Temarii and Adamu — Two Votes for Sale, Caught on Tape
Summary
In October 2010, two members of FIFA's 24-man executive committee — the body that was weeks from awarding the 2018 and 2022 World Cups — were caught on camera by undercover reporters from Britain's Sunday Times appearing to put their votes up for sale. Amos Adamu of Nigeria and Reynald Temarii of Tahiti, the president of the Oceania Football Confederation, met people they believed to be lobbyists for an American consortium trying to bring the tournament to the United States, and discussed money. FIFA's Ethics Committee acted with rare speed: on November 17–18, 2010, it banned Adamu from all football activity for three years and fined him 10,000 Swiss francs, and suspended Temarii for one year with a 5,000-franc fine. Both were barred from the December 2 vote in Zurich. The verdict was on the record before the ballot they had tried to monetise was even cast.
The two cases were not identical, and FIFA was careful to say so. Adamu was filmed asking for £500,000 — about 800,000 dollars — to be paid to him personally, ostensibly to build four artificial football pitches in Nigeria, in exchange for his support. Temarii, by contrast, was not found to have agreed to sell his vote; he asked for £1.5 million to fund a sports academy in Oceania, and was sanctioned for breaching FIFA's confidentiality and loyalty rules by discussing the bid contest with outsiders at all. One man was punished for appearing to trade his vote; the other for talking about the auction. Both punishments removed them from it.
The sting reshaped the vote it exposed. With Adamu and Temarii suspended, only 22 of the 24 executive committee members cast ballots on December 2, 2010 — the day FIFA awarded the 2018 World Cup to Russia and the 2022 tournament to Qatar, decisions that would themselves become the most scrutinised in the organisation's history. Temarii's story did not end with his one-year ban. In 2015 FIFA banned him for a further eight years after finding he had taken 305,640 euros from the disgraced Asian football boss Mohamed bin Hammam to fund his appeal against the original sanction — a man punished for selling his silence about the auction, financing his defence with money from another of its central figures.
Timeline
The auction nobody admitted was open
The 2010 World Cup vote was the most valuable transaction in football, and everyone involved understood the geometry of it. Twenty-four men on FIFA's executive committee would decide, by secret ballot, which countries would host the 2018 and 2022 tournaments — events worth billions in television and commercial revenue, and incalculable prestige, to the winners. That concentrated an extraordinary amount of power in a small, lightly supervised group, and it made each member a destination for lobbying that ranged from the legitimate to the frankly transactional. The line between courting a vote and buying one was exactly where the Sunday Times went looking.
The reporters' cover was an American consortium hoping to land a World Cup, and lobbyists for such a bid would plausibly be flush with money and eager to spend it. Approaching ExCo members in that guise, the journalists recorded the conversations that followed. The resulting footage did not show envelopes changing hands; it showed something subtler and, for FIFA, more damaging — officials discussing what it would take to secure their support, in terms that mixed development projects with personal benefit. The sting worked because it did not need to manufacture corruption. It only needed to ask, and record the answers.
Adamu's recorded position was the more direct. He was filmed seeking £500,000 — roughly 800,000 dollars — to be paid to him personally, framed as funding for four artificial pitches in Nigeria, in return for his vote. The personal-payment element was the hinge: development money routed through a federation is one thing, money to an official's own control is another, and FIFA's Ethics Committee treated the distinction as decisive. Temarii's ask was larger in headline terms — £1.5 million for an Oceania sports academy — but directed at an institution rather than himself, and the committee did not find that he had agreed to sell his vote. The difference in the framing produced the difference in the verdicts.
The committee that beat the ballot
FIFA's Ethics Committee, an organisation not historically famous for haste, moved before its own showpiece vote. The provisional suspensions came on October 20, 2010, days after the story broke; the full hearings ran in mid-November; and the sanctions were handed down on November 17–18, with barely two weeks to spare before the December 2 ballot. The committee plainly understood that allowing two compromised men to vote on the World Cup, after they had been filmed discussing money, would taint the result beyond rescue. Speed here was self-preservation.
The sanctions tracked the evidence. Adamu drew the heavier penalty — a three-year ban from all football activity and a 10,000-franc fine — consistent with a finding that he had been willing to take money personally in connection with his vote. Temarii received a one-year suspension and a 5,000-franc fine, and crucially was not found to have traded his vote; his offence was breaching FIFA's confidentiality and loyalty rules by discussing the hosting contest with people he should not have. It was, in effect, a conviction for being indiscreet about the auction rather than for participating in it, and the lighter sentence reflected that.
The practical effect was identical regardless of the legal distinction: both men were removed from the December 2 ballot. The vote proceeded with 22 of 24 members, and FIFA awarded 2018 to Russia and 2022 to Qatar. The sting had not stopped the vote, but it had stripped two votes from it and, more lastingly, established before the fact that the body conducting the most important decision in football contained members who could be filmed putting their support in play. The verdict preceded the ballot it concerned, which is an unusual sequence in governance scandals and a damning one.
The appeal that became a second offence
For Adamu, the matter largely ended where it began: the Court of Arbitration for Sport upheld his three-year ban in 2011, and he served it. Temarii's case took a stranger turn, one that converted his original, comparatively minor offence into the lead-in to a far larger one. Determined to clear his name and reclaim his Oceania position, he set out to appeal the November 2010 suspension — and in January 2011 he accepted 305,640 euros from Mohamed bin Hammam, the Qatari head of the Asian Football Confederation, ostensibly to cover his legal costs.
Bin Hammam was not a neutral benefactor. He was a candidate for the FIFA presidency and a central figure in Qatar's orbit, and he would himself be banned by FIFA in 2011 and again in 2012. Taking a third of a million euros from such a man, while contesting a corruption-adjacent sanction, was the kind of judgment that an ethics process exists to catch. It did. On May 13, 2015, FIFA banned Temarii for eight years, finding he had breached multiple provisions of the ethics code by accepting the payment. The man originally punished for talking too freely about football's vote auction had financed his defence with money from one of the auction's most notorious players, and earned a sentence eight times longer than the first.
The episode closed the loop on what the 2010 sting had exposed. The vulnerability was never really about two officials; it was about a governance structure in which a handful of executive-committee members held disproportionate power, attracted disproportionate money, and operated with disproportionately little oversight. Adamu and Temarii were the two who got filmed. The system that made them targets carried on awarding the tournaments they had been caught discussing.
The Five Factors
Aftermath
Adamu served his three-year ban after CAS upheld it in 2011 and never returned to FIFA's top table. Temarii's career was effectively ended by the cumulative bans — one year in 2010, then eight years in 2015 — and his name resurfaced in 2023 among former officials charged in a long-running French criminal inquiry into corruption around the World Cup bidding era, a process that continues to work through the conduct of the period. Bin Hammam, the source of the money that doubled Temarii's exposure, was himself banned for life from football.
The sting's deepest mark was on the vote it bracketed. The awarding of 2018 to Russia and 2022 to Qatar on December 2, 2010, conducted with two suspended members watching from the sidelines, became the most investigated decision in football governance, feeding directly into the broader reckoning of 2015 and after. FIFA eventually abolished the small-committee model that had concentrated so much power in so few hands, moving World Cup host selection toward a vote of its full congress with published ballots — a reform aimed squarely at the structural flaw the Sunday Times had exposed. Two officials had been caught discussing the price of their votes; the lasting change was to the system that had given so few people something so valuable to sell.
Lessons
- Assume that any small body controlling a multibillion-dollar decision will be targeted by money, and build oversight proportional to the stakes rather than to the number of people involved.
- Draw and enforce a bright line between institutional development funding and personal payment; the disguise of the first as the second is the most common form of the offence.
- Do not rely on investigative journalism to do an integrity body's policing; if outside stings are catching what internal controls miss, the controls are the failure.
- Scrutinise how the accused fund their defence — money taken to appeal a corruption ruling can be a fresh corruption offence in its own right.
- Reform the structure, not just the individuals: removing two compromised members fixes a ballot, but only redistributing the power fixes the vulnerability.
References
- FIFA suspends pair of officials from voting on future World Cup hosts The Christian Science Monitor / Associated Press
- FIFA officials suspended from World Cup votes CBC Sports
- Oceania vote void after Temarii appeals ban FourFourTwo
- Former FIFA VP Temarii banned 8 years for taking money Sports Illustrated / Associated Press