THE night before the day few believed would ever come, roughly half of Fifa’s Executive Committee members gathered for a nightcap at Zurich’s Baur-au-Lac Hotel. (It’s the very same hotel that was the site of the dawn raids in May and that alone perhaps underscores just how distant and insulated Fifa’s higher echelons feel.)

Uefa president Michel Platini showed up, shook a few hands, shared a few jokes and left early. The others were preoccupied with the usual Fifa gossip. Not one appeared to realise that their world was about to be rocked to its foundations.

Yet just over 12 hours later, Swiss authorities were raiding Fifa headquarters, interrogating Platini and telling Sepp Blatter, the Fifa supremo, that they had opened proceedings against him for “criminal misappropriation”. One of the charges against Blatter was familiar: under his stewardship, Fifa had sold the Caribbean TV rights for the 2010 and 2014 World Cup to disgraced former Concacaf boss Jack Warner for a knockdown price of around £400,000. Warner then sold them on to a Jamaican broadcaster for £12 million, making a cool £10m plus in the process. And, in exchange, he may or may not have continued to support Blatter’s presidency.

The bombshell was the other charge. In February 2011, shortly after announcing he would not stand against Blatter for the Fifa presidency, Platini received a payment from Fifa of around £1.3m. The statement from the Swiss authorities claims the payment was for services rendered to Fifa between 1999 and 2002, before Platini joined the Executive Committee.

Platini says he is keen to co-operate with the investigation and admits he received the money for consulting work he did at the time. It does raise the obvious question of what sort of high-level part-time “consulting” pays £1.3m over three years. And, more importantly, why did nine years pass between the time his consulting ended and when he actually was paid? Did he forget to invoice?

Simply put, Platini needs to come up with a convincing and credible explanation or his run at the Fifa presidency is dead in the water.

Whatever hopes Blatter may have harboured of sticking around in some capacity – whether by doing a 180 degree turn (one of his advisors in Zurich was keen to remind people that he had not “resigned” in June, but had merely “laid down his mandate”) or by being made “honorary president” – seem shot.

Ten days ago, the Swiss attorney general opened an inquiry, on far less serious charges, effectively ticket touting, into Fifa’s general secretary Jerome Valcke. He was immediately suspended pending further investigation by Fifa’s Ethics Committee. It’s hard to see how Blatter won’t escape that fate.

What next?

We will have an organisation with an acting secretary-general and an acting president – by statute the title in these situations goes to the senior member of the Executive Committee, Cameroon’s Issa Hayatou – heading into the February election. And that election is in danger of losing its front-runner, Platini, as well as another of the three declared candidates, South Korea’s Chung Mong Joon, who is, you guessed it, also being investigated by Fifa’s Ethics Committee.

In other words, we are in uncharted waters here. To some, that’s scary. To others, it’s a sign of hope that maybe some of the corruption and malfeasance will be left behind.

EVEN before Friday’s raid, word around Zurich was that Fifa was essentially being run not by Blatter, but by lawyers. Specifically, Marco Villiger, the organisation’s head of legal, and Michael Burck, from the top US law firm Quin Emanuel, retained by Fifa over the summer.

It was the lawyers, apparently, who insisted that Valcke be dealt with swiftly, after last week’s revelations. They had spent the previous few months trying to negotiate his exit – a condition of Quin Emanuel taking the FIFA job – and this allows them to usher him out the door for close to nothing.

The feeling is that at risk is Fifa’s very existence as an institution, something that goes beyond Blatter. The possibility that, if ducks aren’t put in a row, Fifa might find itself so shackled by Swiss regulators that they will have no choice but to move elsewhere is apparently very real. And that is something which, as one senior source put it “scares everybody”.

NOT a day has passed recently without talk of Brendan Rodgers’ imminent demise and the possibility of Liverpool replacing him with some high-end manager, with Carlo Ancelotti and Jurgen Klopp being the most frequently mentioned.

Liverpool’s poor start to the season, coupled with a certain ennui after months of Rodgers’ ostrich routine – like talking about how brilliant they played, regardless of the result – has undoubtedly created a resentment towards the former Swansea boss.

Throw in the endless finger-pointing over who was responsible for what botched signing and the much derided (and misunderstood) transfer committee, and it’s easy to see why the owners, Fenway Sports Group, might be mulling a change.

Yet at the same time, you wonder what has happened this season that would prompt them to view Rodgers differently than they did at the end of last year. Liverpool collected eight points in their final eight games in all competitions last season. In their first eight this season, they have actually enjoyed a marginal improvement, to 10 points.

Did they really think that their summer signings were going to be an instant hit to the point that they would amount to a giant leap forward? Or that, in a few months, Rodgers was going to get all the moving parts working, something he had not been able to do in the previous 15 months?

This isn’t to say that replacing Rodgers is wrong. If you think you can get an upgrade, and both Klopp and Ancelotti represent an upgrade, it can make sense to make a change. But it can’t be a knee-jerk to murmurs among the fan base. He is the same guy he was at the end of last season, except now he has the defence of the summer signings needing to bed in.

And a change now will likely mean whoever comes in, will also enjoy plenty of excuses: it’s tough to take over mid-season, he’s stuck with another manager’s signings, etc. And that will, in turn, most likely amount to another wasted campaign.