Sepp Blatter's ban is upheld, but has FIFA really been reformed?

Court of Arbitration for Sport rejected former FIFA president Sepp Blatter’s appeal against his four-year ban from the sport. Blatter was convicted by FIFA’s own investigative mechanism of apparently bribing fellow presidential candidate Michel Platini not to run in 1999 – when Platini, now also banned, was in charge of UEFA. Blatter had initially been banned by FIFA for eight years, which was then reduced to six. The CAS cut it further to four but has now denied Blatter’s motion to have it dismissed altogether. Blatter has said he won’t be fighting the ban in the Swiss courts.

Considering that he turns 81 in March, this all but guarantees the end of his involvement in a sport that he towered over for almost two decades, running FIFA from 1998 to 2015, when he promptly resigned just days after winning another term as president. Law enforcement has seemingly only just begun to peel away the first few layers of the stunning graft and corruption that ran wild during Blatter’s reign, either with his blessing, participation or condoning silence.

Big Bad Blatter, who nonetheless stands a pocket-sized 5-foot-3, is gone for good.

Yet more than nine months later, there’s hardly any telling what became of all FIFA’s grand proclamations to reform itself in the wake of an FBI investigation and a series of Department of Justice and Swiss arrests and indictments.

Let’s do a little exercise. Do an internet search for “FIFA reform.”

I’ll wait.

OK. Done?

You will have noticed that the first seven results are from FIFA’s own website. The next few are news stories on the “landmark reforms” the organization passed back on Feb. 26, when it also elected Gianni Infantino to succeed the ousted Blatter.

After that, however, it takes a few pages to find anything newer.

In February, FIFA promised to dilute power at the top by stripping the president’s office of plenty of its decision-making ability over commercial matters and expanding the Executive Committee of two dozen or so – depending on ongoing bans and such – to a Council of 37. It also made rules on term limits, transparency on salaries and diversity. It promised to spread World Cup hosting rights voting to all 209 federations.

All we know, however, is that there is still no public knowledge of FIFA salaries, other than that Infantino found the initial offer made to him of $2 million per year “insulting” – because it seems to have been less than half of what Blatter made. All we’ve heard of new secretary general Fatma Samoura – a Senegalese woman, to FIFA’s credit, who was supposed to be the new conscience of the organization after her predecessor, too, was ousted on corruption charges – is her controversial decision to ban the English national team from wearing poppies on Nov. 11. (FIFA did implement 12-year term limits on the president and the Council members.)

Oh, and then there’s this. In May, just a few months into Infantino’s term, Domenico Scala resigned. He’d been FIFA’s head of the audit and compliance committee and its compensation committee. He was the one who had presented the salary offer to Infantino. Soon thereafter, the FIFA Council passed a new rule that allowed that body to fire anybody on the ethics committee, which was supposed to be protected from the Council in order to safeguard its independence. That’s how it was able to go after Blatter and then-secretary general Jerome Valcke, after all.

In other words, anybody on the Council, the highest body, being investigated by the ethics committee could just get his colleagues to fire those investigating him or her. It was an irredeemable breach of the sole system of checks and balances on the Council’s power. “I am consternated about this decision, because it undermines a central pillar of the good governance of FIFA and it destroys a substantial achievement of the reforms,” Scala said, and off he went.

For all the world, it looked like FIFA’s president and its re-branded executive committee had simply re-appropriated all the power they had signed away in the name of ostensible reform just months earlier.

And since then? It’s been back to the silence and mystique that has always enshrouded the global game’s governing body. Might it have been rehabilitated significantly? Maybe it has. But since there has been no meaningful progress on the promised transparency, there’s simply no telling.

Blatter’s definitive departure really only confirmed one thing on Monday: We don’t really know if FIFA has actually changed at all in this Post-Blatter Era.

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