Fifa's history is one of chaos and alleged corruption, but the president remains while his allies turned enemies have fallen

On Sunday, Joseph S Blatter attended a ceremony on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius to celebrate the renaming of the country's FA headquarters in his honour.

The Fifa president would perhaps say it was a fitting tribute, given his promotion of African football and the amount of "development" money poured into the continent over recent decades. His critics would say it was typical of his egomania and note the importance of African votes in keeping him atop world football for 15 years.

Either way, the 77-year-old – clutching his trumpeted but now tatty "roadmap to reform" at the Fifa Congress which began on Thursday – no doubt felt a glow of satisfaction as warm as the sun that will this week beat down on delegates from Fifa's 209 members.

Two years ago the mood was very different, when an avalanche of corruption allegations threatened to engulf him and the organisation.

Following brutal criticism of the chaotic race for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, which virtually invited corruption with its ill-defined rules, sponsors began to exert pressure of their own and the ISL affair lingered in the background. After years of seeming untouchable, it was thought Fifa was crumbling from within and would at last be forced into reform.

At the Fifa Congress in Zurich that followed, day after day of newspaper headlines brought forth lurid tales of brown envelopes stuffed with cash, historic allegations of vote rigging that went back all the way to Blatter's first presidential election victory in 1998 and a series of scandals that left his position looking untenable.

But the Swiss is nothing if not a survivor. By 1998 he had already been employed at Fifa for 23 years, 17 of them as general secretary at the right hand of the all-powerful Brazilian João Havelange, forging alliances, calling in favours and creating debts that would have to be paid.

Mohammed bin Hammam, the Qatari who dramatically came unstuck when challenging for the presidency in 2011 amid allegations that he had bribed Carribbean Football Union officials for their votes with bills in brown envelopes, is just one of a string of former allies turned enemies who have been recently cast from Fifa's gilded Zurich HQ.

Many of those names echo down the decades as examples of Fifa's bloated and at times corrupt modus operandi. One by one, the cast who benefited from Fifa's huge growth over three decades as money poured in from commercial partners and broadcasters have exited stage left.

Jack Warner, the Trinidadian Concacaf president who revelled in his role as kingmaker during the sometimes farcical 2018 and 2022 races for World Cup hosts and has been involved in a string of controversies down the years, resigned days before the conclusion of a Fifa investigation into claims he helped facilitate the paying of bribes as part of Bin Hammam's bid to unseat Blatter.

He has subsequently been accused of embezzling Concacaf funds by an independent report commissioned by his successors.

The same report found that Chuck Blazer, the rotund former Concacaf general secretary who documented his travels to meet world leaders on Fifa business on his blog, had taken $15m (£9.9m) in commissions from 1998 onwards and used the organisation's funds to "finance his personal lifestyle". Blazer denies the claims.

Ricardo Teixeira, the man who married Havelange's daughter and was all powerful in Brazilian football for more than two decades, also resigned from the Fifa executive committee in March last year, citing ill health.

Nicolás Leoz, the Paraguayan who the former FA chairman David Triesman claimed asked for a knighthood in return for his World Cup vote and was president of Conmebol for 26 years, is another who resigned on the grounds of "ill health", just days before Fifa's final report on the ISL scandal in which he was implicated was published.

As Blatter looks around the table at his 24-strong executive committee in the meetings that will precede the congress, he will see a vastly changed – and considerably younger – cast of faces.

Leoz was the fifth member of the Fifa executive committee who voted in December 2010 on the World Cup hosts to leave with outstanding corruption allegations against him.

In all, 12 executive committee members have been accused of some form of corruption since October 2010 with Leoz, Warner, Bin Hammam, Teixeira, Blazer, Amos Adamu, Reynald Temarii and Vernon Manilal Fernando facing the most serious allegations. Leoz, Warner, Bin Hammam, Teixeira and Blazer have resigned with Bin Hammam banned from football for life. All of them have repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

Adamu was banned for three years and Temarii for one year, while the Sri Lankan Fernando has now been banned for eight years, despite Fifa not publicly shedding any light on his alleged transgressions.

Meanwhile Havelange, Blatter's mentor, has been almost entirely disgraced. Now 97, he was forced to resign from the International Olympic Committee days before a hearing that would have suspended him over the ISL allegations and last month resigned his position as Fifa honorary president.

A report compiled by Fifa's ethics committee chairman, Hans Joachim Eckert, laid out how both Havelange and his former son-in-law, Teixeira, had taken a series of bribes over an eight-year period from the now defunct sports marketing agency ISL.

Their behaviour was described as "morally and ethically reproachable". But Blatter, who was not accused of accepting bribes himself, escaped with being described as "clumsy" rather than "criminal".

Yet the central charge that has dogged Blatter's tenure – that in March 1997, when he was still secretary general and a year before he won a bitterly contested election to become president, a $1m bribe meant for Havelange crossed his desk – was confirmed. The report confirmed that ISL systemically paid out bribes – estimated at $100m — to sports officials between 1992 and May 2000. The company collapsed with debts of $300m in 2001.

Yet Blatter, for whom the affair is so damaging because it links him to the institutionalised corruption that was a feature of that era, has interpreted the report as allowing him to close the door on one of the most damaging periods in Fifa's history.

He has also spent much of the last two years trumpeting his "roadmap to reform". The removal of so many of the old guard should have been an opportunity for Blatter, divesting him of the baggage that came with those to whom he owed his position. But for his critics, the roadmap has been full of dead ends and blind alleys. First Transparency International, which had offered to work with Fifa to overhaul its structures, walked away in "disappointment".

Then the independent governance committee, overseen by Mark Pieth, was over time reduced to the position of a pressure group as their work was handed over to the general secretaries of the six regional confederations.

Yet Blatter's tactics appear to have worked. Much of the heat is off and the media focus has moved on. Some shrug their shoulders and say some progress is better than none.

The Football Association is working hard to reintegrate itself into world football, so is keen not to rock the boat. Outgoing FA chairman David Bernstein gave a cautious welcome to the progress made last week.

"I believe they are making some meaningful progress. They have put quite some effort into governance and audit. The extent of it and how it is pushed through, we'll have to see," he said.

Blatter's incremental, tortuously slow process has delivered some progress. Meanwhile, more plausible individuals have replaced those forced out, some of whom say the right things about wanting more accountability and transparency.

The long overdue addition of a woman to the executive committee, and the possibility of more, and the introduction of an overhauled ethics committee and a companion adjudicatory body, are to be welcomed.

The most meaningful changes, however, were gradually dropped as the work of the independent governance committee stalled. There will be no independent advisers appointed to the Fifa executive committee, let alone independent non-executive members. And measures to publish the salaries and expenses of Fifa executive committee members and officials have been quietly dropped. Fifa's annual bill for wages and other employee costs hit more than $90m for the first time in 2012.

Even those proposals that will be voted upon, including age and term limits for the Fifa president and the executive, are far from certain to achieve the 75% majority required among the 209 voters. A proposed background check on new members of the executive committee may also fail to gain the necessary support.

Alexandra Wrage, chair of the anti-corruption body Trace International, recently resigned in frustration at the inability of the so-called independent governance committee to effect change.

She said she was "frustrated and surprised' that "really bland, straightforward governance provisions" had been knocked back. The other members of the ICG have vowed to struggle on beyond the 2013 congress.

Even if age and term limits were introduced, they would not apply to those currently in office, including Blatter.

Pieth, who oversaw the now fractured ICG process, has said it is "naive" to suggest that efforts at reform should be refracted through one man. But it remains impossible to see how perceptions of Fifa can ever be overhauled while Blatter remains at the helm. Free of the turmoil and intense media scrutiny that placed Blatter in the eye of the storm in 2011, it feels like the "football family" has largely reverted to type.

Jean-Marie Weber, the so-called "bagman" who distributed the ISL bribes around the sporting world, was spotted in London last week during Uefa's congress.

The Uefa president Michel Platini said "I tip my hat" to the now disgraced Havelange, who he called a "legendary" figure.

The grave danger is that Blatter will be able to tick off "reform" as though it is just another agenda item at congress – an event that traditionally takes on the appearance of a rally rather than a democratic summit.

"We have had some problems inside Fifa starting in 2010 and then in 2011 we had the idea to go into a reform," he said matter-of-factly on Friday, as though the idea only occurred to him then. "It was a reform to bring back the football community and the recognition and the perception of the world of football in the right place. We are not yet finished but we are nearby."

Stereotyped by many as a buffoon for his ill-timed public pronouncements on racism, homosexuality and women's football, when it comes to politics Blatter is a genius. He has seen off his enemies, and in doing so been able to claim reform. Meanwhile, he looks set to stand for a fifth term. The only cloud on Blatter's horizon, and it is potentially a very dark one, is an ongoing FBI investigation into the activities of Fifa's murky past.

Justifying Wrage's exit, Trace said earlier this year that Fifa's main problem was that it "remains the closed society that fuelled its problems to begin with".

This week's events in the Indian Ocean, beyond the budgets of most news organisations who would scrutinise them, are unlikely to do much to shift that view.