Lennart Johansson interview: we saw Blatter buy votes. I’m glad they were all found out

After Blatter’s victory in the election in Paris, witnesses saw African delegates in the Meridien Montparnasse hotel being handed brown envelopes each stuffed with $50,000 (about £39,000) in cash: “development money” as thanks for their votes. Blatter suggested in 2011 that someone had bought those votes on his behalf, but without his knowledge.

In an interview with The Times, Johansson recalled the pain of those days, saying: “The votes were mine and I thought, ‘I’m going to win.’ But I didn’t. They had an enormous amount of money to buy votes from Africa and Asia against me, and this is what happened.

“My people saw them go there with brown envelopes, handing them over to the African delegates and then I started to know what was going on, and the kind of people we have to deal with.

“I tried to expose what was going on and what has now been discovered is something I knew for many years. Blatter is a bastard and crook, and corruption is his game, but we must not forget there were people around him, all those members of the executive committee, paid to go his way.

“These people made it possible for Blatter and Platini to take power. Now they are all banned, or under arrest or have died — Julio Grondona, Jack Warner, Chuck Blazer, [Ricardo] Teixeira. Nice guys . . . I could very happily hit them all.”

Grondona, Fifa’s long-time finance chairman and viewed by many as the biggest facilitator of corruption, died in 2014, while Warner, from Trinidad, and the Brazilian Teixeira have been indicted by the US department of justice after Blazer turned whistleblower.

Johansson was ousted as Uefa president in 2007 by his other nemesis, Platini, the Frenchman who was banned from football after investigators uncovered a secret £1.3 million payment to him by Fifa in 2011, shortly before Blatter stood for re-election.

Blatter was also banned over the same scandal, and is under investigation by Swiss legal authorities. For Johansson the end of his 17-year regime meant that Fifa could finally start to clean up its act. The Swede is now retired but remains honorary president of Uefa, and is trying to establish a foundation to work against corruption in the game and reward good leadership.

“The biggest sport in the world cannot live with two bastards in charge, Blatter and Platini,” he added. “People think the thing is over, but there are still some people who did worse than Blatter did, who are still in business. We have to clean the whole house to see to it we get an administration of people known for being honest and fair and there is a still a long way to go.”

Johansson knows the new Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, from the days when the Swiss-Italian worked under him at Uefa, and says he is aiming in the right direction but warned that he must be prepared to take criticism. The expansion of the World Cup from 32 to 48 teams — one of Infantino’s election promises — is one change that Johansson does not like.

“Never change a winning team,” he said. “We have a system in the World Cup which works extremely well. People always have a tendency of saying that football is too conservative, it must change, and I say, ‘Why?’ We have a winning concept with the Champions League, the World Cup and the European Championship and I see no reason why we should change it.”

Football may have avoided almost 20 years of scandal and corruption had things turned out differently that day in Paris in 1998. “I’m satisfied that these people have been now found out,” Johansson says, “but I’m not happy — because of what it meant for football.”