Mohamed bin Hammam of Qatar became the only contender for Blatter’s crown.

That vote never took place. On the eve of the election, Bin Hammam and Jack Warner, longtime personal friends of Blatter’s who had helped his rise to power, were accused of offering $40,000 bribes to members of Warner’s Caribbean constituency to vote for bin Hammam.

Warner resigned, complaining that the FIFA ethics panel set to consider the evidence was a court of hypocrites because, he said, gifts were part and parcel of the FIFA culture.

Bin Hammam was found guilty by the FIFA ethics panel and banned from any soccer activity for life. The Qatari called the panel a kangaroo court doing Blatter’s bidding and said he would go to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland, to prove his innocence. On Tuesday, he claimed FIFA never would have convicted and banned him if he were European.

But Hammam, Warner and Chung are out. Blatter remains, in his 13th year as FIFA president.

Blatter says that in October, he will present his reforms for a cleaner, transparent FIFA after the corruption that the news media exposed during the World Cup bidding process last December. He invited, without consulting his executive committee, the U.S. diplomat Henry A. Kissinger, the Spanish singer Plácido Domingo and the retired soccer player Johan Cruyff to help him find solutions to clean up FIFA’s image.

Kissinger appeared to be flattered to be asked. But long ago, while leading an American bid to stage the 1986 World Cup, Kissinger, the secretary of state under Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford, was reported to have said: “The politics of FIFA, they make me nostalgic for the Middle East.”

What Kissinger found then was that FIFA, under Havelange as president and with Blatter as general secretary, was anything but transparent in its dealings with billion-dollar bids for its global tournament.

The U.S. bid was undermined by a deal for television rights that Havelange had already promised to Mexico, which was awarded the 1986 tournament.