Fifa chief Sepp Blatter stands down
Sepp Blatter, the president of Fifa, has stood down, but he's not gone yet.
Fifa President Sepp Blatter unexpectedly resigned this week, only days after being elected to a fifth term at the top of global football's governing body. He will stay as president until a successor is chosen. According to US news reports, the FBI and American prosecutors are investigating him as part of the same operation that led to last week's arrest of seven Fifa officials, including Blatter's vice-president, Jack Warner.
What the commentators said
Blatter may have gone, said The Guardian's Marina Hyde, but the task of cleaning up Fifa lies ahead. "Investigating it will seem like a picnic compared to reforming it." But the good news is that it already feels as though something "has changed irrevocably". It was once an "unassailable hierarchy" now the spell has been broken.
But "a depressing sub-plot", says The Guardian's Nils Pratley, has been the behaviour of Fifa's sponsors. For years they have been powerful enough to demand pervasive reform and a new president. But they bottled it, and even when this scandal erupted, all they could muster were "mealy-mouthed and inadequate protestations of concern'". They have been left without even a"scrap of respectability".