Sepp Blatter and Fifa: It's time to boot out football's grasping toadies

What an excruciating week for football fans. After the giddy delights of Saturday's Champions League Final, the best showcase for the beautiful game since Pelé's Brazil were in their pomp, there is not just the usual end-of-season hangover to suffer, but something far more painful: a farce of tragic dimensions at the heart of football.

The prospect that Sepp Blatter will tomorrow be returned unopposed as president of Fifa, the game's governing body, is enough to make any true football fan, of whatever nationality, cringe with embarrassment.

Unopposed? Does that mean people think he is doing a good job? Couldn't some tramp be brought in from the streets of Zurich to contest the election? Are ballot papers being printed to give this fiasco a veneer of legitimacy? And who is paying for the prerequisite slap-up lunch for the stooges flying thousands of miles to rubber-stamp Blatter's election?

The sheer absurdity of the process makes Premier League footballers look like paragons of virtue. Unless 75-year-old Blatter does the decent thing and agrees to the deferment of tomorrow's election – and nothing in his record of ruthless, self-important nest-feathering suggests that he is capable of doing the decent thing – a coronation of look-away-now awfulness, with toadies in blazers applauding the Supreme Leader, is in prospect.

An unopposed election is unsatisfactory at the best of times. Nobody stood against Gordon Brown when he replaced Tony Blair as Labour leader, and look what happened to him. But in the case of Blatter, whose staunchest supporters would acknowledge that he has been a controversial figure, it is particularly pernicious.