Speculating on the future of Fifa is a bit like mulling over the future of an organised crime family's ageing head who has a series of powerful enemies.
With Swiss and US police circling, and Fifa's very highest executives becoming embroiled ever deeper in a whole range of scandals that long ago turned into a crisis of existential proportions, what on earth is the point of attempting to deduce what might happen in four and a half months' time, when football's governing body is, in theory, due to elect its next president? But that distant future is closer than you might imagine. On 26 October, nominations for the Fifa presidency will close.
Currently there are only four candidates. One lost last time around, one is currently under investigation by Fifa's ethics committee, one is at present under investigation by the Swiss police and one, the head of the Liberian Football Association, will not be supported even by the African Football Confederation.
Which bring to mind Sepp Blatter's words, delivered to Fifa's staff at a meeting just two weeks ago: “We don't know what will happen on 26 February but when there will be no candidate elected, I [will] feel obligated to stay.”
So, who will be Fifa's next president?
Prince Ali Bin al-Hussein
The Jordanian prince was the last man standing in the trident attack on Blatter, almost certainly masterminded by Michel Platini, at the May election. Both the former Portugal player Luis Figo and the Dutch businessman and ex-Ajax chairman Michael van Praag dropped out with a few days to go before the election.
It was calculated then that the highly uninspiring royal would be better placed to win a few votes from Asia to add to the support guaranteed him by Europe. He lost, and by miles, even in the wake of those sensational dawn arrests at the Hotel Baur au Lac.
This time round, he has been highly critical of Platini. “Platini is not good for Fifa,” he said. “Football's fans and players deserve better. Fifa is engulfed in scandal. We must stop doing business as usual. The practice of backroom, under-the-table deals must end.”
But if not even the English Football Association - who backed him last time - will support him on this occasion, what hope does he have?
Musa Bility
It was only days after Blatter's shock quasi-resignation announcement that the head of the Liberian FA declared his intention to run.
At Blatter's hurriedly convened press conference, brought about for reasons he has yet to disclose, he claimed “not to have a mandate” from the wider football world. Of course, you do not need a mandate from the wider football world to run Fifa, just the backing of the entirely self-interested, deal-breaking “blazerati”.
But Bility does not even have that. As David Ginola found out this spring, to the considerable expense of a publicity-addicted Irish bookmaker, you need five countries to back you before you can even get your name on the ballot paper. And the African Football Confederation [Caf] wasted no time in making public its unanimous decision not to back him.
The head of Caf is Cameroon's Issa Hayatou, Fifa's senior vice-president and Blatter's most loyal deputy, the man who would, in theory, become acting head of the world governing body if Blatter were to be suspended.
Bility has said he would step aside for Hayatou, if he chose to run - as if to suggest he would have any choice in the matter. Hayatou's credentials for the job are slightly diminished by the allegations over receiving bribes from both the shamed and now defunct ISL marketing agency and also, according to the Sunday Times, for voting for the 2022 World Cup to be held in Qatar.
The first set of allegations, originally made by the BBC in a 2010 Panorama programme, has since caused him to have the organisation barred from Fifa's meetings.
Michel Platini
That the favourite for the job spent more than a decade as the now-shamed Blatter's chosen one and that fact has done almost nothing to diminish his chances of winning is yet another extraordinary feature that tells you all you need to know about Fifa.
Swiss police officially regard the former France player as “somewhere between” a witness and a suspect in their investigation into corrupt payments within the organisation, but that is not sufficient even for the FA, and its chairman Greg Dyke, to withdraw its support for him (a decision that strips English football of any moral authority it imagines it might have over its currently incarcerated South American or Caribbean counterparts).
But that four-month period between declaration and the election itself is crucial. Platini's status as the frontrunner is down to the backing he is expected to receive from both Europe and the huge Asian confederation, via the two Asian sporting power-brokers who run it, Sheikh Ahmad of Kuwait and Salman Bin Ibrahim al-Khalifa of Bahrain.
But those two men, one of whom, Sheikh Ahmad, almost certainly has designs on the job himself eventually, will have to decide in the next two weeks whether their man will still be standing in four months' time.
Chung Mong-joon
The South Korean scion of Hyundai's billions is, he revealed yesterday, under investigation by Fifa's ethics committee over long-standing allegations of collusion in the vote for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.
Chung called the supposedly independent ethics committee “Blatter's hitman”, arguing that the allegations against him are strategic, that the matter was closed in 2010 and the investigation is designed to “sabotage” his campaign.
Chung backed South Korea's bid for the 2022 World Cup and has for many years been alleged to have sought to engineer vote-trading among Fifa's executive committee between the 2018 and 2022 bids. It was officially against the rules. But it was destined to happen the moment the executive committee made the crazy, or more likely corrupt, decision to host two bidding contests simultaneously.
The normal football fan might not like the idea of the largest stakeholder in one of Fifa's top sponsors being its president, but as we have seen before, the views of the normal football fan are irrelevant in the process.– The Independent