As we all know by now, Sepp Blatter just can't keep his mouth shut.
Each morning, the former president of the World Society of Friends of Suspenders must wake up and think 'How am I going to make the world a better place today? I know - bigger goals! Two referees! Everyone will love me now!'
Blatter's history of barking-mad ideas have kept us entertained in the brief breaks between football matches over the past few years, but you can't help but wonder that if these are the schemes he's considered sane enough to share with the world, what about those he rejected as too ridiculous?
Here at Sporting Life, we've guessed what gems might lie inside Sepp's 'Ideas Jotter', containing the innermost thoughts of football's glorious leader. Here are some of the highlights.
Sepp was actually behind the Budweiser 'added time multi-ball' advert. This was no jocular corporate joke - this was Blatter testing the ground for his latest batch of new ideas. As we sat back and lightly chuckled at the preposterous ideas, Sepp's minions were watching in the shadows with clipboards. As we all know, Sepp is always trying to make football more inclusive and more representative of the world. Therefore, because the world is in fact 70% ocean, logic states that a World Cup must soon be held on the high seas. Before awarding the 2010 tournament to South Africa, Sepp was entertaining secret bids from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, as well as the Persian Gulf and the North Sea. The idea was only shelved after concerns that advertising boards would get soggy. After clearly deciding that giving man-of-the-match awards to some plucky unknown from Ghana was patently ludicrous, Sepp came to the conclusion that the awards should be made before the game. The player must then perform to the required standard, and if he failed he would be fined a certain percentage of his country's GDP. Good news for Didier Drogba, terrible news for Brian McBride. Continuing the man-of-the-match theme, Sepp decided that the current collection of stuffed shirts on the committee who decide the best player in each game just wouldn't do. Therefore, plans were afoot to make it a half-time feature, with a panel of Simon Cowell, nasty headmaster Richard Park from Fame Academy and that bloke from Strictly Come Dancing. Sepp has always been keen to promote women's football, and with fellow enlightened soul Lennart Johannsson, he hatched a number of plans to jazz up the game. One early suggestion was a return to traditional park football, and employ the 'shirts and skins' rule to the women's game. To make it fair, the teams would swap at half-time. To the bemusement of Sepp and Lennart, this was considered sexist, and was sadly watered down to Blatter's infamous 'tighter shorts' idea. Sepp came to the realisation that if football was to be considered a truly global game, it must represent all the world's inhabitants, not just humans. Therefore, a different animal would be allocated to each team qualifying for the World Cup, based on a handicap system. So, while Brazil would get a chicken for the midfield holding role, minnows like Saudi Arabia would be given a giant octopus to play in goal. If the rule had been enforced in Germany Sven would have been gifted a whale to "park the bus" after we'd gone 1-0 up. Sepp recently mooted the idea of increasing the number of yellow cards required to suspend a player from two to three. However, what Sepp really wanted to bring in was a rudimentary game of Bruce's Play Your Cards Right. When a player receives that dreaded second yellow, the referee brings out a pack of playing cards, from which the offender has to pick one. Attention then switches to the sidelines, where Bruce and lovely assistant are waiting with three more cards. The player then has to guess higher or lower, and if he gets it right, then he's free to play in the next game. The idea fell down because FIFA couldn't agree terms with show producers Freemantle Media. Penalty shootouts are widely recognised to be unfair, so Sepp - finger on the pulse as always - stepped in to propose a better system. Instead of penalties, draws would be resolved by a five-minutes each-way 'Masters' game, where the stars of yesteryear wheeze around the pitch to decide their country's fate. The prospect of seeing Beckenbauer against Charlton again would be an infinitely more appealing way of deciding games. This idea was actually trialled in USA '94, but a breakdown in communications meant that Cameroon fielded Roger Milla in normal play. The idea was not continued after Blatter reportedly baulked at the added cost of employing pitchside cardiac nurses.
