ZURICH - Sepp Blatter, who was re-elected last week for a fifth term as president of world soccer's governing body, resigned his position early Wednesday (Thailand time) as US law enforcement officials confirmed that he was a focus of a federal corruption investigation.
Blatter had for days tried to distance himself from the controversy, but several US officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that in their efforts to build a case against Blatter, they were hoping to win the cooperation of some of the Fifa officials now under indictment and work their way up the organisation.
In a short speech delivered at the headquarters of Fifa, which oversees global soccer, Blatter said that "Fifa needs a profound restructuring".
He said he had decided to step away from the organisation, where he had worked in various positions for 40 years.
Blatter, 79, who spoke in French, then referred to his recent re-election by Fifa's 209 member nations when he said, "Although the members of Fifa have given me the new mandate, this mandate does not seem to be supported by everybody in the world of football."
The New York Times and ABC News reported the investigation, citing unnamed law enforcement officials and sources familiar with the case, but gave no further details.
An FBI spokesman said the bureau was "making no comment" beyond last week's announcement by the Attorney General and FBI director that Fifa was being investigated for corruption.
ABC News said Blatter was being investigated by the FBI and US prosecutors as part of the probe that led to last week's indictments.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced last Wednesday that the United States had indicted 14 Fifa executives and sports marketing executives accused is a $150 million bribery scheme.
Seven Fifa officials were arrested in a dawn swoop by Swiss police on a luxury five-star hotel in Zurich ahead of the body's executive meeting, which saw Blatter briefly re-elected.
At the time, US prosecutors said the investigation was ongoing but would not be drawn on the possible charges against other senior Fifa figures and pointedly refused to answer questions about Blatter.
Blatter always has loved maritime analogies. He promised to guide Fifa into a safe port, but on Tuesday he found his ship foundered on the rocks after 17 years at the helm of the world's most popular sport.
The 79-year-old Swiss stunned the watching world with his resignation announcement just four days after being voted to a fifth term and repelling the pointed questions of his fiercest critics, the British media.
Blatter said in his election victory speech he would be the "commander" who would take Fifa "out of the storm."
While Blatter has seen off mutinies by discontented Fifa members, he could not hold off US and Swiss investigators.
Blatter has not been named as a suspect. But their inquiries into bribes and the award of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups led to him walking the plank.
It has been an incredible turnaround for a man who last month was compared to Jesus, Moses, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln by Dominican Republic FA president Osiris Guzman at a Central and North American confederation (CONCACAF) meeting.
Among the many unflattering nicknames the Fifa chief picked up over the years: Darth Blatter.
Unapologetically divisive, Blatter has had to deal with scandal virtually since his first day in office in 1998.
He came through allegations about 'brown envelopes' handed out before his 1998 election and the collapse of the ISL sports marketing empire.
Blatter said he was unfairly blamed for everything that goes wrong in football.
"In my 40 years at Fifa I have learned to live with hostility and resentment," he said recently.
"However as the German language proverb puts it: sympathy is free, but envy must be earned."
There is a lot to envy.
Blatter is in 70th place on the Forbes list of the world's most powerful people - the only sports leader in the group jostling behind the likes of Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama.
The former amateur footballer - an old fashioned striker - joined Fifa in 1975 from a position marketing Swiss watches.
He became secretary general in 1981 and was elected to the top job in 1998 after another controversial president, Brazilian Joao Havelange, finally ended his 24 year reign.
Blatter, who also worked as a public relations official and general secretary of the Swiss ice hockey federation, claims credit for building Fifa's financial muscle - $1.5 billion in cash reserves.
When he joined Fifa it was in a small Zurich building with about 10 staff. One story says that it was Blatter who went to the bank to get a loan when they could not be paid.
But Fifa made about $5.7 billion in the four years between the 2010 and 2014 World Cups and now has about 1,400 staff.
The workaholic Blatter says his main achievement has been to make football "universal" - the first World Cups in Asia (South Korea and Japan in 2002 although the decision was taken before he became president) and Africa (2010) came in his tenure.
Hundreds of millions of dollars are given to national federations and in development grants.
But since the day he took office, accusations of skulduggery have never been far away from Fifa. In recent months, he has been fighting allegations about the awarding of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar.
Blatter also told UEFA, the European confederation in 2011 that if elected then it would be his last term.
But until now, the Fifa president has never been implicated in wrongdoing and he has always shrugged off controversy - apart from one episode in 2006 when he tried to stop a book on Fifa being published in Switzerland,
While Asia, Africa and to a large extent Central America and South America stood four square behind Blatter at last Friday's plebiscite Europe turned against him.
UEFA president Michel Platini said the three-times married Blatter made some good decisions "often in difficult circumstances" but that he cannot face a life of "emptiness" without Fifa's power.
Many questioned how he kept getting re-elected.
"He has a way of making people dependent or indebted to him, but not in a way that people regret it," one Blatter confidant told AFP.
"These people know where they are with Blatter. They don't know where they will be with someone else."
The people who rely on the man who has dominated world football for nearly two decades will soon have to get used to someone else.
The embattled president of world soccer's governing body has resigned amid a corruption scandal that has plunged FIFA into crisis. - Reuters