Vladimir Putin said that FIFA President Sepp Blatter “deserves the Nobel Prize.”
The Russian president spoke favorably of Blatter in an interview with a Swiss broadcaster on Monday, invoking the indictments of other FIFA officials on bribery and fraud charges and saying, “I don’t want to go into details but I don’t believe a word about him being involved in corruption personally,” Reuters reports.
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Putin added that Blatter’s fellow “heads of big international sporting federations, or the Olympic Games, deserve special recognition. If there is anyone who deserves the Nobel Prize, it’s those people.”
Russia will host the FIFA World Cup in 2018; by then, Blatter will no longer be president, as he has announced that he will resign when a FIFA Congress elects his successor on Feb. 26, 2016.
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