It would be unfair to tar the Fifa president with the football cliche: "You never know which Sepp Blatter is going to turn up." In fairness, you can always be absolutely sure to expect a tenuously coherent uber-survivor with an alarmingly untreated Napoleon complex.

What can change, though – and seemingly from one day to the next – is Blatter's assessment of his powers and those of the game of which he regards himself as the earthly representative. These are by turns borderline intergalactic, and vanishingly small. "Football has the power to build a better future," he declared during a keynote address at the Oxford Union last month. He went on to explain that Fifa's job is "helping communities in need through football". "Fifa exists … because we love the game, recognise its power and feel a strong duty to society."

Only a couple of weeks earlier, however, he had seemed to be having one of his little-old-us days when confronted by the mounting evidence of the appalling working conditions suffered by migrant workers building the Fifa dream in Qatar. "We are not the ones that can actually change it," he explained self-effacingly. "This is not Fifa's remit." And yet, only a couple of years ago, Fifa's general secretary, Jérôme Valcke, ruled that workers' rights in Qatar were a concern of Fifa's as "we have a responsibility that goes beyond the development of football".

So which is it? Hard to say, given a similar hokey cokey a few months ago, when the Confederations Cup brought Blatter to Brazil – the lucky country chosen to host the 2014 World Cup, but whose ungrateful citizens were taking to the streets to let it be known they'd have preferred the money spent on fripperies such as public services. "I can understand people are not happy but they should not use football to make their demands heard," Blatter decided. "If this happens again we have to question whether we made the wrong decision awarding the hosting rights."

It's all so confusing, isn't it? Still, I think we can hazard a guess at which assessment of Fifa's powers and remit will be deployed in response to Amnesty International's damning assessment into where we're at now with those workers' rights in Qatar.

Another month, another miserable report on the 2022 folly, and the Amnesty one – published this week – makes for grim reading. As my colleague David Conn highlighted, Qatar is one of those places where the classification "labour camp" is regarded as acceptable, and where local statute explicitly decrees that migrant workers must be ghettoised away from "districts where Qatari families live", with the "sponsorship" system binding many in a form of indentured servitude.

So while Blatter has yet to be drawn on the matter, this is doubtless the sort of document that will trigger a theatrical sigh along the lines of: "Football? What can football do about all this?"

In the end, though, you have to wonder how long Fifa ought to be permitted to make fanciful claims without producing a shred of evidence to back them up. No other billion-dollar business could get away with it. Blatter has been Fifa president since around 1938 and has been making unsubstantiated statements about the transformative power of his quixotically awarded tournaments for at least as long. How is it possible that in all that time he has never publicly had to adduce one single thing that would be counted as a statistic, or a piece of research, to back up his claims? Where are the measurable targets, considering Fifa is effectively awarding billion‑dollar contracts? Where are the key performance indicators?

If football is big business, as its custodians constantly remind us "consumers" that it is, show me another big business in which such unaccountable woolliness would be permitted. While endless studies exist on the economic benefits or otherwise a country may expect from hosting a major sporting event – and more often than not, as you probably know, the costs outweigh the benefits – no Fifa executive to my knowledge has ever pointed to a single notable one that attempts to quantify the social and human benefits always claimed for the World Cup.

If Fifa is so confident of these boons, perhaps this is something it would consider commissioning, if only to silence the cynics once and for all. Should it find itself strapped for the few hundred thousand euros it would cost to do the research properly, it could always club together with the International Olympic Committee, whose nebulous claims are similarly untried.

As for what the researchers would find … far be it from me to prejudge a proper study on a mere hunch, but my inkling is that the ludicrous claims the World Cup is an engine of human empowerment would be for ever punctured. No dictator or authoritarian government would bid to host a major sporting event if they had deemed it even a possibility that it would inconveniently enhance the status of their subjects, which is precisely why the Chinese government was perfectly relaxed about hosting the Olympics, and the emir of Qatar feels similarly emboldened.

They know very well that "human progress" or "social change", or whatever byword we're using for democracy this week, will not be the result of their lavishing tens of billions on a sporting event – and Blatter is far too canny an operator not to know it himself after all these years.