Jean-Baptiste Sarrazin / Photo credit: FABRICE COFFRINI / AFP
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6:25 p.m., May 11, 2023
Fifagate, resale of tickets for the 2014 World Cup, private jets, allocation of TV rights… The former secretary general of Fifa under Sepp Blatter Jérôme Valcke has not been spared by scandals and legal cases over the past ten years. From his appointment as Secretary General of Fifa in June 2007 to his fall in September 2015, the former French sports journalist broke the silence exclusively on the show Europe 1 Sport (every evening from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. live on Europe 1). The former number 2 in world football compared himself to “a train that has been driving through a tunnel non-stop for the past eight years”. “At no time has there ever been the slightest thinning”, blew the latter at the microphone of Jacques Vendroux and Cyrille de La Morinerie.
For Jérôme Valcke, the starting point of these setbacks is in 2015, with “the story of the ticket office to which was added the use of a private plane to go to Russia to make the preliminary draw for the 2018 World Cup.” The former secretary general of Fifa was implicated in a case of resale of tickets for the 2014 World Cup. A first legal problem revealed by the British press which then announced an unprecedented fall. Jérôme Valcke was finally suspended for twelve years from any football-related activity by the ethics committee on February 12, 2016. “In 2015, I boarded a train which I had absolutely no control over”, summarized the main interested party. .
Eleven month suspended prison sentence
The legal troubles are piling up. Also prosecuted in Switzerland for “multiple suspicions of unfair management” in another case, Jérôme Valcke was finally acquitted, in October 2020 and June 2022, of the counts of “aggravated unfair management” by the Swiss Federal Criminal Court on the part of ” villa in Sardinia”. A villa from which he was able to benefit thanks to the president of Paris-Saint-Germain Nasser Al-Khelaïfi.
The former secretary general of Fifa, however, was sentenced on appeal to 11 months in prison suspended for “repeated passive corruption” and “repeated forgery in the titles” in the context of “Fifagate” and the granting of TV rights . Jérôme Valcke was accused of having monetized his support for the beIN Sports channel, directed by Nasser Al-Khelaïfi in exchange for a luxurious villa on the Sardinian Emerald Coast.
“Commit the irreparable”
Of these court cases, Jérôme Valcke has always refused to speak. The former leader believes that “as long as a file is not closed, it’s complicated to talk about it.” A logical strategy for someone who spent seven years at Fifa: “You don’t want to say things that could potentially be used against you, knowing that the people you are defending yourself against are not the ones who will help you to exonerate yourself”, he justified himself. Today almost out of business, it is therefore in Europe 1 Sport that Jérôme Valcke decided to confide with emotion.
“The truth is, you’re kind of like someone in a ring. It’s like you’re Mike Tyson’s opponent. When you walk into a prosecutor’s office, you step into the ring and you know for a fact that you’re going to be undone piece by piece. You get down on one knee, you get the second knee down. And then there comes a point where it’s just resilience. I think other people could have done the irreparable,” he said.
Committing the irreparable, Jérôme Valcke was not far from it. The latter no longer hides it, he “fell into a kind of depression without ever wanting to accept it”. A brutal fall for the one who had nevertheless experienced a phenomenal rise to the point of wanting to end his life: “I was on my motorcycle. There was a semi-trailer coming in front. And I said to myself: ‘Come on , I’m going, I’m going in the tractor-trailer’. But at the last minute, I swerved and started on my way. And when I went to bed at night, my only dream was that my heart stops beating in the night, that I don’t wake up.”
Saved by those around him
It is ultimately to his family that Jérôme Valcke relies. Pediatrician and psychologist, his mother then comes to his aid. “She had said to me one day: ‘Know that in a family, when a member of this family commits suicide, it has an impact on the following generations. Your children, the children of your children, potentially, will have an impact’ “, recalls the former journalist. Strong words that remobilize the 62-year-old man.
Today, Jérôme Valcke believes he has overcome most of the legal troubles he has faced. And for him, all that he has been accused of has not necessarily been justified. He claims to have “no feeling of having acted in a criminal way.” “That I am morally condemned by saying ‘you shouldn’t have done if, you shouldn’t have done that’, maybe. But morality is another subject. Between morality and criminal, there is a world”, continued the former secretary general of Fifa.
Now established in Barcelona, Jérôme Valcke is gradually taking his head above water. On March 27, the Zurich public prosecutor’s office closed a criminal investigation opened in 2022, after a complaint from Fifa, for “suspicions of unfair management” against the former secretary general concerning the museum of the instance in Zurich. He is no longer being prosecuted by the Zurich prosecutor’s office. From these setbacks, Jérôme Valcke retains one thing: justice “is a system which means that it can only be painful, whether you are convicted or not convicted.”