Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Sepp Blatter wants his watches back.
Blatter, the former president of FIFA whose yearslong leadership of soccer’s global governing body ended in scandal, also wants some pension payments and for his former employer to clear his name. But his current focus is a strangely personal dispute over the fate of dozens of luxury watches that he said he was unable to retrieve from FIFA headquarters after he was forced out of the organization in 2015.
Blatter, 83, told The New York Times in an interview Wednesday that he had grown so frustrated with FIFA’s failure to return as many as 80 watches — from brands like Patek Philippe, IWC and Omega — that he was including them in a lawsuit he plans to file against the organization that also will include demands for pension payments and clarification about his compensation arrangements to show that “I am not a thief.