Former FIFA president, Sepp Blatter has opened up on an experience he had after being put in an induced coma following heart surgery that saw him miss the first day of his 2022 fraud trial.
Blatter served as president of football’s global governing body from 1998 to 2015 when he was ejected from office by FIFA’s ethics committee after criminal proceedings were opened against him by the Swiss Attorney General’s Office.
He was forced to stand down in 2015 and was banned by FIFA for eight years, later reduced to six, over ethics breaches for authorising payment of 2 million Swiss Francs (approx £1.8m) to then-UEFA President Michel Platini, allegedly made in his own interests rather than FIFA’s.
Both Blatter, now 88 and Platini would be found not guilty of fraud in July 2022, although the saga continues into a ninth year after their acquittals were appealed.
The trial saw Blatter miss the first day, complaining of chest pains after undergoing heart surgery 18 months earlier, and in an interview with the Telegraph, he has opened up on the near-death experience he had while in a coma.
‘I had hallucinations,’ he said. ‘I have seen that angels were coming for me and wanted to take me off. And I have said, “No, I’m not ready to go”.
‘I was in a coma, I was out, and there are two lovely white-dressed ladies that were looking after me and I had some apparatus to breathe. And then they had to change it.
‘But, in my dream – or, at that time, my reality – it was that there were angels. They said, “You have to come. You have to die now. They are awaiting you in heaven”. I took more than three months afterwards just to realise that I’m still alive.’
After emerging from the induced coma, he was unable to speak French, English or Spanish, only the dialectal language from his birth-place of Valais in Switzerland.
Blatter also revealed that he had been born prematurely, telling the Telegraph he had weighed just 1.25kg at birth.
The 88-year-old had also suffered a brush with mortality in the months immediately following the start of the investigation into his payment to Platini, as he collapsed on visiting the graves of his parents.
‘I was among the angels singing and the devil with the fire. But it was the angels who sang,’ he told Swiss channel RTS.
In the wide-ranging interview, Blatter also suggested that the World Cup would likely never return to England in his lifetime, claiming the English game is ‘too successful’.
He said: ‘I would say, in my life, I will not witness it! The problem is that English football is too successful.’