I can’t help myself. I’m starting to like the guy. Yeah, he might have compromised himself a time or 10 along the way, but the guy has almost a messianic vision for his game, and he is making things happen. They may seem strange to the First World soccer nations, giving the 2018 World Cup to Russia instead of England or Spain-Portugal, and giving the 2022 World Cup to Qatar instead of the United States or Australia. But it’s part of his vision now.

Anyway, I went to a press conference he starred at today, at Zayed Sports City, the day before the championship match, and I was impressed by him. Not personally or physically. He’s a little old Swiss guy who is 74 and is reaching that point where he seems to be a little smaller every time I see him, now. And he’s prone to saying insensitive/non-PC things simply because, well, he’s old and he doesn’t think it all through.

But his vision of soccer as vehicle for somehow making the world a little better place … well, I’ve been around enough to know that does in fact happen. Kinda. When the shooting is over, what the survivors nearly all have in common is an interest in the game they call football.

I wrote a column about this … then discovered that someone in another part of The National newsroom had written a profile that touched on many of the same points, so I yanked the column and submitted a straight news story, instead.

So here, on this blog, you get the never-published column, starting now.

This was Sepp Blatter the visionary. Not the slick political operator who fought his way to the top of the Fifa heap. Not the bogeyman of First World football.

This was Sepp Blatter the feisty septuagenarian who is brave – or deluded – enough to believe the game he governs can be a force for good in a troubled world. The globe-trotting Envoy of Sport who seems to envision a planet on which nearly any dispute can be solved or at least sharply ameliorated by generous applications of “the world game”.

At Zayed Sports City, 34 hours before kick-off of the championship match of the Club World Cup, the president of Fifa addressed several prosaic topics. How it is Qatar’s decision on whether to disperse parts of the 2022 World Cup throughout the region; how he believes the 2022 tournament should be held in January to allow footballers to escape the Gulf summer; how well Abu Dhabi organised the current edition of the Club World Cup; how Brazil needs prodding to be ready for the 2014 World Cup.

But what impressed was his passion for football as a place where warring factions work out their anger in a “fair play” environment and exchange shirts after the final whistle. And whether it is sheer naivete or shameless grandstanding by a shady figure, give the man this: he certainly seems to believe his own message.

“If a human being has no more dreams, then he should close the eyes and then close his life,” he said in his German-accented English. “Dreams are what we need in our lives.”

He spoke of organising a competition in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in February of 1976, when he was an aide to the former Fifa president Joao Havelange. How from that moment forward he felt that “football is more than kicking a ball.”

Blatter clearly believes in football as a forum for creating understanding by taking its big event, the World Cup, where it has never been. South Africa in 2010. Russia in 2018. And, perhaps, most controversially, Qatar in 2022.

“Speaking of ‘22 in the Middle East, it is more than the Middle East,” he said. “Now there is a chance to go to this Arab world and another culture. Don’t forget it’s another culture in the world where you have 900 million or one billion in the same culture; it is Islam, and it’s good to have the World Cup in another culture as well.

“So it is a dream. Where shall we go in the future, to Alaska or the Arctic? If you look at this subcontinent called India, 1.3 or 1.4 billion people where football can perhaps move something …”

He assured that “from time to time” the World Cup should go back to “those countries who have been in charge of football for more than 100 years”, a clear reference to western Europe.

But Blatter is looking elsewhere now. To football frontiers, not the well-tilled grounds of settled sporting territory. To lands, regions where he believes his game can have “a social and cultural impact”, often not “in countries where you live like in a paradise” but in the more numerous places “where you don’t live like in a paradise on Earth and where football can help. Football for hope, football for heads and football for entertainment.”

He added: “My dreams are still alive, but sometimes you come to a limit … when God will say you have to stop and this is a question of age. But dreaming, you can dream when you’re 100 years old. When you lose all your dreams, it’s time to go.”

Blatter clearly is not ready to go. He plans to run for reelection as Fifa president next year a position from which he can continue to take the game in directions that puzzle and frustrate the historic powers of the sport.

He did not say it, exactly, but it is safe to assume he would like to see TP Mazembe of Africa defeat Inter Milan in the final. In Sepp Blatter’s visionary world, champions spring from every corner of the globe, and Fifa tournaments land there, as well.