.

With both Blatter and his general secretary, Valcke, suspended, FIFA's rules anoint Issa Hayatou as his interim replacement. He's the organization's most senior vice president, as well as the head of the African continental governing body. UEFA, meanwhile, will be run by vice president Angel Maria Villar. Hayatou was reprimanded by the IOC in 2011 for taking a kickback; Villar has his own ethics case hanging over his head, stemming from his actions during the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bidding process.

This spell of total chaos comes just four months before a presidential election that promised to give soccer just its third leader since 1974. And with both the incumbent and the frontrunner now either ineligible or severely compromised by the allegations, the race is shaping up to be something very rare in FIFA politics: unpredictable.

The round of suspensions is probably good news for Price Ali bin Hussein, the reformist Jordanian and former FIFA vice president who challenged Blatter in May but lost so decisively in the first round of voting that he pulled out before the runoff. Prince Ali has promised a new era of transparency and accountability – although plenty of others, Blatter included, have said the same kind of things, to little tangible effect.

FIFA elections have historically not been won on promises of reform, however – when an opponent for the reigning ruler has even emerged, unlike in two of Blatter's five election wins. They tend to swing in favor of whoever is seen as the most likely to keep the deeply entrenched system of patronage in place. The bulk of FIFA member countries, all of whom get an equally weighted vote, are far less concerned with good governance than the Western nations, and all the more so with self-preservation.

But in this sudden new age of culpability for actions that were for decades conducted in backrooms and condemned never to leave them, with the entire decadent and depraved structure suddenly brought to account, there's little telling what will come next.

It seems fairly to safe to say now, though, that the balance of power as it has existed for years is about to shift.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.