Among the worldwide media, John Delaney has emerged as the somewhat unlikely white knight in the great battle against Sepp Blatter this week. The FAI chief has been upfront in his desire to see Blatter removed from his office and he has been commended for that.
However, at home there have been suggestions that a bit of hypocrisy is at play. Chief among these is the thorny issue of what happened in the aftermath of Thierry Henry's infamous handball in 2009.
Last year it was reported that the FAI had received a €5 million payment from FIFA in exchange for a calming of tensions surrounding the 'Team 33' request. It was reported that Delaney was less than pleased with Blatter's revealing of the request to shoehorn Ireland into the World Cup as a 33rd member. As a result, the payment was said to have been made to stop tensions escalating further.
That issue has been raised quite a bit this week amid Delaney's public stance on Blatter's soon to be confirmed re-election. Speaking to RTÉ this morning, Delaney has addressed the alleged payment. However, he refused to be drawn on its exact nature.
There was a legal case we had against FIFA at the time. There was an arrangement that was come to but it certainly wasn’t bestowing patronage to us.
That is confidential for the moment but what I will say is that at no stage have we ever voted in favour of Blatter.
Delaney then reiterated his stance that the FAI would be voting against the incumbent president later today.
We have been consistent in that all through and I have as well. That is the bottom end of it. Today, like I said earlier, we will be voting against Blatter because he is not the man to lead FIFA going forward.
It seems very likely that stance will be a symbolic one more than anything given Blatter's significant support among FIFA member nations. However, for Delaney, the more FIFA descends into farce, the more likely it is that the alleged payment may become more of an issue.
