Is this fair play?

Perhaps it is being the chief negotiator for the SDG – the Submarine Deckhands Guild. If not, then surely it would be the hooded grand wizard of the Harlem sub-division of the Ku Klux Klan.

If not that, then what about the crucial responsibility that goes hand on tiller as the Chief Rear-Admiral of the Swiss Navy?

I mean, just how dysfunctional, disembodied and discredited can anyone be?

Well, there’s another senior posting that can be added to the litany of crease-faced careerists. It is the president of FIFA.

That position has yet again, for an unprecedented fifth consecutive term, been conferred on Joseph Sepp Blatter.

The official reports confirmed he is back in charge because Blatter won the election. But we should not forget that said election comprised just one candidate, namely old Sepp himself.

So he was about as likely to lose as Wayne Rooney is to become president of the Mothers’ Union.

Blatter’s return to a position he has been barnacled into for the last 11 years was underpinned by the margin of his victory. The FIFA Congress in Zurich accorded no fewer than 172 votes for the election to continue. There were just 17 X’s to the contrary.

In the election itself the president polled 186 of the 203 votes cast. So Blatter’s reign of error continues.

It could be argued that Blatter could still have had the majority of delegates at FIFA’s plush headquarters voting against him. But, bizarrely, for the world governing body about a sport all about balls, they were conspicuous by their absence at FIFA HQ this week.

Belatedly the English FA grew some. Under the harassed looking new FA chairman David Bernstein, England’s highest body railed against the election arguing it should have been postponed while an independent inquiry into corruption at FIFA was conducted.

The English FA were backed by the Scottish FA – a rare occurrence of Anglo-Scottish co-operation. Even the second in line to the throne, Prince William, broke free from supposed protocol to endorse the FA’s call in his role as FA president.

But it was all too late. Such a demand for the election to have been scrapped should have been made at least a week before when Blatter’s other presidential challenger, Bin Hamman, was suspended as allegations of corruption enveloped him and FIFA vice-president Jack Warner.

Again, the FA took the lead but way after it should have done, no doubt reinforcing other candidates’ belief that the opposition to the election was more due to a fresh vintage of sour grapes resulting from England’s bid to host the 2018 World Cup being snubbed by the world power.

Indeed, had the FA shown enough ‘cojones’ ahead of the bidding war to point up claims of corruption rather than rail at the English media for bringing them to attention at such an “untimely” moment, this current malaise might not be infecting the game.

But shooting the messenger pre-occupied the FA more than training a spotlight on potential grubbiness. And I mean, when is the uncovering of corruption untimely?

FIFA now remains in the custodianship of a man tainted. Credibility is stretched tauter than a tightrope with the main hope of radical change apparently depending on global “sponsors of the product” uneasy at the mess in which FIFA is now mired.

But there is another answer and it follows on from the English FA’s ill-fated stance. All the home nations also come under the umbrella of UEFA, the European game’s governing power. All the richest clubs are under UEFA’s command.

No less an authority than Sir Alex Ferguson, European football’s most successful manager, has previously stated that the Champions League can be more attractive to play in and harder to win than a World Cup.

Use that perception – that the cradle of the game, Europe, can take the lead and usher in long-awaited reform of a world organisation that frankly would be a laughing stock if the current plight was not in any way humorous.

So UEFA, and more pointedly, UEFA president Michel Platini, time for platitudes to be discarded and concerted action be taken. Rise up and challenge FIFA.

If it results in a short-term split, so be it. The world game will eventually come together and in a more accountable Blatter-less fashion.