Former FIFA president Joseph Blatter spent a week in an induced coma after undergoing heart surgery in December, his family said on Thursday.
Blatter, 84, who also tested positive for COVID-19 late last year, was fine enough but was transferred from intensive care to a Swiss hospital this week.
“Doctors are happy with their condition. But there is still a long way to go,” Blatter’s daughter Corinne Blatter Andenmatten said in an interview with Swiss media. “It was the hardest and saddest Christmas of my life.”
Blatter has been under criminal investigation by Swiss federal prosecutors since 2015 and has not yet been told FIFA filed a new criminal complaint against him last month, his daughter said in an interview circulating on behalf of the family .
The latest case concerns FIFA funding for the World Football Museum in Zurich. It was a favorite Blatter project that was not inaugurated until February 2016, after he ended his presidency following the aftermath of U.S. and Swiss investigations by football officials.
“He still doesn’t know anything about the museum’s complaint,” his daughter said. “And that’s a good thing. It would just be unnecessarily agitated.”
When asked about the stress of facing multiple legal cases and interviews with prosecutors, Blatter Andenmatten said “you can imagine he’s been under a lot of pressure.”
He spoke in detail about Blatter’s health for the first time before a meeting scheduled for the week in one of several civil and criminal cases between FIFA and its president between 1998 and 2015. Blatter appeared to have overcome his infection by COVID-19 and hoped his heart surgery would be routine.
“But then everything became more complicated and dangerous,” her daughter said. “In total, he spent more than a week in an artificial coma and could no longer communicate.”
Blatter had a health problem before 2015, while the FIFA ethics committee suspended him for the first time on suspicion of financial mismanagement. Hr later said he had been “near death” after falling ill while visiting his parents’ graves.
“He has earned the right to be able to enjoy the rest of his life without being constantly torpedoed by his previous boss,” Blatter Andenmatten said, asking that his father “be given what he needs on the way to, hopefully, a complete recovery: rest, time and relaxation “.