“I cannot deny something that I haven’t done,” declares the Fifa presidential frontrunner Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim al-Khalifa, a statement which suggests he can only deny something he has done. He certainly denies having headed up a committee which identified dissident athletes during the 2011 Bahrain pro-democracy uprisings (many of whom were imprisoned and tortured), despite an announcement at the time by Bahrain’s official government news agency that he was to take this post, and an Associated Press report from the same era which also described him as the committee’s chair.

“It’s not just damaging me,” he frets to the BBC of these mysterious contemporaneous documents, “it’s damaging the people and the country.”

And I’ve no doubt the sensitivities of the Bahraini people are always his primary concern. Still, I hope no one ever tells Sheikh Salman that his country is consistently ranked near the very bottom of any index that measures freedom, his family’s regime considered among the most authoritarian on the planet. The shock of it could give him a fit of the vapours.

Yet for a man who has not clocked up a whole lot of hours inside the democracy simulator, his grasp of electoral politics is strong. Given that the vast majority of Fifa’s member associations have about as much interest in the organisation being cleaned up as they have in football, Sheikh Salman has moved quickly to dismiss the mad idea that what Fifa actually needs is a genuine outsider to begin the mammoth task of reform. As he told the BBC: “You wouldn’t put a baker in charge of a bank.” Debatable. What if it was 2006 and Mr Kipling expressed an interest in running Lehman Brothers?

It looks like we’ll never know, because the list of runners and riders for the Fifa presidential election is finally in – and it does not make an exceedingly good read. Behold, seven good men and true. Well, seven men, anyway. To the untrained eye, the headshots of the candidates could easily be mistaken for one of those increasingly familiar galleries of Fifa executives who are wanted or already charged by prosecutors.

Indeed, Michel Platini occupies the intersection of the Venn diagram, being both under investigation for corruption and a candidate in the great anti-corruption election. I assume he is deluded enough to imagine himself the Aung San Suu Kyi of this process – under the equivalent of house arrest, yet still standing on heroic principle.

Back in the real world, meanwhile, the only way these men could be considered new brooms is if they were placed next to a recently unearthed fossilised sweeping implement believed to date back to the early Iron Age.

Almost the most excruciating entrant of all is the 11th-hour candidate, Uefa’s Swiss general secretary Gianni Infantino, who was clearly pushed forward by a European governing body devoid of anything approaching serious quality, but desperate to have someone to vote for that wasn’t Sheikh Salman. A Platini lieutenant who indicates wanly that he’d stand aside should his suspended boss somehow manage to get rid of the allegations against him, his last-minute candidacy only serves to underscore the moral inadequacy of the various Uefa members, who can see that the sheikh will likely be the winner but reckon they can just about cover their arses politically back home if they vote for someone else.

What Uefa should really be considering, now they have surveyed the field and the way in which the wind is blowing, is the possibility of withdrawing from Fifa. Nuclear options increasingly feel like the only way to force the radical change the world governing body needs, and if Europe truly was the moral beacon it likes to fancy itself within the game, then this secession would be starting to feel inevitable. When you consider the financial allegations against Blatter are actually less morally repugnant than the human rights ones against Sheikh Salman … well, what are you really saving your depth charge for? Megatron to get through to the second round on a bye?

As for whether such a game-changer is even remotely on the cards, the smoke signals are not encouraging at present. It doesn’t help that our own emissaries to European HQ are the FA chairman Greg Dyke and his vice-chairman David Gill, who have reportedly told the FA council “the only people they could really trust within Fifa and Uefa are each other”. I don’t want to dampen any flicker of optimism but it might help to think of them as Bob Hope and No Hope. These are the men who precipitously declared their support for Platini, only to see him engulfed in scandal. Yet instead of appearing remotely chastened by a turn of events that could only have been predicted by a few million casual observers of the situation, they had the FA issue a bizarre and wholly reprehensible statement in which they wished Platini “every success” in getting off the hook.

So no one in their right mind can expect the English component of Uefa to show any real backbone. But if only the other, more serious nations would consider it. There really is nothing so terminally craven as forever waiting for the likes of McDonald’s or Coca-Cola to take the decisive “moral” stand, or imagining that it will be enough to have one of your own suits lose honourably to a man whose family regime stand accused of torturing footballers.