There is more to Sepp Blatter than meets the eye. The Fifa president’s rise to the top of world football has been slow and deliberate. Blatter, 72, fell in love with the game when he was a schoolboy in Switzerland and set his heart on becoming a professional player. He did not make the grade, but he played as a striker in the top Swiss amateur league for 23 years until 1971.

Realising that he was not going to become the next Pelé, Blatter studied for a degree in business administration and economics and worked in public relations and as a sports journalist before becoming the general secretary of the Swiss Ice Hockey Federation in 1964. It was there that he honed the diplomatic skills and developed the political antennae that helped him to become the president of Fifa in 1998 after a fierce battle with Lennart Johansson, who was president of Uefa at the time.

Blatter got his first taste of football administration in 1970, when he became a director of Neuchâtel Xamax, and got his big break in 1972, when he became a director of Longines, the Swiss watch manufacturer that timed the Olympic Games. As the company’s director of sports timing and public relations, Blatter worked at the Olympic Games in Munich in 1972, but his first love was football and three years later he was appointed the technical director of Fifa. He made his mark by introducing new tournaments, such as the Under-17 and Under-20 World Cups, and six years later became general secretary.

His new job opened the doors to a world of influence and opulence at football’s top tables and helped Blatter to cultivate the friendships and votes that would lead to him winning the election to become the most powerful man in the sport.

Since then there has been a steady stream of proposals — some visionary, some half-baked — that have kept Blatter at the heart of the debate about the future of the game. There were golden goals and silver goals, quotas and slave comments, bigger goals and second referees, and allegations of corruption when Michel Zen-Ruffinen, the former Fifa general secretary, claimed in 2002 that Fifa had lost more than £200 million during Blatter’s presidency. “I have worked hard,” Blatter said. “Only those who don’t work never commit errors.”