Birds of a feather stick together. And the sight of Sepp Blatter, the 78-year-old who has been Fifa president since 1998, beaming alongside Issa Hayatou, just 68 and head of African football since 1988, and Africa’s longest-serving dictator, the Equatorial Guinea president Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, following the Africa Cup of Nations final was a reminder that the Swiss is very much on the campaign trail. Smiling thinly, he may have been thinking of the three Uefa-endorsed rivals to his presidency in a campaign that officially kicked off this week and is only going to get more bitter.

The triumvirate of the former world footballer of the year Luís Figo, the Dutch FA president and former Ajax president, Michael van Praag, and the Jordanian royal Prince Ali Bin al-Hussein have their work cut out. A couple of weeks earlier Blatter was all smiles in St Petersburg with Vladimir Putin. Expect many more air miles to be clocked up before the campaign is through – all on official Fifa business, of course.

The long-serving Fifa president, who has reneged on an earlier promise that this would be his last term, took time out in Equatorial Guinea to sign a memorandum of understanding with the Confederation of African Football for the provision of future development and took a self-serving pop at the “racist” western media for reporting crowd trouble at the semi-final between Ghana and the host nation.

The latter is quite a trick, allowing him to endlessly claim that articles like this one are somehow part of a colonialist conspiracy. Called out on the tactic in São Paulo last summer, Blatter claimed to have “never been so insulted in all my life”.

At each Fifa congress, memorably likened by the FA chairman, Greg Dyke, to “something out of North Korea”, he will stand up and announce “bonus” payments to the member associations to wild applause. It may seem incredible that such nakedly transparent tactics still work. Yet distrust for the powerful European confederation – as well as fear of a club-led takeover of the world game – runs deep in the waters among many of Fifa’s 209 members in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.

Blatter knows exactly which buttons to press, although it is intriguing that even in his strongholds of support there are stirrings of dissent. Hayatou’s presence was a reminder of what tends to happen when Blatter is challenged. It was Hayatou, currently serving his seventh term as CAF president, who stood against Blatter as a Uefa-endorsed candidate in 2002.

Prince Ali bin al-Hussein of Jordan, another candidate for the Fifa presidency, criticised the governing body for interfering with an independent report. Photograph: C Villemain/Sipa/Rex

The campaign was dominated by claims of financial irregularities, abuse of power and double dealing in the wake of the spectacular collapse of ISL, the rights company later found to have been paying bribes from a $100m slush fund. Specific allegations against Blatter were not proven, although a Fifa ethics committee report later found that Blatter was “clumsy” rather than “criminal” in his handling of a $1m bribe meant for João Havelange, who ruled Fifa for more than two decades. True to form, Blatter survived the scandal and went on to win the election by 139 votes to 56. Ever since, he has expertly worked the Fifa corridors of power – a promise met here, a fixer enforcing his will there. Sometimes it is hard to tell where the obfuscation stops and the operations of the president’s office begin.

All this may appear ancient history but ever since he first secured victory in 1998 in Paris, amid allegations he denied of vote-buying and envelopes under hotel doors, Blatter has used similar tactics to string along his allies and oust his enemies. In the past week alone, evidence has emerged that one of Blatter’s closest advisers, Fifa’s chief lawyer Marco Villiger, requested amendments to a supposedly independent report by the governance expert professor Mark Pieth.

The report, the cornerstone of Blatter’s laughable promise to oversee a reform programme that would restore Fifa’s reputation in the wake of the scandal-hit 2011 election, was duly changed to excise references to the ISL affair and to the president himself. Fifa said it was standard practice. Perhaps it is in Zurich. Prince Ali was quick to draw parallels with the farce around the still unpublished Garcia report.

Meanwhile, the Chinese conglomerate Wanda agreed to pay $1.05bn for Infront, the media and rights agency whose chief executive is Blatter’s nephew Philippe. The company grew fat on the back of selling Fifa’s television rights around the world.

In short, it is business as usual at Fifa HQ. Blatter’s defenders will often insist he is not all powerful and has had to make deals and compromises all the way down the line in order to get things done.

Yet just as the IOC could not move on from the Salt Lake City bribery scandal until Juan Antonio Samaranch made way for Jacques Rogge, so it is impossible to imagine how Fifa’s image can ever be restored and the organisation reformed with a compromised Blatter at the helm.

The author David Goldblatt has made the perceptive point that the modern, bloated, committee-laden Fifa was minted in the image of its father figure Havelange. He perfected a style of sports politics modelled on the Brazilian way of doing business, in which personal, political and professional patronage and funds intermingled to the extent that it was often difficult to tell between them. Add Blatter’s Machiavellian cunning and the Swiss culture of secrecy to the mix and it is clear why his challengers face an uphill battle.

And yet between them, the curious triumvirate of Figo, Van Praag and Prince Ali – all clean-hands candidates – represent the best chance to shine a light on the Blatter era since he was levered into Fifa 40 years ago. Backing them requires a certain leap of faith: that they will not just simply represent more of the same, that they are not as transparently self-serving as those who have gone before, that they are not the puppets some accuse them of being, and that the Uefa president, Michel Platini (once Blatter’s chosen heir apparent), is not as compromised as he may sometimes appear.

Many idealistically hope for a total fresh start, a blank sheet of paper. But getting to there from here appears impossible. As Blatter well knows, the international community does not have the will nor the unanimity to waste energy forcing change in football.

Any result other than a Blatter victory on 29 May remains a long shot. He was momentarily wrong-footed if far from seriously wounded by the emergence of Van Praag, Figo and Prince Ali. But all have the ability to land blows in different ways and will ramp up the rhetoric in the coming weeks.

There are also practical cards to play. It remains one scandal among many that Fifa’s spending on football development projects ($183m) is dwarfed by operating expenses of $216m (including $102m on salaries) and another $60m spent on Fifa congress and the committees through which Blatter dispenses patronage and expenses. So there may be room to make Fifa’s millions go further.

Blatter is older now, shorn of some of his streetfighting Praetorian guard by the events of the past four years and presiding over a divided executive committee. His addiction is not only to luxury and privilege but to power. If he wins another four years, it will give him the opportunity to engineer a handover to his successor of choice. And so it will go on.

In the meantime hoping serious blows can be landed by a trio of credible challengers is the only sensible option short of declaring a plague on all their houses.

Blatter’s journey to the top marked by scandal

Born in the Swiss town of Visp in 1936, Blatter remains fond of reminding his critics that he was once also a journalist and a keen amateur footballer.

As director of sports timing and PR at the watchmaker Longines in the early 1970s he began to get involved in sports politics, which was then just starting to wake up to the potential for marrying commercial interests to previously amateur endeavour.

Blatter hungrily took to the opportunities on offer when he was levered in to Fifa in 1975 by Horst Dassler and the then-president João Havelange as its technical director. When he joined, Fifa had just 12 staff. By 1981 he was the general secretary and played a key role in the monetisation of the World Cup and creating the systems of patronage and perks that endure to this day.

By the time he became chief executive in 1990, he was nursing presidential ambitions and got his way in 1998 when the later disgraced Havelange stood aside. Having won a bitter battle with Lennart Johannson marked by allegations of bribery, he was then re-elected four years later following another controversial campaign against Issa Hayatou in 2002.

The collapse of ISL, the marketing agency that held the World Cup TV rights, was to turn into a long-running bribery scandal. Blatter was later found to have handled a $1m payment meant for Havelange but was dubbed “clumsy” rather than criminal.

He was duly re-elected unopposed in 2006 and 2011. But mired in new corruption allegations following the ousting of his 2011 presidential rival and one-time ally Mohamed bin Hammam and the controversial 2018-2022 World Cup bidding race, he vowed: “Reforms will be made.”

He also promised then to stand down after four years but having seen off the threat of term limits now insists: “A mission is never finished.”