Tom English: Mark Pieth sets out plan to clean up Fifa – good luck with that . . .

YOU might say that Professor Mark Pieth is the right man to, as he puts it, “bring Fifa back to the road of virtue”.

Pieth is the new chairman of Fifa’s Independent Governance Committee, a body that will ruminate on the ills of the organisation before presenting a road-map for change next March.

Pieth is professor of criminal law at Basel University, he is also chairman of a working group on bribery in international business transactions and a member of the Swiss gaming commission. He is an ex-member of the Independent Inquiry Committee into the Iraq Oil-for-Food Programme and was on the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering as well as heading a section in the Economic and Organised Crime unit at the Swiss Justice Ministry. He has published papers on economic and organised crime, money laundering, corruption, sentencing and criminal procedure.

Some might say he is still under-qualified for his new role at Fifa, but he’ll do. Pieth presented a report called “Governing FIFA” in Zurich yesterday, Sepp Blatter at his side. It’s not his job to look to the sins of the past at football’s governing body but to come up with recommendations for the future.

Pieth suggests suspension of any all-powerful Executive Committee (ExCo) members who face active criminal proceedings. He wants a term limit for the Fifa president and other office holders. He wants independent members placed on the ExCo. He believes the media is part of the solution (and not the whole problem, as the king and the kingmakers at Fifa believe).

The new man is a serious operator who says he will walk away if he thinks he is not being taken seriously by Blatter and Co. “There have been problems with members of Fifa’s Executive Committee, to put it mildly,” he says. The chief problem, as he may soon find out, is that the ExCo will decide who joins Pieth on the Independent Governance Committee and it will be the same merry band of media-hating, transparency-shirking, corruption-riddled Blatter sycophants who will decide whether any of Pieth’s recommendations actually get voted into the Fifa constitution. World football can only hope that Pieth prevails. We wish him luck on his mission to catch lightning in a bottle.