On the morning of May 27, 2015, plainclothes Swiss police walked into the Baur au Lac, a discreet five-star hotel on the shore of Lake Zurich, and arrested seven senior football officials who had gathered for FIFA’s annual congress. Hours later in Brooklyn, the United States Department of Justice unsealed a 47-count indictment charging 14 defendants — nine football officials and five sports-marketing executives — with racketeering, wire fraud, and money-laundering conspiracies. The verdict that opens this file is the indictment itself: a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of New York charged that the men had run, for nearly a quarter of a century, what Attorney General Loretta Lynch called “rampant, systemic, and deep-rooted” corruption inside the body that governs the world’s most popular game.
The mechanism was almost mundane in its repetition. Sports-marketing companies wanted the lucrative media and marketing rights to tournaments — the Copa América, the Copa Libertadores, the CONCACAF Gold Cup, World Cup qualifiers — and the officials who controlled those rights were willing to sell their votes and signatures for a cut. Prosecutors alleged the executives paid and agreed to pay well over $150 million in bribes and kickbacks over 24 years. The money moved through US banks and the US financial system, which is precisely what gave American prosecutors jurisdiction over a Swiss-based federation and a roster of defendants from a dozen countries.
What made the case land was not a single whistleblower’s outrage but the patient assembly of a federal racketeering case under the RICO statute, the law built to dismantle the Mafia. The government treated FIFA’s confederations as a criminal enterprise and the bribery as its ongoing business. Cooperating witnesses — most notably the former CONCACAF general secretary Chuck Blazer, who had worn a recording device for the FBI — supplied the inside view. Sepp Blatter, FIFA’s president of 17 years, was re-elected two days after the arrests and announced his intention to step down four days after that.
The indictment was the beginning, not the end. Several defendants pleaded guilty; in December 2017 a Brooklyn jury convicted the former heads of the Brazilian and Paraguayan federations after trial; and the broader investigation grew to dozens of defendants and entities. The dawn raid at the Baur au Lac became the image of a reckoning that football had spent decades insisting could not happen to it.
In December 2015, FIFA’s Ethics Committee banned the two most powerful men in world football from the game. Sepp Blatter, FIFA’s president of 17 years, and Michel Platini, the UEFA president and Blatter’s heir-apparent, were each handed eight-year bans over a single payment: two million Swiss francs that FIFA paid Platini in 2011 for advisory work he said he had done between 1998 and 2002. The Ethics Committee found the payment improper — a “disloyal payment” with no written contract, made years after the fact, just as Platini was positioning himself to succeed Blatter. That sporting verdict, later trimmed on appeal, is the one that opens this file.
The crucial distinction, easy to blur and important to keep straight, is that a sporting ban is not a criminal conviction. The bans came from FIFA’s own internal justice system and were reviewed by the Court of Arbitration for Sport. A separate Swiss criminal prosecution, brought by the federal attorney general over the same payment, ended very differently: in July 2022 the Federal Criminal Court in Bellinzona acquitted both men of fraud, and on appeal in 2025 they were cleared again. Neither man was criminally convicted. Both were banned by football’s regulators and exonerated by the Swiss courts — a split verdict that this case is defined by.
The mechanism at the heart of it was deceptively small. Platini had worked as a technical adviser to Blatter at the turn of the century. He was paid a salary at the time, but he and Blatter later claimed there had been a verbal “gentleman’s agreement” for far more, the balance to be paid whenever FIFA could afford it. In 2011 — nine years after the work ended and shortly before a FIFA presidential election — FIFA paid the outstanding two million francs. To FIFA’s ethics judges, an undocumented, long-delayed seven-figure payment between the incumbent president and his likely successor looked like exactly the kind of conflict the ethics code existed to forbid.
The fallout ended two of football’s most consequential careers. Platini, a genuine candidate to lead FIFA, was forced out of the race and out of UEFA. Blatter, already stepping down amid the broader US corruption investigation, left under a cloud rather than on his own terms. Both spent the next decade insisting the payment was legitimate — and, in the criminal courts at least, the judges agreed with them.
Chuck Blazer was the American who built CONCACAF into a commercial powerhouse, sat on FIFA’s executive committee, and skimmed a fortune off the top — and then, cornered by the tax he never paid on it, became the FBI’s man inside world football’s corruption. On November 25, 2013, in a sealed Brooklyn courtroom, the former CONCACAF general secretary pleaded guilty to 10 federal counts, including racketeering, wire fraud, money laundering, tax evasion, and failing to report his foreign bank accounts. That guilty plea, unsealed in 2015 alongside the broader FIFA case, is the verdict on record: Blazer was a convicted felon who had admitted taking bribes on World Cup hosting bids and on the marketing rights to CONCACAF’s Gold Cup.
The mechanism was a percentage. Blazer’s reputation, and his nickname “Mr. Ten Percent,” came from the cut he extracted from the deals he brokered, most famously a marketing-rights arrangement on the Gold Cup that funneled a slice of the revenue to him personally. Atop that ran the bribes the bigger scheme turned on: payments to FIFA executive committee members in exchange for their votes on where World Cups would be played, including the 1998 and 2010 tournaments. The money built a life of conspicuous excess — apartments in Trump Tower, one of them reportedly kept for his cats — that became the case’s most quoted detail and, eventually, the thread the IRS pulled.
What makes Blazer central rather than merely colorful is what he did after he was caught. Confronted around 2011 over millions in hidden, untaxed income, he agreed to cooperate, and in December 2011 he began working undercover for the FBI. He recorded fellow officials, reportedly using a microphone concealed in a keychain that he left out on a table while soccer power-brokers spoke freely in his hotel suite during the 2012 London Olympics. The “Mr. Ten Percent” who had grown rich on football’s kickbacks became the informant who handed prosecutors a map of how the kickbacks worked.
Blazer agreed to forfeit nearly $1.96 million and owed millions more in back taxes, and FIFA’s Ethics Committee banned him from football for life in 2015. He never reached a sentencing hearing; he died in July 2017, at 72, with his cooperation having helped make the largest corruption case in the sport’s history possible.
Mohamed bin Hammam, the Qatari power broker who ran the Asian Football Confederation and sat on FIFA’s executive committee for fifteen years, was banned from football for life by the FIFA Ethics Committee on December 17, 2012 — for repeated conflicts of interest in the way he ran the AFC, not for the cash-for-votes affair that had made him famous. That distinction is the whole point of his case, and it is one most people get wrong. Bin Hammam was banned twice. Only the second ban stuck.
The first ban, in July 2011, accused him of distributing US$40,000 cash bribes to Caribbean football officials in Trinidad to buy their votes in his challenge to Sepp Blatter for the FIFA presidency. That ban was annulled in July 2012 by the Court of Arbitration for Sport — not because bin Hammam was found innocent, but because CAS judged the evidence insufficient to sustain a lifetime sanction. The court was explicit that its ruling was “not an affirmative finding of innocence.” It was, in effect, an acquittal on procedural grounds, and bin Hammam celebrated it as vindication. He had roughly five months to enjoy the feeling.
While the Caribbean case was unravelling, FIFA’s newly empowered investigatory chamber, chaired by the American prosecutor Michael J. Garcia, had been working a different file: a forensic audit of the AFC’s books during bin Hammam’s presidency. It found, in FIFA’s words, “repeated violations” of Article 19 of the FIFA Code of Ethics — conflict of interest — across his tenure from 2008 to 2011, including the use of confederation accounts that blurred the line between the AFC’s money and his own. On December 15, 2012, with the second hearing looming, bin Hammam resigned from all his football positions, declaring himself disillusioned with the game. Two days later FIFA banned him anyway, retroactively and for life, so that the resignation could never be mistaken for an escape. The man who had survived the spectacular charge was finished by the boring one.
Lalit Modi built the Indian Premier League out of nothing in 2008 and turned it, within two years, into one of the most valuable competitions in world sport. He was its founder, its chairman, and its commissioner — and on September 25, 2013, the Board of Control for Cricket in India expelled him and banned him for life from holding any post in cricket administration. The verdict on the record is a sporting one: the BCCI’s Special General Meeting in Chennai unanimously accepted its disciplinary committee’s findings that Modi was guilty of serious misconduct and indiscipline, and ruled that he would never again be “entitled to hold any position or office” in the game he had reinvented.
The disciplinary committee, which delivered a 134-page report, found him guilty on eight counts that describe a man who ran a public institution as a personal enterprise: rigging the franchise auctions by slipping onerous tender clauses in and out to favor preferred bidders; selling broadcast, media, and internet rights without authorization from the board he answered to; steering television rights to a favored agency; and failing to disclose the stakes people close to him quietly held in the league’s franchises and digital business. The IPL was a triumph. The way Modi held the levers of it was, in the board’s judgment, a conflict of interest in motion.
It is worth stating plainly what this verdict is and is not. Modi has been banned for life by cricket’s governing body in India; he has not been criminally convicted. India’s Enforcement Directorate opened multiple investigations into alleged foreign-exchange violations running into hundreds of millions of dollars, and the matters have ground on for more than a decade, but no criminal conviction is on record. Modi decamped to London in 2010, days after his suspension, and has remained in the UK ever since, contesting the allegations and declining to return. The ban is enforced; the man is abroad.
What follows is how the most successful start-up in the history of cricket became a case study in the danger of letting its inventor also be its referee.
Between 1992 and 2000, FIFA’s own marketing agency funnelled an estimated 41 million Swiss francs in kickbacks to the men at the top of world football, chiefly the long-reigning FIFA president João Havelange and his son-in-law Ricardo Teixeira, the head of Brazil’s football confederation. The scheme was never tested by a guilty verdict. It ended, instead, in the most genteel resolution available to a continental institution caught with its hand in the till: a repayment. In May 2010 a Swiss criminal investigation in the canton of Zug was discontinued after Havelange and Teixeira agreed to pay back a fraction of what they had taken, and FIFA itself topped up the arrangement. The case file closed not with a conviction but with a transaction.
The mechanism was almost boring in its simplicity, which is part of why it lasted so long. ISL — International Sport and Leisure, the agency that held FIFA’s World Cup television and marketing rights — paid commissions to the officials who controlled the rights it was buying. The payments ran through front companies designed to hide the true recipients, and at the time they were made, commercial bribery was not a crime under Swiss law, a legal gap the scheme fit into with unusual precision. ISL collapsed into bankruptcy in 2001 with debts later estimated in the hundreds of millions, and the receivers and prosecutors who picked through the wreckage found the trail of commissions running straight back to FIFA’s leadership.
It took years and a court order to get the names into daylight. In July 2012 a Swiss court released the long-suppressed file, confirming that Havelange had received at least 1.5 million francs and Teixeira at least 12.4 million, the document noting the pair may together have taken some 22 million. In April 2013 FIFA’s own Ethics Committee, working from an investigation by the American lawyer Michael Garcia, confirmed in writing that the payments were “bribes” — its word — and added a third recipient, the South American confederation president Nicolás Leoz. By then the principals had begun to vanish: Havelange had resigned his International Olympic Committee membership in December 2011, days before that body was due to sanction him, citing ill health. The verdict on record is a settlement. The finding on record is that bribes were paid.
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.
Valentin Balakhnichev held two of the most powerful positions in his sport: treasurer of the International Association of Athletics Federations, the global governing body now called World Athletics, and president of the All-Russia Athletic Federation. On January 7, 2016, the IAAF Ethics Board banned him from athletics for life. The finding was not that he had failed to police doping. It was that he, together with others, had turned the machinery of doping enforcement into an instrument of extortion — demanding money from a Russian marathon runner, Liliya Shobukhova, in exchange for delaying and concealing the sanction her own abnormal blood values warranted. He was fined 25,000 dollars. The Court of Arbitration for Sport upheld the lifetime ban in August 2017.
The scheme inverted the purpose of the office. Shobukhova, a leading distance runner, had suspicious readings in her Athlete Biological Passport, the longitudinal blood-monitoring system designed precisely to catch the kind of doping that evades a single test. Those readings should have triggered a disciplinary process. Instead, the officials in a position to bring that process found a way to monetise their power over it. The Ethics Board concluded that Balakhnichev, the Russian distance-running head coach Alexei Melnikov, and Papa Massata Diack — an IAAF marketing consultant and son of the then-IAAF president — conspired to extract what the Board called, in substance, bribes from Shobukhova by acts of blackmail, allowing her to keep competing when she should not have, including at the London 2012 Olympic marathon.
The numbers were specific and traceable. Shobukhova paid 450,000 euros; bank records showed sums withdrawn from her accounts in stages. When she was eventually banned anyway, a partial refund of 300,000 euros was returned to her and her husband in 2014 — a repayment linked back to Balakhnichev — which had the effect of documenting the original transaction. The Ethics Board found that the men had “conspired to extort what were in substance bribes from the athlete by acts of blackmail,” and that they “acted dishonestly and corruptly and did unprecedented damage to the sport of track and field.” Three of the four officials sanctioned in the decision, Balakhnichev among them, were banned for life.