Longtime FIFA president Sepp Blatter's 17-year run in power was interrupted on Thursday when he was suspended for the first time in his four-decade career at soccer's global governing body. Unending corruption allegations finally caught up to the 79-year-old Swiss when he was disciplined by the Ethics Committee, an arm of FIFA once created by Blatter himself.

The chairman of the committee's adjudicatory chamber, Hans Joachim Eckert, enacted the recommendation of the investigatory chamber that Blatter be provisionally suspended from all soccer activities for 90 days – with a possible extension of another 45 days. In the past week, Blatter had rejected calls from four major FIFA sponsors to step down immediately, rather than in February, as he has said he plans to.

UEFA president and FIFA vice president Michel Platini was hit with the same disciplinary action, as was FIFA general secretary Jerome Valcke, who had already been placed on mandatory leave last month.

For years, allegations of graft, abuse of power and bribery had dogged Blatter. But no evidence had ever been found, and no accusations ever stuck or materialized into real charges. This time around, however, the Swiss Attorney General has opened criminal proceedings into a pair of transactions.

The first was to former CONCACAF president and FIFA vice president Jack Warner of Trinidad and Tobago. He was charged in the Department of Justice's May 27 indictment and is currently fighting extradition to the United States. Blatter is accused of awarding Warner regional broadcast rights to the 2006 World Cup at a well-below-market rate for Warner to sell on at a profit.

The second is a payment of 2 million Swiss francs made to Platini in 2011 shortly before the Frenchman announced that he wouldn't be challenging Blatter for the FIFA presidency that year after all. They have both claimed that the payment was for work Platini had done as an advisor for Blatter from 1999 to 2002, although neither man has managed to explain why it took nine years for the bill to be paid.

Valcke, for his part, had already been relieved of his duties on Sept. 18 following allegations that he had passed his personal allotment of 2014 World Cup tickets on to a broker in order to be sold above face value, breaking FIFA's in-house rules.

FIFA's internal investigations into actions by Blatter, Platini and Valcke are ongoing. All of the accused claim they are innocent, of course. Members of both FIFA and UEFA's executive committees have called for emergency meetings.

The suspensions are as ill-timed as could be for the principals involved. Blatter has already announced that he would give up his presidency on February 26 – although he's since been wishy-washy on whether he'll actually follow through – when a new election will be held.

Blatter had won a fifth term on May 29 but said he would resign just four days later in the wake of the DoJ's sweeping indictment, which charged several longtime Blatter allies and implicated him by association – or at the very least posed troubling questions about the corrupt culture he had allowed to fester during his 17-year-reign. Blatter will now be barred from his office, or any other soccer office or stadium, for the bulk of his remaining term, if not all of it.

Platini has long been seen as the heir apparent to Blatter and had been biding his time in the UEFA presidency until the supreme job opened up. He was considered a frontrunner even after the Swiss investigation was announced.

Valcke, too, had aspirations of making a run at the presidency.

South Korea's Chung Mong-joon, meanwhile, who is also a former FIFA vice president and another man with presidential aspirations, was fined and banned from soccer for six years on Thursday, knocking him out of the quickly thinning field. He was found guilty of several rules violations in the bidding process for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.

Prince Ali Bin Al Hussein of Jordan could very well be the leading candidate for February's election. (AFP Photo) More

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