Further Thoughts on Sepp Blatter's FIFA Salary

A few months ago I offered a guesstimate at Sepp Blatter's FIFA salary of $6 million. I have just read through the 2012 FIFA Financial Report which was released a few weeks ago in Mauritius (here in PDF) and have a few additional thoughts.

In 2012 FIFA had total personnel expenses of $90,649,000 covering 412 employees, for an average of about $220,000 per employee (from p. 73). However, the report also notes that "key personnel" received $33,500,000 in compensation in 2012 (from p. 94). These "key personnel" include members of the FIFA Executive Committee, Finance Committee and management.

If we subtract the compensation of the "key personnel" from the total and also the 38 personnel who fall in that category, we find that the average salary of a non-key FIFA employee is about $153,000.

There are 25 members listed on FIFA's Executive Committee (let's set aside those who are suspended or otherwise outcast) including FIFA President Sepp Blatter. The Finance Committee is comprised of member of the ExCo, but for salary purposes, let's treat them as separate salaries. We do not know how much compensation these 25 receive, we just have a snippet of information from Mohammed bin Hammam in 2011 who revealed the ExCo compensation in 2010 to be 200,000 Euros, or about $280,000.

Since 2010 was a World Cup year FIFA's revenues were high and the pay to the ExCo was apparently high as well:

"We don't get any salaries," Bin Hammam said. "We are only getting bonuses [and FIFA expense reimbursements]." One FIFA source told SI.com that personal bonuses for the executive committee are larger in years when FIFA's profits are higher, as was the case in 2010.

For simplicity sake and to likely err on the over, let's go with $250,000 as the average compensation of the 24 members of the Executive Committee (minus Blatter) including whatever bonuses are received by those 6 ExCo members who put in additional duties on the Finance Committee. That totals $6 million.

If we subtract that total from the $33.5 million that leaves $27.5 million to be allocated across FIFA management, shown in the organization chart below from the FIFA website showing its administration:

That means 13 individuals average annual compensation of $2.12 million each. I see perhaps 5 or 6 organizational levels in the organization chart. Assuming a simple rule that salaries double from one level to the next, and that the lowest "key personnel" makes $400,000 per year implies that Blatter makes >$12 million per year. That seems high. You can play around with the allocation of the $27.5 million in any number of hypothetical ways, of course, and unless FIFA has a somewhat flat salary structure, it is hard to come up with an allocation to Blatter of $6 million or less, which would be 2-3 times the average of the "key personnel." The alternative of course is that the "key personnel" are very handsomely paid.
 
So right now, I'm taking the over on my April guesstimate as a slightly better than 50-50 proposition. I am pretty confident that (let's say 95%) that Blatter's 2012 salary falls into the range of $2.12 million ("key personnel" average) and $12 million (~6 times the "key personnel" average). That's my guesstimate for today.