Never mind the corruption arrests and charges of racketeering, fraud and money laundering at Fifa. What skeletons have recently emerged from Sepp Blatter’s closet?

Fifa’s reputation as international sport’s grubby uncle reached its nadir last week with the arrest of seven officials in a five-star Zurich hotel and 14 others charged by the US Department of Justice. But away from the multiple allegations of racketeering, wire fraud and money-laundering levelled at various Fifa officials, some fascinating details have emerged for non-Fifa watchers about the organisation and its re-elected president, Sepp Blatter …

Sepp Blatter made money as a young man as a wedding singer and a yodeller

He was also once elected the president of the World Society of Friends of Suspenders. Make of that what you will.

Fifa’s president modelled himself on a forgotten American film star

Eddie Constantine left the US to follow his wife to Paris in the early 50s. He became France’s most popular male movie star (and later found global acclaim for his role in Godard’s Alphaville). Constantine’s wider legacy may not be among film historians, but football ones. Blatter met Constantine while working at a ski resort as a young man. According to a Swiss biographer, Blatter modelled himself on Constantine’s on-screen portrayal of a smooth detective. A smooth detective being one of the first things you think of when you think of old Sepp.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fifa’s boardroom bears an uncanny resemblance to the war room in Stanley Kubrik’s Dr Strangelove. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features

His HQ has its own war room

The most remarked-upon element of Fifa’s £166m HQ is a subterranean boardroom that looks so similar to the war room in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove that architect Tilla Theus ought to be paying royalties to the film’s production designer, Ken Adam. Adam based the design for the war room not on any actual government facility, but it did echo work he had done on early Bond movies such as Dr No. Something that lends a certain verisimilitude to the comparisons between Fifa HQ and a Bond villain’s lair.

A giant, circular overhead light source is common to both Kubrick and Blatter’s war rooms. When Fifa’s building opened, Blatter told a German broadcaster: “Places where people make decisions should only contain indirect light … the light should come from the people themselves who are assembled there.”

Fifa has its own flop movie

Perhaps most amusing in Fifa’s Big Long List of Public Relations Follies was last year’s £19m, England-at-a-World-Cup-sized-flop movie United Passions. The film starred Tim Roth as Blatter, Gerard Depardieu as World Cup founder Jules Rimet and Sam Neill as João Havelange (the man who ran Fifa from 1974 until 1998; he stepped down as Fifa’s honorary president in 2013 having been implicated in a $100m bribery scandal). Though firmly in the top 10 movies ever made about the everyday heroics of football administration, its IMDb rating of 3.0/10 puts it level with classics such as Night of the Living Dead 3D: Re-Animation and The Astro-Zombies.

Pleasingly, United Passions premiered at Cannes just days before the Sunday Times began to unravel the sea of corruption surrounding the awarding of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar. Even more pleasingly, especially for Tim Roth’s agent, it has still not been given a UK release.

The Sepp Blatter trough at Fifa’s Zürich headquarters. Photograph: Tom Peck

Fifa’s HQ has a Sepp Blatter trough

Blatter’s status as an honorary citizen of the Swiss Alpine town of Ulrichen is celebrated with what can only be described as a “wooden trough” in the grounds next to Fifa’s HQ. A gift from the townspeople both to Blatter and the world’s satirists.

You can buy a £60 veal cutlet at Fifa’s hotel

In the context of other Fifa scandals, this one is a bit like finding out that Tony Soprano burned down Artie Bucco’s restaurant. Not that big a deal, but indicative of a wider moral malaise. The previously itinerant Fifa had moved from Paris and Amsterdam before settling in Zurich in the 1930s. The organisation outgrew its office in the city’s Bahnhofstrasse and in 1954 moved to Villa Derwald in Sonnenberg, overlooking the city. As Fifa acquired more and more staff, it expanded into the adjacent Sonnenberg hotel in 1998. The hotel needed major renovation and, according to Time, didn’t have the cash for the project. In 1996, Fifa took over the building with a lease that included conditions such as making food affordable for locals. This 60-year lease costs Fifa SFr200,000 (£139,000) annually – a rate that, according to local politicians, was far too low and loses the city millions in income every year.

Despite moving into their whizz-bang new HQ in 2006, Fifa continues to use the Sonnenberg as a convention space. The hotel even has its own Fifa private members’ club with a £1,044 annual charge. As for the affordable food, the Sonnenberg restaurant features a £40 scallop dish and a £60 veal cutlet. You don’t want to know about the wine list.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Grace Jones performs during the 61st Fifa Congress opening ceremony in 2011. Photograph: Julian Finney/Getty Images

They know how to throw a party

At the 2011 Fifa Congress, Grace Jones performed a 20-minute set including La Vie en Rose. “Are you ready to party?” Jones asked the room of blazer-wearing delegates. Paraguay’s 82-year-old Nicolás Leoz – one of the Fifa officials arrested last week, whose staff allegedly asked to have the FA Cup named after him during discussions about England’s 2018 bid – found Jones sitting on his lap, singing.

Also performing at the 61st congress: a juggler, a “former Miss Switzerland” and a seven-piece breakdancing group called Flying Steps.

Fifa’s biggest critic in 1993 was … Robin Williams

When Fifa held the draw for the 1994 US World Cup in Las Vegas in late 1993, its then-secretary general, one Sepp Blatter, was joined on stage for the drawing of the World Cup balls by Robin Williams. The late comedian insisted on calling Blatter “Mr Bladder” throughout. The Guardian’s David Lacey was there to report on the draw and captured Sepp’s reaction: “This is not a comedy.”

Blatter was more magnanimous when Williams died in 2014, tweeting a picture of the pair laughing during the draw.

The Fifa anthem was written by Germany’s top Hammond organist

Not to be outdone by Uefa, which had Handel’s Zadok the Priest reworked for its revamped Champions League format in 1992, Fifa commissioned its own musical signature for the US World Cup. The Fifa Hymn (really!) was written by German composer and organ player Franz Lambert. You may remember Lambert from such hit albums as Let’s Swing in Hammond Style (2007) and Franz Lambert – Der Lustige Orgelmann (1992)

Unlike Uefa’s, Fifa’s hymn is a lyric-free (why not make up your own?), Vangelis-lite three-minutes of synth-based triumphalism. It’s a shame that only a small fragment is played at Fifa’s games as, after the famous “dur-duh-duh”, it all goes a little bit Pebble Mill-in-the-80s. It’s fair to say that the Fifa Hymn is the organisation’s purest achievement of the past four decades.

The hotel favoured by Fifa officials is pretty pricey

The cheapest room available on Monday night (with breakfast, naturally) at Zürich’s Baur Au Lac hotel – where Swiss authorities made their arrests, aided by some fine cotton bedsheets last Wednesday – would cost around £840. (The suites Fifa officials were staying in were more like £2,250.) A room at the Dorchester, by way of comparison, is a mere £445.

Blatter has always been modest

In a 1993 interview with British sportswriter Patrick Barclay, Blatter was asked about a cracking idea within Fifa to replace throw-ins with kick-ins. He replied immodestly: “I know the answer to that. But I do not want to appear immodest.”

The same interview revealed that Blatter, who was then still fit enough to play regularly for either a Fifa team or one made up of retired Swiss generals, insisted on playing up front. This is a preference he shares with another widely disliked official who was first elected in the late 90s: our very own Tony Blair.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Henry Kissinger was asked to join Blatter’s ‘council of wisdom’. Photograph: George Pimentel/WireImage

He once asked Placido Domingo and Henry Kissinger to join Fifa’s ‘council of wisdom’

Reeling after Fifa’s annual bout of corruption allegations in 2011, Blatter invited the opera singer and the statesman into advisory roles. Like many of Fifa’s ethics reforms, not a lot came of it, with Kissinger perhaps heeding the warning he had given while working on the US bid for the 1986 World Cup: “The politics of Fifa, they make me nostalgic for the Middle East.”

Blatter has so many honours they have their own Wikipedia page

It’s said that Fifa’s president’s last remaining ambition is to be awarded the Nobel peace prize. We’ll see how that one pans out, but in the meantime, he’ll have to content himself with an honours board worthy of Lord’s. Blatter’s distinctions include a 2007 Order of National Friendship from Uzbekistan’s president Islam Karimov (a man who’s been accused of boiling prisoners alive) and Liberia’s Humane Order of African Redemption. The latter was, of course, given to him in 1999 by Charles Taylor, who has watched the last three World Cups from a cell in The Hague where, in 2012, he was sentenced to serve 50 years for war crimes.

That one isn’t included on Fifa.com’s list of his awards, weirdly.

He married his boss’s daughter. And then took his job

Blatter married his second wife, Barbara, in the 1970s. She was 30 years his junior and the daughter of Fifa’s secretary general, Helmut Käser. By 1981, Blatter had taken his father-in-law’s job as well as his daughter (Herr Käser didn’t attend the wedding and is said to have cried on the day.) In 2002, Blatter surprised friends by marrying his daughter Corinne’s 40-year-old friend, Graziella Bianca, a former dolphin trainer at a Swiss amusement park pleasingly named Conny Land.