Echoing the long drawn-out but still spectacular toppling of old, discredited rulers in loathed regimes around the world, Sepp Blatter, Fifa’s president since 1998, has finally felt the tidal wave of corruption scandals seep through his office door and been suspended from the organisation he lorded over for so long. His secretary-general, Jérôme Valcke, already put on leave following allegations of a ticketing scam, is also now formally suspended by Fifa’s “ethics committee”. For 90 days, pending further investigation of serious charges against its two most senior figures, football’s world governing body has decapitated itself.

Two of those who eagerly declared themselves clean-up candidates to replace Blatter in the February presidential election he scheduled as his time to step down, have been swept away in the wash. For Michel Platini, president of European football’s governing body Uefa, his own 90-day suspension while the 2011 payment to him by Blatter of 2m Swiss francs (£1.35m) is investigated, surely finishes any thought he can still stand and be a credible next president of Fifa. The Korean Chung Mong-joon, previously a long-term member of the Fifa executive committee, has been banned from football for six years, apparently over a $777m football development fund he proposed in 2010, linked to Korea’s 2022 World Cup, and so his declared candidacy to become the president is destroyed.

These four former masters of the football universe now join the crowded roll-call of the banned, arrested, indicted, suspended or under investigation, in a multiple pile-up which has wrecked and ruined the authority of this once-impregnable organisation.

Sepp Blatter, Michel Platini and Jérôme Valcke suspended for 90 days. Guardian

Against that backdrop of mountainous corruption allegations, it looks like fantasy for Fifa to believe it can continue with the parallel universe of a process to reform itself from within, and the election of a new president. To have two out of three declared candidates effectively knocked out even before the due day for formally declaring their candidacies, 26 October, makes its own statement: the organisation is nowhere near ready for an election of a president.

To wonder who that person should be only shows that the wrong question is being asked – the one set by Blatter when he unilaterally decided to step down days after his re-election in June was surreally pooped by the arrests of Fifa officials in Zurich on US corruption charges. The fact Fifa itself and the world’s national football associations, including the British FAs, are still going along with that Blatter plan, coupled with a reform process wholly conducted from within and amounting to the rearrangement of some rules, demonstrates that – remarkably, given the unprecedented scale of scandal - Fifa and football are still in denial.

No future can be charted without the starting point of a proper, non-delusional recognition of the catastrophic state they are in. As one scandal has followed another, a fug of punch-drunkenness has crept over the Fifa story, so that extraordinary, scandal-ridden revelations become almost normal. So the startling nature of the implosion has to be continually restated. Of the 24 executive committee members who were in 2010 preparing to select the host countries for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, two were suspended before the vote. Of the 22 who did vote: Jack Warner, the former Caribbean football chief, Qatari Mohamed bin Hammam and the American Chuck Blazer are banned for life after serial corruption scandals; the Paraguayan Nicolás Leoz and Brazilian Ricardo Teixeira resigned before being exposed for taking bribes, along with Fifa’s former president João Havelange; the Cameroonian Issa Hayatou was censured by the International Olympic Committee for receiving money, although he insists it was for his Confederation of African Football. Now Chung is banned for six years and Blatter is suspended, over an allegedly undervalued TV rights contract with Warner in 2005, and, with Platini, over that 2011 payment for work Platini did at Fifa which finished in 2002.

Criminal cases and investigations are proceeding in the US and Switzerland, including into the World Cup voting process, and Fifa’s own ethics committee is examining more allegations surrounding it, including rule-breaking by vote collusion, which Teixeira recently appeared to admit.

Fifa is financially rich but administratively bankrupt and real change cannot come from within. Photograph: Harold Cunningham/Getty Images

If this toxic, multiple collapse of leaders and reputations, with more to come and no end in sight, was happening to Fifa’s finances, the organisation would long ago have been declared insolvent. A standard process would then take over: professionally qualified outsiders – administrators or receivers – would have been appointed to take legal charge of Fifa, out of the control of its executives. The insolvency practitioners would clear out and liquidate what they find to be unsalvageable, work to reshape the heart of the body which could have a credible future – which in Fifa’s case remains the golden, glittering, lucrative prize of football itself – then hand it back to new custodians with reformed structures in place to enable it to be run properly. That is the kind of process now being increasingly talked about as the only credible solution for a morass of scandal on this scale: a temporary handover to an independent body which would oversee the necessary reforms and restructuring. Some talk of the former United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan as a credible possible candidate to be asked to head it, but this seems again to confuse the simplistic attraction of choosing a figurehead with the need for wholesale reform.

Fifa, of course, despite this near-unbelievable cascade of scandal, is far from financially bankrupt, given the adoration around the world for football and the $5.4bn this reaped for Blatter’s organisation in the 2011-14 period. To say it is morally bankrupt does not quite meet the moment; it is a judgment, a matter of opinion, and this breakdown is more factual, real, than that. To have so many top people removed in circumstances of such proven or alleged disgrace means that Fifa is administratively, functionally bankrupt.

It is not at all clear that this will come to be recognised from within, and the core issue of self-interest will always discourage member associations from handing power to an outside body, even temporarily. The sponsors could extend their unprecedented recent intervention into a lobbying for some independent control, but it has always jarred to ask Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Budweiser and the other brand marketers to sort out football’s future.

However it happens, this new vacuum should precipitate total change at Fifa, and it seems like a parallel universe to believe this can happen through fire-fighting internal reforms, and a new president chosen from the shredded ranks of whoever is left standing.