When Mark Pieth headed up FIFA's Independent Governance Committee, the resistance to reform was such that he said the people inside FIFA "were hard of hearing."
Now it appears that FIFA has begun to listen, at least for the moment. Not only did president Sepp Blatter resign, but he and Domenico Scala, chairman of FIFA's audit and compliance committee, stated at Tuesday's press conference that many of the reforms suggested by the IGC back in 2014 would be taken up.
Pieth, a professor of criminal law at Basel University, led the IGC from 2011-14. He took up the post in the wake of several FIFA scandals, including one relating to vote buying for hosting rights of the 2018 and 2022 World Cup.
Under his leadership, the IGC came up with what appeared to be modest proposals, including term and age limits for the presidency and Executive Committee, as well as more transparency as to how those individuals were compensated.
Another proposal was for FIFA to perform background checks on those individuals being nominated for positions on the FIFA Executive Committee, the better to identify bad characters and any potential conflicts of interest. Yet they were almost universally rejected.
Reached by telephone, Pieth sounded cautiously optimistic about Blatter's resignation and what it means for potential reforms.
"I'm not downbeat by any means," Pieth said. "The new situation, with Blatter stepping down, is a great chance for the future."
But talking and doing are two separate things. No one understands that better than Alexandra Wrage, president of TRACE International, a company that specializes in devising transparency and anti-bribery solutions for corporations. She was also on the IGC, but resigned in protest in April of 2013, when it became apparent just how resistant to change FIFA was.
With regard to Blatter's resignation, Wrage said, "It's great news for the soccer world, and I think it's energized people."
She admitted, however, that the sight of Blatter talking up reform was a bit much.
"It was little stunning to hear Blatter say, 'These were of course reforms that I wanted and they were blocked,'" she said. "I was like, 'Who on earth blocked them? You, you blocked them. You said you would not make your salary known, and you said you wouldn't back term limits.'
"It was a little startling that these are now being accepted as just the ordinary course of things when two years ago they were completely dead in the water."
That could happen again. The constituency that elected Blatter still exists, as do the powerful interests behind it. Pieth acknowledged that reality, and cautioned that real reform requires more than just the resignation of one man.
"The challenge is to find a real successor who will be more like a Pope Francis than somebody who will is the same kind of guy [like Blatter]," he said. "The problem was not Blatter alone, the institution is rotten to the core.
"Of course things have changed on paper in the past, but they really haven't changed their minds. If you just take a new guy out of the ranks now, the risk is that you have the same kind of power player again."
That's why Wrage feels that any talk of vindication is premature.
"I'm being a little bit of a Grim Reaper," she said. "This is such an artful group, with entrenched relationships and cronyism. I've already been at that point where we talk about how important reform is. We spent a lot of time and energy thinking about what that reform looks like, and then nothing happened."