Last November the President of the Deutscher Fussball-Bund (the German Football Association), Reinhard Rauball, feared the "secession" of UEFA from FIFA as a last resort for the reluctance of the Blatter presidency to release the results of the global football body's internal investigation into the procedures for the assignment of the 2018 and 2022 World Cup finals, to be held in Russia and Qatar respectively.

Already in 2011, for the same reasons, the Brits evoked the exit of the European federation from FIFA. Without the football of the Old Continent Joseph Blatter would have ended up empty-handed. UEFA could easily organize its own World Cup, inviting individual national federations from around the globe to participate according to more transparent standards and stringent criteria than what is offered by the long-serving government of Sepp Blatter and his lieutenants from exotic countries.

We do not know how this affair will end and it makes no sense to issue hasty and bombastic judgments on social networks as was done by that "masaniello" of Diego Armando Maradona, but Mr. Blatter cannot think of resisting the pressure of those (including big commercial sponsors) who are asking him to quit the nth candidacy at the top of FIFA. The presumption of innocence is a must (as has been suggested by Vladimir Putin who is clearly interested in defending Russia 2018), but there is a matter of opportunity.

Whatever the result of the court case and the political-sport struggle will be, the lesson that we should draw from the matter is the following: we must take the organization of major sporting events, primarily the World Cup and the Olympics, away from the sticky hands of politics, particularly from not free countries.

For nearly a century such mega-events have covered and thus given legitimacy to some of the worst expressions of humanity: from the affirmation of power of Nazi Berlin in 1936 to the 1978 World Cup in Argentina, organized by the same military junta which made his domestic opponents disappear; from the intense corruption of Italy in the 1990s to the financial abyss caused by Athens 2004. Numerous economic analyses show substantial ineffectiveness of these mega-events to produce economic growth in host cities and countries - with rare exceptions, the effects are short term and the costs for the state budgets and the taxpayers exorbitant.

For decades Sepp Blatter and Blatterism have contributed to inflating the bubble of the mega-sporting events. Regardless of the involvement in the corruption the American investigators accuse them of, they should cease to occupy the FIFA militarily. If, however, Blatter continues to run and is reconfirmed with the help of votes from Sao Tome and Principe and the Cayman Islands, it would really be the case for UEFA to leave with the ball in hand.

• Falasca
• FIFA
• UEFA
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