There is a theory that one of the things that keeps Sepp Blatter in what, until very recently, seemed like such an unassailable position as FIFA president was the money that FIFA had given in support to developing countries - which have the same electoral clout in his election as advanced economies like Germany.

It is, as many have pointed out, perfectly possible for Blatter to win a presidential election without any European or North American votes - as you can see from this pie chart:

BBC Copyright: BBC

But it's not entirely clear to me that developing countries have actually done particularly disproportionately well out of these development programmes. Laura tweeted a link earlier to the FIFA development spending statistics. The website doesn't appear to state what period they cover, but I believe it's a fairly long one as, in total, they substantially outstrip FIFA's yearly revenues. I've asked FIFA to clarify, and so hopefully will be able to update this later. Either way, it gives us an idea of FIFA's financial commitments:

BBC Copyright: BBC

Note that Europe actually apparently does rather well out of FIFA. But a more meaningful statistic might be the spendingper country - Europe has many more members than Oceania, so it would get more money. Here are the figures adjusted for the number of members in each area:

BBC Copyright: BBC

As you can see, Europe gets rather fewer Goal programme projects - but then that doesn't feel obviously suspicious as you wouldn't have thought that a continent full of rich countries would need as much development. And they actually get a comparable amount of financial assistance.

One last chart - this time from FIFA's 2014 annual financial report. It shows how much FIFA spends on everything, development, and Blatter's Goal programme (the period is 2011-14):

BBC Copyright: BBC

Doesn't seem like a lot does it?

And remember that Blatter is hardly unique in promising more development funding. Other candidates for the presidency promised it too. If this is a trump card, it's not unique to him.

Now, none of these charts prove anything either way. And, of course, an extra dollar of assistance means a lot more to Zambia than it does to Germany, so it might be that the development spending is a bigger factor for developing countries in their voting decisions than developed ones.

But on a casual look, it's not clear to me that the raw figures are as skewed as some have made them out to be.