Greg Dyke interview: ‘People keep coming up to me and saying: Well done, you got rid of him!’

Greg Dyke is the largest small man I have ever met. In terms of height he is conspicuously short, but everything else about him is enormous: he has a massive head, a barrel chest, great white shark teeth, the posture of a prize bull and a voice so loud that the couple in a far corner of the empty bar have to abandon their own conversation and end up joining in with ours. The FA chairman has the joyful air of a man who considers global news headlines his natural habitat, and finds himself at the centre of a story big enough to accommodate his personality.

The last time Dyke was this famous, he was resigning from the BBC amid the uproar of the Hutton report in 2004. This time round the resignation is Sepp Blatter’s, and Dyke the triumphant hunter, not the prey. “People keep coming up to me and saying, ‘Well done, you got rid of him!’” he hoots, roaring with laughter. “To which I say, ‘I think the FBI had more to do with it than me.’” But the impression of a gladiatorial clash between two titans is unmistakable – as is the surprising degree of similarity between football’s mortal enemies.

Although still stunned by the Fifa president’s resignation, Dyke thinks he can explain it, starting with the allegations of a bribe to erstwhile Fifa official Jack Warner. “I think it was a combination of three things. The $10m payment I think must have been authorised by him. Nobody else could authorise $10m. Not $10m. Also, I don’t know this for certain, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Jérôme Valcke [Fifa’s secretary general, who faces strong evidence that he knew of the alleged bribe] did say to Blatter, ‘I’m not taking the rap for this, you agreed.’ That’s one. Two, I think the FBI are getting close. And I suspect the big sponsors said, ‘You can’t do this, it’s got to change.’”

I ask if he expects Blatter to be arrested and he falls uncharacteristically silent, so I put the question a different way. If he had to put £50 on it, which way would he bet? “Yeah.”

Either way, says Dyke, Blatter hasn’t a hope of remaining in post until his successor is appointed this winter. “No!” he snorts scornfully, perhaps thinking of the speed of his own departure from the BBC. “He’ll be gone. He won’t last. He can’t last more than a couple of months. The one thing you discover if you run an organisation is that the moment you say you’re going, you’ve gone. He’s dead. It’s over. If you resign, you resign.”

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The two men first met shortly after Dyke was appointed to the FA in 2013. “He was very personable, very likable. In his way. He’s got charisma, there’s no doubt. But I never trusted him, no. He reminded me of Nixon, what I call Nixonian politics, ie, ‘You’re either on our side or you’re the enemy, and anyone who criticises is the enemy. Everything I do is by definition right.’ Blatter’s argument at the end, when he said this is a politically motivated conspiracy – I mean, what world does he live in? These are a bunch of crooks. Or it appears,” he corrects himself, “they are a bunch of crooks.”

When the pair attended a meeting in February, Dyke had been teetotal since New Year’s Day. “And then I got sat next to Blatter at this bloody thing, and I thought, ‘I can’t do this, I can’t sit here without a drink.’ So it put me back on the bottle!”

Relations had by then more or less broken down, perhaps predictably. “Blatter hates the English. He hates the FA. And he hates the British media. Blames them for everything.” An FA chairman who made his name and fortune at London Weekend Television, “my spiritual home”, before becoming director general of the BBC, would have been bad enough. What must have made matters worse is the absence of any discernible indication that Dyke has forsaken his former profession. “Once you’ve been a journalist, to some extent you’re always a journalist,” he agrees. “Last week on Wednesday, which bits of my brain jumped up? It was the journalistic bits.”

The animosity was mutual. Dyke has “always assumed Fifa is corrupt. It’s always been corrupt.” Blatter cast himself as a global football missionary, and won praise even from his critics for exporting the game into developing countries. But when I ask if Blatter’s chief interest in Africa and Asia was weak governance susceptible to bribery and corruption, without hesitation Dyke says, “Yes. That’s my view. Someone very senior in Fifa – I won’t name who – said to me: ‘Football will always be corrupt. Basically because it’s run by men. If you walk into a room and there’s a million pounds on the table and a naked woman in the corner, most men will take the million pounds and fuck the woman.’ Now, I happen to believe that’s not what life is like, and I think it’s a very depressing view of the world. But that was someone quite senior in Fifa, and his account of what life is like. It’s quite sad, isn’t it? It’s a pretty sordid world, Fifa.”

Dyke’s disgust doesn’t feel confected, and he offers another anecdote with glum dismay. Blatter, he was told, boasted to a pretty female journalist: “‘What’s interesting about my job is, whichever country I go to, I’m more important than the president.’ Now, if that’s true, then it tells you a lot about him. Massive ego. I think he believed he was not answerable to anybody.”

Dyke’s analysis of his nemesis’ unaccountability sounds broadly reliable. The more he talks, however, the more it sounds like an uncannily accurate description of Dyke as well. With the obvious exception of starkly different attitudes to corruption, the two men’s leadership style does not appear to be dissimilar.

When I ask if his public attacks on Blatter and Fifa might have been rashly intemperate, his tone is nonchalantly defiant. “See, I work on the basis that we have nothing to lose, the English FA. We don’t need Fifa’s money. We don’t want to bid for another event, not while Blatter’s there. We can say what we like. Also, I’m 68. This is the end of my career.” Will the FA be his last big public job? “Yeah. Yeah. You know, I’m 68. I was 68 last week. The only advantage of being old – well, of being old and having made money – is you don’t give a fuck.”

His colleagues might regard a chairman who doesn’t give a fuck as a dangerous liability. “Well, as an employee, if you have that attitude you are in some ways quite interesting, and in some ways quite dangerous. You’ve got to work out what’s in the interests of the organisation at the time. I think the FA needs to be on the front foot more than it is. It’s been on the front foot this week. I mean, the really interesting thing is, whenever I go to a football match and I’ve had a go at Blatter, people come up and shake your hand.”

In the large parts of the world where the FA is perceived as an arrogant, neocolonial elite, Dyke’s comments might enjoy less approval, and do little to dispel that reputation. “No, I think it’s good for the FA’s reputation. We stood up. We stood up. The FA hasn’t always stood up. The history is not that good. We stood up to be counted. We stood up to him.”

If Blatter was oblivious to Fifa’s international reputation, Dyke appears similarly unaware of any animosity towards the FA. “Well, I think it’s true that it’s perceived like that politically in some quarters, but not by the football-watching public. ’Cos they all love the Premier League. No, I think this is a bit of a myth. That somehow it’s colonialism. It’s not colonialism at all. But there is no doubt that there are a set of values which you find in western Europe, and in America, and in Australia, that don’t apply everywhere.” Such as? “Well, my experience in Africa is that when people go into politics in Africa, it’s incumbent upon you as part of that to look after your family. That’s just cultural, it’s a cultural difference.”

He does concede that Boris Johnson’s offer to host the 2018 World Cup in London was unhelpful. (Culture secretary John Whittingdale later said something similar about 2022.) “Yes. Because it looks like we’re doing it all for our personal gain. I think we’ve been too far involved in all of this, publically. We should not bid for it, no.” The mayor did not consult Dyke before publicising the proposal. “He just woke up one morning and thought” – he adopts a silly voice – “‘This is a good idea, isn’t it?’ We won’t have the World Cup in 2018, and we certainly won’t have it in 2022.”

But he has no intention of heeding Qatar’s public warning this week to stop querying its right to host in 2022. “I thought it was funny,” he laughs. “I’m an adult and I’ve been around too long. I once had Blair after me, I’ve been there before. Of course, you can’t convict people on journalism, so we will have to wait for the Swiss investigation to do its job. But if you read the Sunday Times and the recent book, it’s all in there. If you read all of that, it’s hard to believe that it wasn’t corrupt.” His phone rings, and when he hangs up he is beaming. “We’ve just discovered that the FBI investigation does include scrutiny of the two World Cup awards. That’s good. I wouldn’t want to be Qatar. They’ll sleep even less well tonight.”

He does sometimes worry that he speaks his mind too freely – “Yeah, course I do,” – but bursts into giggles, which suggest he doesn’t worry much. “Oh, I expect I’ve done it this week,” he goes on happily. “Already I’m sure there’s people in the FA saying, ‘Ooh, he shouldn’t have said that, he shouldn’t have said this.’ I’m certain there’s already people saying I shouldn’t have said anything about Qatar.” How does he feel about that? “Oh, I take no notice. ’Cos I’m too old to care really.”

He attributes his cavalier bombast partly to age – he is 68, he tells me five times – and partly to his wealth, which me also mentions numerous times. But he admits, “Actually, I’ve always been quite outspoken, I suppose. Ever since I first knew my wife, she has always said, ‘Oh, tell them to fuck off. Do what you want to do, say what you want to say.’ It doesn’t sound, I say, as if he needed much encouragement. “No, we were probably a bad combination!” he hoots.

Anecdotes to illustrate the point keep tumbling out, delivered with exuberant glee. His car registration plate is M16 WMD (“It’s a sort of up yours!”), and when I use the word “bollocks” a few minutes later, his face lights up and he is off again: “That was one of my great quotes!” At last week’s Fifa congress he told a journalist that Blatter’s speech was bollocks. “I get back to the hotel, it was already on Twitter! Luckily it didn’t seem to get much further,” he adds, but his eagerness to repeat the line to another journalist casts some doubt on his relief.

Like Blatter, Dyke can lapse into mystifyingly abstract aphorisms. “In the end it’s all about ideas,” he offers sagely, apropos of nothing. Although appalled by corruption, he cheerfully admits to granting interviews to journalists whose fathers were his friends (including, full disclosure, the editor who commissioned this piece), while denying others’ requests, and looks astonished when I call this nepotism. “It’s not nepotism! It’s just people I’ve known as kids! No, it’s not about nepotism, it’s about helping people, if you know them.” His philosophy for life – “You control your destiny. And if you sit and wait for someone else to control your destiny, you’ve had it. You’ve got to be determined” – is one I imagine Blatter would wholeheartedly endorse. “Oh, he would! That’s what he is. Blatter is an operator, he’s a survivor.”

Most of us hope to feel our lives have been well lived, but I have seldom met anyone more convinced of it, and his contentment makes him hugely likable. If Dyke has any regret, it was his departure from the BBC.

“I hadn’t finished. There was more to be done there. I wouldn’t have done more than a couple of years anyway, but I would have liked to have finished off all the stuff we were doing. But then,” he starts to laugh, “that’s what Blatter said!”

The Guardian will host a debate on the future of Fifa with Ian Prior, Marina Hyde, Owen Gibson and guests, at Kings Place, London N1, on 10 June at 7.30pm. Details: membership.theguardian.com