The expulsion of Sepp Blatter by Fifa itself has emphatically ended an era at football’s world governing body but huge work remains to cleanse the overblown, questionable culture Blatter shaped and embodied over 40 years in Zurich.

From voices outside football, including the Conservative MP Damian Collins and Labour’s shadow sports minister Clive Efford, there are calls for an independent process but in reality their influence, like that of the Football Association, is slight.

Promises of a new era rely on reform proposals continuing internally even while the US and Swiss criminal investigations continue, and the US law firm Quin Emanuel conducts a forensic examination of all Fifa’s files in its Zurich HQ. The fact Blatter started the reform process in 2011, including the introduction of the ethics committee process that has ultimately dealt with him, partly explains his continuing bewilderment and denials at the flailing press conference he held after sustaining his ban.

Yet even with Fifa and particularly its American confederations engulfed in scandal, and the president and others banned, an election is nevertheless continuing with five candidates vying to become Blatter’s successor.

The winner stands to be responsible for ushering in the reform plans which partly proscribe the role, greatly restricting it from the freewheeling influence Blatter and his predecessor and mentor, the Brazilian João Havelange, wielded for a combined 41 years, after Havelange’s election in 1974 and Blatter’s in 1998. Indeed, ending the spectacle of people serving so long is itself a cornerstone of the proposals devised by Domenico Scala, the business executive brought in by Blatter to spearhead the reforms.

Scala, whose proposals have largely been approved by the executive committee, which will also be reconfigured, is essentially looking to reshape Fifa along the lines of a modern corporation, with basic governance structures glaringly absent all these years. The term limit he chose is still too long for some – three terms of four years in office – but is nevertheless half the 24 years Havelange ruled as president during which, it is now known, he took millions of dollars in bribes from the marketing company ISL. It is also significantly less than Blatter’s 17 years – he was intending to serve until 2019 before agreeing to stand down early after the multiple arrests in the week of his election.

Scala’s most significant proposed reform is to split the governing executive committee, in effect the Fifa board, along the lines of German and Swiss corporations. They have a governing board to set strategy and oversee the work of an executive board which conducts the company’s day-to-day business. In Scala’s plans, the “political” officials, directly elected by the congress of 209 national football associations around the world, will form a 36-person governing council, responsible for overall strategy and direction. This will oversee an executive board of professionals whom they appoint to run the operational work and seal multibillion-dollar sponsorships and TV deals centred on the prime global property: the four-yearly World Cup.

The idea for protecting the World Cup bidding process from voter-bribery allegations now dogging all recent tournaments and the votes for Russia and Qatar as hosts in 2018 and 2022 respectively, is to enlarge the constituency beyond the executive committee and have all 209 associations vote. That looks unwieldy and unsatisfactory to many, who believe the location of Word Cups should be more systematically planned than the flawed, rival bidding campaigns that have sunk so far into disrepute.

Scala has also called for the six global confederations – the US indictments allege corruption committed in the north, central and South American regional confederations, not at Fifa in Zurich – to themselves undergo reforms, including integrity checks for their officials.

Fifa’s congress has to approve all these reforms, at the same time as electing a president to oversee them, in February.

Collins wants it all to add up to genuine change, not “shifting the deck chairs on the Titanic,” but there is no meaningful pressure for an independent process. Scala, when presenting the plans in July, is understood to have told the executive committee the ideal would be for them all to resign and that 12 people unconnected to the past should take over. When this was greeted by a stunned silence, he unveiled the current proposals as Plan B. For now, these are the best that football has to hope for.