Football: Team America comes to the rescue yet again

FIFA President Sepp Blatter. Photo / AP

It felt as if Sepp Blatter's shuffling through the Fifa exit door should have been set to the plangent strains of Ennio Morricone.

Or perhaps the theme tune to Beverly Hills Cop. If football's endlessly tumultuous week has taught us anything, it is that the iron fist of the law has a habit of striking the most corrupt bastions in sport inside a star-spangled glove.

Legions of European adversaries had tried and failed to bring Blatter to account, but it took the combined might of the FBI, IRS, DOJ and every other glamorous acronym in the United States legal system to boot him out of his Zurich lair for good. This was justice, Team America-style.

"Soccer is a beautiful game because the pitch is flat," James Comey, the FBI director, intoned. "The game was hijacked, the pitch tilted."

Then, this delight from Richard Weber, head of the Inland Revenue Service's criminal investigation unit: "This is the World Cup of fraud, and today we are issuing Fifa a red card."

The funereal statements in New York have offered a further demonstration of how gravely America regards white-collar crime, especially in the sporting sphere. It was also the FBI, let us not forget, which blew the lid off the Ponzi schemes of Allen Stanford, once cricket's prospective saviour, and helped to throw him into a Florida prison for 110 years.

And it was the ferocious perseverance of the US Anti-Doping Agency that led to the unveiling, beyond any last doubt, of the industrial-scale drugs culture that surrounded Lance Armstrong and friends in cycling.

In this period of unprecedented crisis, Fifa's besieged hierarchy can reflect that their greatest mistake was to stick their heads into the hornets' nest of the US judicial process. Federal agents are empowered to travel to the ends of the Earth to pursue anybody suspected of using US dollars for ill-gotten gains, or of manipulating its banking system through illegal payments.

It is an object lesson for Fifa to consider, post-Blatter, about what can happen when the full weight of American law enforcement is brought to bear.

Chuck Blazer, the prodigious charlatan who has since turned FBI informant, must rue the day that he tried to grease his colleagues' palms with greenbacks. Of the 30 banks that handled Fifa's dubious transactions, several are American. And when you start trying to commit corporate crime with notes that have George Washington's face on, you are, as they say in New York, in deep schtuck.

This is not to suggest that American interference is uniformly welcomed.

Vladimir Putin, Russia's president, is only too eager to depict the assault on Blatter-ville as the arrogant posturing of the evil empire. Many of the smaller associations, often ignored on the global political stage but made to feel hugely important by their deposed leader's patronage, are not exactly overjoyed, either, about their merry carousel being halted by a meddlesome superpower.

But Fifa's day of judgment had to come somehow, and if it needed the Feds to cut up rough, then so be it. No governing body, least of all one accused of exploiting the people's game as a screen for outright criminality, can be permitted to act with impunity.

- Telegraph Group Ltd