LONDON — For all the negative light cast on Chuck Blazer, we need to remember he was a mere follower of those in FIFA who had corrupted the so-called Beautiful Game long before he arrived on the scene as the most powerful person in American soccer.

Blazer, sick with colon cancer, was the focus last weekend of an investigation by The Daily News, which reported he had cooperated with the F.B.I. and the Internal Revenue Service as an informant after he failed to pay income taxes on millions of dollars he made from undeclared soccer-related activities.

As one of the top officials in U.S. soccer and the regional ruling body known as Concacaf, Blazer could hardly be avoided in the game. He was a big figure physically and reveled in self- promotion. For two decades he cut television deals as the sport grew in his region, and from his office in Trump Tower in Manhattan, he would greet the great and the good with a colorful macaw, called Max, perched on his shoulder. When he went abroad, he filled his personal website with photographs of himself with Vladimir V. Putin in Russia or on a private jet with Nelson Mandela.

Those two were passing acquaintances. The greater influence on Blazer — his role model in doing business — was the Brazilian João Havelange.