In May 2015 the remaining chief officers of Fifa, and the substitutes for those thrown overboard, assembled in Zurich for the annual congress and inevitable re-election of the president, a gathering suffused with gloom, grey and ennui. Sepp Blatter, masterful survivor, was not only still afloat, but in command, at seventy-nine the unquestionable favourite to be elected for his fifth term, extending his tenure to beyond twenty years. To the trail left in the wake of his political acumen and relentless self-advancement could be added another sulking victim: Michel Platini, nursing a grumble that Blatter had reneged on a promise to step down this time. Since his very first entwining with Blatter in 1998, Platini always believed the older man was grooming him for the Fifa presidency, but now he felt betrayed: he was never going to stand against Blatter, worried that he would always lose a nasty fight. So the one realistic candidate prepared to oppose the long-term crowd-pleaser was really no more than a stalking horse, a symbol of opposition, backed by Platini for having a go in his place: the game prince of Jordan, Ali bin Al Hussein.
The planes flew in, the pampered delegates were met at the airport by smart young Swiss greeters holding Fifa names aloft, then leading their visitors to their Mercedes saloons and familiar grand hotels. After the scandals and so many impregnable reputations sunk, including that of Havelange, it was nevertheless business as always. Reforms were being introduced, initially developed by Mark Pieth and his independent governance committee, which featured some prominent names in anti-corruption, including the British former attorney general Lord Goldsmith. But they had pulled out and dismantled their process when, in the autumn of 2014, Blatter had pondered all the options and decided it would be for the best if he stood again.
‘That was partly why we stepped down,’ Pieth told me in an interview for this book. ‘We found it indefensible for him to run again, because he was so discredited. It was a slap in the face for us, it would have meant our work was useless.’
Domenico Scala, the Swiss corporate executive recruited by Blatter, on Pieth’s recommendation, to steer the reforms in as the chairman of a new audit and compliance committee, was continuing his work. His immediate perception on arriving at the House of Fifa had been that there was a howling vacuum where some basics of governance should be expected of a modern organisation. Scala recommended oversights of the finance; a committee to set the pay of the president and executive committee, which had never existed before; reformation of the executive committee and president, and their powers.
‘As far as good governance is concerned, I am convinced that we remain on the right track,’ Scala said in the annual report published at the congress.
Long-term allies Warner, Blazer, Teixeira, Leoz and bin Hammam were gone, replaced in their confederations and on the executive committee by new men who had been in the system for years. There had not been a major scandal since all the unpleasantness in the Trinidad hotel and its aftermath, and Blatter had sailed through the scrutiny of the ISL bribe revelations. The New York Daily News had run its splash on 2 November 2014 about Blazer, revealing ‘the secret life of soccer’s Mr Big’, but not much had been heard about that supposed US investigation since.
Also in November 2014, Judge Eckert of the ethics committee’s ‘adjudicatory’ chamber gave his verdict on the long-awaited investigation by Michael Garcia into the bidding process which sent the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar. Eckert said Garcia’s findings did identify some possible malpractice by bids, including England’s and Australia’s, and by executive committee members, including Warner and bin Hammam, but none were sufficient to undermine the ‘integrity’ of the outcome. The Spain and Portugal bid for 2018, accused of colluding with Qatar in a pact of votes, appeared not to have cooperated at all with Garcia; their bid was not included in Eckert’s summary and the Spain FA president, Fifa executive committee member and vice president, Ángel María Villar Llona, was later given a warning by the ethics committee and fined 25,000 CHF.
Franz Beckenbauer, the world football icon for forty years and member of the Fifa executive committee from 2007 to 2011, who was one of the twenty-two voters in 2010, was also fined, in February 2016, for failing to cooperate with Garcia. This was despite, the ethics committee said, ‘Repeated requests for his assistance. This included requests to provide information during an in-person interview and in response to written questions presented in both English and German.’
The Russian bid, led by the minister for sport in Vladimir Putin’s government, Vitaly Mutko, had told Garcia that it no longer had any of its emails or computer records, because they had only ‘leased’ the computers, then given them back to their owner.
‘The owner has confirmed that the computers were destroyed in the meantime,’ Eckert’s report said.
Nor could the Russian bid’s emails from Gmail accounts be recovered because, the bid said, Google USA had not responded to its request. Eckert accepted this, made no criticism of it, and on ‘the evidence available’ found nothing ‘sufficient to support any findings of misconduct by the Russia 2018 bid team’.
Bin Hammam was found to have paid Reynald Temarii €305,640 to help the Oceania president with legal costs to fight his one-year suspension imposed after the undercover sting by the Sunday Times. Garcia found that bin Hammam’s funding of Temarii’s appeal was directly intended to help the Qatar bid. It meant that Temarii did not have to step down and be replaced on the executive committee, which would have been by David Chung, his then deputy, who is from Papua New Guinea and would have voted, as mandated, for Australia. However, Eckert concluded that because it was only one vote, it did not make a ‘significant’ difference to the outcome. Despite all the allegations and suspicion loaded on to the Qatar result, Eckert said no other evidence of serious corruption had been found.
Garcia, extraordinarily, joined those protesting that Eckert’s report was a whitewash, issuing a statement complaining publicly that the summary of his investigatory report contained ‘numerous materially incomplete and erroneous representations’ of the facts he had established and his conclusions. But an appeal to Fifa’s own appeals committee failed, and Eckert’s decisions stood. Garcia then explicitly questioned Eckert’s independence, and the culture of Fifa, saying there was ‘a lack of leadership on these issues’. He resigned, but has never since broken his confidentiality agreement to explain his objections to Eckert’s summary. He was replaced by his deputy, a Swiss lawyer and prosecutor, Cornel Borbély.
The ethics committee announced it would proceed against some of those identified for misconduct, including Warner, bin Hammam and Temarii, who had, anyway, already been discarded. On 18 November 2014, Fifa even stated that it had lodged a criminal complaint with the Swiss authorities based on some of the misconduct identified. But these were evidently fringe issues, not sufficient to annul the vote and rerun it. The contracts with Qatar were signed, and the multi-billion-dollar stadium and infrastructure programme was going ahead in the boomingly wealthy statelet in the Gulf.
The 2014 World Cup in Brazil had begun with anti-Fifa and anti-inequality demonstrations by thousands of citizens in Rio de Janeiro appalled at the tournament’s cost to the country. But as so often–and as is likely in Qatar in 2022–once the tournament started the action was globally engrossing, and the experience was mostly acclaimed as a carnival of football. Germany’s rebooted generation were a mature and intricately unified team by then, and they produced one of the most extraordinary results in World Cup history when they sliced open a dishevelled Brazil side 7–1 in the semi-final. Joachim Löw’s team beat Argentina 1–0 in extra-time of the final with an exquisite cushioning of the ball on his chest by midfield substitute Mario Götze and a seamless left-foot volley. German football’s revival, begun in 2000 and accelerated by the World Cup hosting Sommermärchen of 2006, was complete, a model achievement to other European countries, including England, who failed again at the group stage.
So in May 2015, Blatter was in Zurich welcoming the voting delegates from around the world with well-timed helpings of good news and lavish promises of money. The financial report showed that while Fifa’s month of football cost Brazil a reported $13bn to host, Fifa went home with $2.4bn from the worldwide TV rights, $1.6bn from the marketing rights and sponsorships by Adidas, Coca-Cola, Hyundai, Emirates, Sony and Visa. Fifa’s total income from the 2011–14 cycle was $5.1bn. Payments to the FAs, gathering to vote for a president, had exceeded $1bn in a four-year period for the first time, which included a special payment of $261m, part of a total $538m paid directly to them in the financial assistance programme.
Making his presidential address in the report, Blatter, pictured smiling, paid tribute to Julio Grondona, who had passed away in July 2014, having been a key ally as the chair of the finance committee. He had served ‘with dedication and commitment’ for fifteen years from 1999 to 2014, Blatter said, ‘overseeing a period of growth and success for global football and for Fifa’. The new chairman of the finance committee was Issa Hayatou, the Cameroonian long-serving president of CAF.
‘The Fifa World Cup™ [sic] in Brazil… was a truly unforgettable tournament,’ Blatter said in his statement. ‘From the first kick of the ball to the last, fans around the world were hit by football fever.’
Explaining that ‘Fifa redistributes the majority of [its] revenue back into football,’ and outlining a $100m legacy fund in Brazil, Blatter said: ‘As we embark on a new commercial cycle, we have many reasons to be optimistic.’
So, people were kicking their heels in Zurich, seeing normal service resumed after the upheavals and corruption revelations, watching the delegates and executive committee high-ups arrive for their gilded few days, to culminate in another syrupy Sepp Blatter victory speech on the stage at the Hallenstadion.
The serenity of this lakeside coronation was shattered on the morning of Wednesday 27 May, just two days before the vote would take place. As the heads of the Fifa family were still sleeping beneath plumped-up duvets in the suites of their elegant Zurich haunt, the Baur au Lac hotel, Swiss police launched a dawn raid and arrested seven of them. Wanted–in fact, as it turned out, already charged in thunderous detail–by the US Department of Justice, the men were dragged from their dreams, awoken, told to get dressed and taken out to meet their nightmares. Some of them were led out of back doors into waiting cars, and shielded from photographers by thoughtful hotel staff holding Baur au Lac bed sheets in front of them. That produced the timeless photographs, perhaps the ultimate flipside of Fifa’s great images, like Pelé and Bobby Moore embracing in sportsmanship, of its dirty linen finally being washed in public.
Timed to coincide with and explain these arrests, the US Department of Justice published its stunning allegations: fraud, $200m bribes taken over twenty-four years, racketeering, money laundering and other serious criminal charges against fourteen defendants, including the seven who had been whisked away from the Baur au Lac. Nine occupied senior offices at Concacaf and Conmebol, and commensurate positions at Fifa. Already, that privileged world had gone, given way to the bare reality of police stations, cells, questioning and extradition proceedings. The few stories of an FBI investigation which had leaked over the four years since the Trinidad debacle turned out to have been mere fragments; the US authorities really had been constructing a barrage.
Several big beasts of Fifa were on the indictment; Warner, Leoz, Teixeira would be added within months. Grondona, not yet dead a year and Blatter’s praise for him barely published, was there as ‘Co-conspirator #10’, accused of taking millions in bribes. But some of their successors, too, those who had replaced the former presidents of Concacaf, Conmebol and the CBF, were also accused, including, extraordinarily, Jeff Webb, who had endlessly preached reform and appointed the Concacaf integrity committee to forensically expose Warner and Blazer.
On the same day, Michael Lauber, the attorney general in Switzerland, whose governments had for so long been accused of indulging Fifa and ignoring alleged corruption, announced an investigation into suspected criminal mismanagement and money laundering in connection with the awarding of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. Lauber announced that Fifa, on a ‘cooperative basis’, had handed over data and documents from its granite bunker on the hill, and that ‘relevant bank documents had already been ordered beforehand at various financial institutes in Switzerland’. Lauber said ten people gathered in Zurich–understood to be the members of the Fifa executive committee who voted on the World Cups–would be interviewed, although ‘persons unknown’ were suspected of the wrongdoing.
‘It is suspected that irregularities occurred in the allocation of the Fifa World Cups of 2018 and 2022. The corresponding unjust enrichment is suspected to have taken place at least partly in Switzerland.’
In New York, at a press conference live-streamed around the world hours after the arrests, the attorney general, Loretta Lynch, who was in charge of the prosecutions, James B. Comey, director of the FBI, and Richard Weber, chief officer of the Internal Revenue Service, competed with each other to produce the phrase most damning of Fifa. Lynch trademarked some which have been repeated ever since, saying:
‘The indictment alleges corruption that is rampant, systemic and deep-rooted, both abroad and here in the United States. It spans at least two generations of soccer officials who, as alleged, have abused their positions of trust to acquire millions of dollars in bribes and kickbacks. And it has profoundly harmed a multitude of victims, from the youth leagues and developing countries that should benefit from the revenue generated by the commercial rights these organisations hold, to the fans at home and throughout the world, whose support for the game makes those rights valuable.’
Comey said: ‘As charged in the indictment, the defendants fostered a culture of corruption and greed that created an uneven playing field for the biggest sport in the world. Undisclosed and illegal payments, kickbacks and bribes became a way of doing business at Fifa.’
Alleging ‘corruption, tax evasion and money laundering’, Weber came up with the money quote, asserting that what had been uncovered was: ‘The World Cup of fraud.’ Comey would admit, a little ruefully, that he wished he had thought of the phrase first.
The indictment itself–the charge sheet against the named defendants–and other key documents including guilty pleas are public in the US, so we had access to the details that day. Expanded six months later when more arrests were made and twenty-seven defendants were accused, along with several others, including Blazer, who had already pleaded guilty, it was an astonishing and gripping read. The indictment charged that there was a culture of bribes paid routinely, almost compulsorily, to Concacaf and Conmebol presidents and officials for the TV and marketing rights of all international tournaments in South, North and Central America and the Caribbean. It was like a densely detailed version of the ISL bribery conduct, replicated in the Americas. The media rights for the Concacaf Gold Cup and its club Champions League were alleged to have been awarded always with the payment of bribes, as was Conmebol’s Copa America–the world’s oldest continuously running international tournament–and its Copa Libertadores for clubs.
Blatter and others in Switzerland would later complain at the US authorities launching these corruption allegations against Fifa itself, and staging arrests of South and Central American citizens in Zurich, so explosively sabotaging his election cakewalk. Although nobody listened, given the unprecedented drama, that did have some justification: almost all the corruption charged was in systematic kickbacks paid by marketing companies for Conmebol and Concacaf tournaments, in the Americas, in which Fifa itself had no financial involvement at all.
The only charges relating directly to Fifa were the Trinidad cash in brown envelopes, thrown in on page 120, and major further claims against Warner. The indictment accused Warner of being paid bribes by South Africa’s bid to host the 2006 World Cup, when the country was beaten by Germany, claiming that: ‘At one point, Warner directed [his son] Daryan Warner to fly to Paris, France, and accept a briefcase containing bundles of US currency in $10,000 stacks in a hotel room from co-conspirator #13, a high ranking South African bid committee official.’
In accusations which appeared clearly to have come from Blazer, it was also alleged that when he and Warner once flew to Morocco, which was bidding to host the 2010 World Cup, an unnamed representative of the Moroccan bid committee offered to pay $1m to Warner for his vote.
That was peanuts compared to the most powerful accusation in the indictment. It was based on the South African government having offered to pay $10m to Warner’s Caribbean Football Union for a World Cup-linked legacy programme. Blazer, the indictment said, understood that offer to have been a bribe, the $10m was in exchange for Warner, Blazer and an unnamed Conmebol representative to vote for South Africa to host the 2010 tournament. Blazer’s account–which Warner was understood to deny; he has been fighting extradition since–was that Warner told him he had accepted the offer and agreed to give Blazer $1m of the $10m.
The indictment framed these charges in an historical narrative. It claimed that the partnership of Warner and Blazer, once they were in control at Concacaf from 1990, generated ‘the initial corruption’ of Fifa. Alleging that Warner diverted Fifa, Concacaf and Caribbean Football Union money into ‘numerous’ bank accounts he controlled, the indictment stated: ‘Beginning in the early 1990s Warner, often with the assistance of Charles Blazer, began to leverage his influence and exploit his official positions for personal gain.’
Although it was now evident that, as reported, Blazer had indeed been helping the authorities with their inquiries for a long time, it is clear from the indictment that a principal witness for the majority of the charges was another who pleaded guilty: José Hawilla. He was the founder and owner of the South American marketing company which had been prominent and renowned for years, with a slick and glamorous image: the Traffic Group. This company was perhaps best known for the deal it brokered for the CBF to do its famous ten-year sponsorship of the Brazil national football team with Nike, in 1996, which was always billed as a $160m deal. The indictment stated that when buying up rights he had paid bribes to football officials, who demanded them, ever since 1991. On that CBF deal, Hawilla’s evidence was that the CBF itself had directed Nike to also pay Traffic a $40m agency fee–and that Hawilla had then split this $40m fifty-fifty with Ricardo Teixeira. Brazil’s congressional inquiry had examined the Nike deal without quite finding major corruption; now the US Department of Justice was alleging that Teixeira received a $20m kickback on the deal. Teixeira, who had moved to Miami for a while, was reported to have moved back after the indictment to Brazil, whose law does not allow citizens to be extradited to another country. That meant he has not yet been required to plead guilty or not guilty to the charges, but he has always angrily rejected allegations of wrongdoing.
Hawilla, it emerged, had pleaded guilty on 12 December 2014, at a court in Brooklyn, to charges of conspiracy to conduct racketeering, with ‘multiple acts involving bribery, in violation of New York State Penal Law’; wire fraud; money laundering of the proceeds and obstruction of justice. District judge Raymond Dearie, who would hear further guilty pleas, told Hawilla that on just one of the conspiracy charges the maximum possible sentence the judge could impose was twenty years in prison; in fact all four counts carried a possible twenty-year imprisonment. Bribery is very definitely considered a crime in the US.
On the same day, Hawilla had signed an agreement to cooperate with the US authorities which would reduce his sentence. The agreement, also made public, revealed that Hawilla, like Blazer, had clearly been cooperating for many months before December 2014. Hawilla agreed that he must ‘at all times give complete, truthful and accurate information and testimony, and must not commit or attempt to commit any further crimes’. He also agreed to forfeit to the US authorities the incredible sum of $151m, which he agreed ‘represents profits that the defendant made from certain contracts obtained through the payment of bribes and kickbacks’. These included the Copa America, 2016 Copa America Centenario, Gold Cup and Concacaf Champions League contracts, and a 2012 contract Traffic agreed with the CBF for the rights to its club tournament, the Copa do Brasil. Hawilla had already paid $25m of his ill-gotten profits to the law enforcement authorities, and agreed to pay the further $126m in instalments.
Hawilla also confessed that when he first heard from an associate that the FBI was asking questions and looking into bribes paid by Traffic, ‘I asked him not to mention my name or the name of Traffic to the FBI,’ and that when he was finally questioned he withheld information ‘about ongoing criminal activity’. That was a guilty plea to the other criminal count, of obstructing justice, by intentionally impeding a grand jury investigation.
‘I knew that this conduct was wrong,’ said the former multi-millionaire. ‘I repent very much and apologise for what I did.’
In his guilty plea, Hawilla furnished the court with a little of his background. He was Brazilian, was seventy-one at the time, with various age-related health problems: he had recovered recently from cancer underneath his tongue, and suffered from pulmonary hypertension in one lung which meant he had to sleep with oxygen apparatus. He had, like João Havelange, originally studied law, and said he was a lawyer. The way he told his sorry story, he had begun Traffic as a decent business, in around 1980, buying rights to football events and ‘promoting them in a legitimate way throughout the world’. Then he ran into Nicolás Leoz, when negotiating for Traffic to buy the rights to the Copa America. Hawilla claimed it was Leoz who corrupted him, and the TV rights process throughout the following years.
It happened in January 1991, Hawilla said. He had already bought the Copa America rights, and went to a signing ceremony at Conmebol’s headquarters in Asunción, Paraguay, Leoz’s base. There, the indictment alleges, Leoz, already by then the president of Conmebol for five years, declined to sign the contract.
‘In a private meeting, Leoz told Hawilla… that Hawilla would make a lot of money from the rights he was acquiring and Leoz did not think it was fair that he [Leoz] did not also make money. Leoz told Hawilla that he would only sign the contract if Hawilla agreed to pay him a bribe.’
So there it was, the allegation that the president of the South American football confederation who lasted twenty-seven years, for fifteen of them one of the elite few in the Fifa executive committee, for whom the English FA had considered an honour when they wanted his vote for the 2018 World Cup, did not think it ‘fair’ for him not to take a bribe on a TV contract. This alleged sense of routine entitlement runs throughout the staggering picture painted by the US indictment, as it had been implicit in the drier Swiss legalese of the ISL documentation, in which Leoz had been one of the men paid bribes.
Hawilla said in his guilty plea that when Leoz demanded that bribe to sign the deal in Paraguay, he had to pay it because–as was explained in relation to the ISL bribes having continued unstoppably for years–‘I needed that contract because I had already assumed future engagements… commitments and even though I didn’t want to, I agreed to pay the bribe to that official.’
Hawilla had a six-figure US dollars payment made to an account designated by Leoz, he said. From then, Hawilla admitted, Traffic’s operation was corrupt. Bribes, he alleged, had to be paid as a matter of course to the officials selling the rights, who expected and demanded them–then to their successors who worked their way up within this culture. The indictment gave an overview of the ‘racketeering conspiracy’ which it claimed had been the underbelly of the lucrative increase in football TV and sponsorship deals’ value during the same period:
‘Over a period of approximately 25 years, the defendants and their co-conspirators rose to positions of power and influence in the world of organised soccer,’ it said. ‘During that same period… a network of marketing companies developed to capitalise on the expanding media market for the sport, particularly in the United States. Over time, the organisations formed to promote and govern soccer in regions and localities throughout the world, including the United States, became increasingly intertwined with one another and with the sports marketing companies that enabled them to generate unprecedented profits through the sale of media rights to soccer matches. The corruption… arose and flourished in this context.’
Leoz’s personal role in this process, from its early days, was alleged in some eyewatering detail:
‘In approximately 1993 or 1995, the defendant Nicolás Leoz began demanding additional bribe payments around the time each edition of the [Copa America] tournament was played,’ the indictment stated. ‘José Hawilla agreed to make these payments and caused them to be made. The defendant Nicolás Leoz solicited and received bribe payments from Hawilla in connection with every Copa America edition until 2011. The payments increased over time, and ultimately reached the seven figures.’
Leoz, eighty-six by the time all this caught up with him, was in the Migone private hospital in Asunción–which he reportedly owns–being treated for high blood pressure. A judge, Humberto Otazú, went to the hospital and told the media crowded outside that he had ordered Leoz to be under house arrest when he was released, as people over seventy are not held in prison before trials in Paraguay. Leoz’s lawyer, Fernando Barriocanal, told the reporters that Leoz was in good spirits and would defend himself ‘when the right time comes’.
Hawilla’s guilty plea and cooperation agreement continued, admitting to corruption having become endemic over twenty-four years, during the time of the TV and sponsorship rights boom.
‘After this and until 2013, other soccer officials came to me and those with whom I associated in business, to demand bribes to sign or renew contracts. I agreed that undisclosed bribe payments would be made to those soccer officials for contracts for the marketing rights to various tournaments and other rights associated with soccer.’
He said that Grondona, the chairman of the Fifa finance committee from 1999 until his death in 2014, pocketed millions of dollars which were due to the Argentinian FA from Traffic for the Copa America. Starting in the 1990s, Hawilla agreed to pay the AFA millions for each tournament so that Argentina would field its best players, and therefore increase the quality of the football and value of the TV rights. Hawilla was at times told not to send the payments to AFA, he said, but to a travel agency which, the indictment alleged, was ‘used to facilitate payments to [Grondona] personally’.
From 2001, Hawilla similarly agreed to pay the CBF money to field its best players, for a tournament the two South American giants might otherwise consider not their highest priority. Teixeira, the indictment alleged, would tell Hawilla to make payments to strange bank accounts, which were not CBF accounts. Hawilla said Traffic also paid bribes to Teixeira for almost twenty years, from the 1990s until 2009, when buying the rights from the CBF to the Copa do Brasil. When in 2011 another company, unnamed, supplanted Traffic and bought the rights, it too agreed to pay a bribe to Teixeira, the indictment alleges. Hawilla took issue with that company, and they agreed a settlement to jointly pool the rights to the tournaments from 2013 to 2022, and, as part of that, ‘Hawilla agreed to pay half the cost of the bribe payments,’ which totalled almost $1m. The bribes had become so soaked into the ways of football, they were a business expense
With Blazer and Hawilla, the selling and buying parties on the Concacaf deals, both pleading guilty, the indictment alleges that bribes were kicked back to Blazer and Warner when Traffic paid $9.75m in 1994 for the rights to the 1996, 1998 and 2000 Gold Cups, and when Traffic subsequently bought the 2002 and 2003 rights as well.
‘Traffic caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribe payments to be made to the defendants Jack Warner and Charles Blazer,’ it alleges, noting as an example $200,000 wired by Traffic to Barclays bank in New York in March 1999 for the credit of a company Blazer owned in the Cayman Islands. Three weeks later, half that money was transferred from Blazer’s Cayman Islands account to one of Warner’s accounts in Trinidad.
Throughout the indictment, the $200m money flows of alleged bribes and kickbacks are traced, through banks in the US and sundry tax havens, and these major figures in football are also charged with wire frauds and money laundering, for seeking to conceal that the payments were bribes.
The Copa America Centenario competition was a special historic moment, celebrating 100 years since Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Brazil had played the first Copa America tournament as long ago as 1916, itself held then to mark 100 years of independence for Argentina. After discussions, the tournament became a pan-American affair, opened up to Concacaf countries as well as Conmebol, so featuring countries throughout the Americas and the Caribbean. It was held in the US, where the gradual growth of soccer’s popularity, and increase in value for TV rights and sponsorships, underpins the wave of corruption alleged against the football bosses. The Copa America Centenario, a romantic landmark, is alleged to have turned into a frenzy of fraud. Another dispute between Traffic and a marketing company, Full Play, owned by brothers Hugo and Mariano Jinkis, who were also charged, led to the two companies and a third, Torneos, joining together to form a new umbrella company, Datisa. It would take on and share the rights to the 2015, 2019 and 2023 Copa America tournaments, which were the subject of the dispute, and the Centenario competition in 2016. The total paid by Datisa to Conmebol was $317.5m, and the company would agree to pay a further $35m to Concacaf for its countries’ participation in the Copa America Centenario.
Hawilla’s evidence was that Full Play and Torneos had already bought the Copa America rights, although he had argued he had an option to buy them, and their executives had told him they had already agreed to pay bribes to Conmebol officials. As his part in resolving the new Datisa joint venture formed to give Traffic a share of the TV rights, Hawilla actually agreed to pay a third share of the bribes already committed. He ended up paying $13.33m, suggesting that a total of $40m in bribes was paid. The list of those alleged to have been paid these bribes included the senior citizens of Fifa entitlement, Leoz, Teixeira and Grondona, but a clutch of their successors were also indicted.
‘The corruption… became endemic,’ the indictment alleged. ‘Certain defendants and their co-conspirators rose to power, unlawfully amassed significant personal fortunes by defrauding the organisations they were chosen to serve, and were exposed and then either expelled from those organisations or forced to resign.
‘Other defendants and their co-conspirators came to power in the wake of scandal, promising reform. Rather than repair the harm done to the sport and its institutions, however, these defendants and their co-conspirators quickly engaged in the same unlawful practices that had enriched their predecessors.’
Eugenio Figueredo, the Uruguayan former player who replaced Leoz as the Conmebol president when Leoz stepped down just before the ISL corruption revelations in 2013, was one of the seven arrested in Zurich. He was alleged to have taken bribes from Datisa on this deal, and ‘annual bribe payments’, together with Leoz, for the sale of the rights to the club competition, the Copa Libertadores. Figueredo would be extradited from Switzerland to Uruguay, where, at eighty-three, he was reported to have been remanded in prison while awaiting trial.
Figueredo’s successor, Juan Ángel Napout, fifty-eight, was a Paraguayan who had risen to become president of Conmebol in the classic, apparently model pattern: a businessman who became president of his local club for years, then president of the Paraguay FA, then involvement in the committees of the confederation. He was added to the indictment in November, arrested in Zurich–while lounging in the comforts of the Baur au Lac hotel–and charged with taking bribes from the massive Datisa contract with Conmebol, as well as ‘annual six figure bribe payments’ from the sale of rights to the Copa Libertadores. He was reported to have travelled voluntarily to the US, where on 16 December 2015 he pleaded not guilty to the charges and was released to home detention with twenty-four-hour video surveillance, in a $20m bond package agreed by the judge.
So, the past three presidents of the South American football confederation, formed in 1916, home of Argentina and Brazil, two of the greatest playing nations on earth, have each been charged with criminal involvement in massive corruption when selling the rights to televised tournaments. At the CBF itself, José Maria Marin, a former politician, took over as the president when Teixeira finally stepped down in 2012. Marin became the head of the committee organising the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, but a year after that triumph he was one of the Fifa high-ups arrested at the Baur au Lac in May 2015. Marin was charged with taking bribes from the Datisa contract, and to have ‘solicited and received bribe and kickback payments’ on the sale of the rights to the Copa Libertadores.
Marin was photographed in November 2015 outside a federal court in Brooklyn following his extradition from Switzerland, where he pleaded not guilty. The judge allowed him, too, to avoid being remanded to prison, sanctioning him to stay in a New York apartment, reported to be in Trump Tower, with tight restrictions and a $15m bond. Court reporters described Marin, eighty-three by then, looking: ‘Haggard… slumped down in a chair while lawyers remained standing in front of the bench discussing his bail conditions. He later rose for a long embrace with his wife, who was required to sign the bond.’
His lawyer, Charles Stillman, said Marin would be ‘preparing to deal with the charges’.
Marin had been replaced as the CBF president in April 2014, adhering to a prior agreement, by Marco Polo del Nero, another lawyer, then seventy-three, a long-term football politician who made it to the Fifa executive committee in 2012. In his official profile on Fifa’s website, asked what football meant to him, del Nero proclaimed: ‘The magic of the ball. I feel responsible by representing a sport which is so popular amongst millions of people. As a member of the management, I want to do something in order that the game stays clean and healthy.’
He left Zurich to fly back to Brazil early the week of the May 2015 congress, before the vote for president, and before he could be arrested for the charges of racketeering, involving alleged bribery, wire fraud and money laundering. Del Nero was charged with taking his share of the Datisa bribes along with Teixeira and Marin, and with soliciting ‘systematic’ bribes and kickback payments on the sale of rights to the Copa Libertadores. Hawilla had also told the authorities, in a startling story in the November indictment, that he and another, unnamed, sports marketing company had to pay Marin and del Nero, as well as Teixeira, bribes when the companies bought the rights to the club tournament, the Copa do Brasil. This was after the pair succeeded Teixeira as CBF president. Hawilla said he had a meeting with Marin in Miami in April 2014, to discuss these bribe payments, and had asked whether it was ‘really necessary’ to continue to pay bribes to Teixeira, who had stepped down from his football positions by then.
Marin, according to the indictment, stated: ‘It’s about time to have it coming our way. True or not?’
‘Hawilla agreed, stating: “Of course, of course, of course. That money had to be given to you.” Marin agreed: “That’s it, that’s right.”’
Del Nero is reported to have remained since the indictment in Brazil, free from the threat of extradition, and said he was preparing a response to the charges. In April 2016, charged with racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering relating to these alleged massive bribes demanded and paid for the sale of rights to tournaments, he brazenly reclaimed the presidency of the CBF. At the time of writing, he is still the president of the football association in Brazil, attacked by Romário as ‘the great plague of our football’.
While the world gazed upon these revelations and gasped incredulously at the sight of Fifa executive committee chiefs arrested, led away and charged in their vault of Zurich, Fifa itself still claimed it was in control. There was no question of postponing the election or of Sepp Blatter withdrawing for the mere matter of nine senior Fifa figures being charged with bribery and racketeering. On the day of the arrests and indictments, Fifa argued for a distance to be acknowledged from the US investigation, pointing out that ‘the individuals [were arrested] for activities carried out in relation with Concacaf and Conmebol business’.
That was not the full truth, as Warner, Blatter’s supporter for years, was charged with accepting bribes for previous World Cup votes, and he and Jeff Webb, a current executive committee member and Warner’s reforming successor, were accused of embezzling Fifa money. The indictment alleged that endemically, habitually corrupt men had been with Blatter on the executive committee, in the inner sanctum of Fifa House for decades, including the long-term chair of the finance committee being thanked for his service in the annual report. Yet Fifa sought to portray the alleged corruption as wholly separate, and nothing for it to worry about.
It was true enough that, in the fevered perception that the organisation was finally being exposed, some of the small print in the Swiss attorney general’s statement had been missed. He had indeed said, right at the end, that Fifa itself had filed the ‘criminal charges against persons unknown’ on 14 December 2014, after the completion of its own ethics committee’s report into the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bidding process. So, Lauber explained, Fifa itself was being treated as ‘the injured party’, and cooperating with the investigation. This, being the victim rather than the accused, would be the legal position and strategy which Fifa would seek to adopt throughout the trauma of the indictments and investigations, during which football’s world governing body was effectively in the hands of its lawyers, a US firm, Quinn Emanuel. In its own statement, Fifa emphasised that victim status, reiterated that the organisation had itself presented the file to Lauber, and at the end of a day of unimaginable scandal, on which it was plunged into the most shocking crisis in 114 years of history, it stated blithely: ‘We are pleased to see that the [Swiss] investigation is being energetically pursued for the good of football and believe that it will help to reinforce measures that Fifa has already taken.’
Efforts were then made to carry on as if the calm of the coronation had not been so rudely interrupted. Blatter was still standing again, on his record, and went on with the congress in the Hallenstadion, unveiling the financial figures which showed that $1bn sent between 2011 and 2014 to the gathered FAs. The staged presentations went on regardless, blissfully distanced from all that unpleasantness which had befallen colleagues from South America and the Caribbean who would otherwise have been in the hall. The good works of football–underwritten by Fifa’s motto: ‘For the Game, For the World’–were proclaimed in videos and presentations, football as a vehicle for hope, anti-racism, peace. All of which was still true; the game was beloved worldwide, and a great frustration of Fifa staff was that some tremendous development work, by many committed people, done in difficult areas and countries was going largely unrecognised beneath the heap of corruption scandals involving the bosses. Here, the projects were presented as Blatter’s vision, legacy and achievement–which to a degree is true, too–to national FAs which were receiving more money than they could ever have conceived before he became president.
People new to all this in 2015, who were baffled that the incumbent president for seventeen years could be re-elected two days after members of his executive committee were indicted for ‘the World Cup of fraud’, did not know the culture or the politics. Prince Ali bin Al Hussein doughtily spoke to the assembly to warn them that ‘Fifa does not exist in a bubble’ and that change was needed. Michel Platini, the Uefa president, had now told Blatter to resign and rallied the Uefa associations to back Prince Ali.
Blatter, though, was supported by an increasingly prominent power broker in Asia, the Kuwaiti Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah, who had said: ‘If you speak about Sepp, you have to speak about the change of football. He has maintained and developed football. He funded a lot of football projects and made it more international.’
To a majority of the football associations around the world it remained a record not worth breaking with. After the standard interminable vote of 209 associations in alphabetical order from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, Sepp Blatter, aged seventy-nine, was accepting the congratulations of 133 countries which had voted to keep him for another four years. Prince Ali’s seventy-three votes in the first round were a creditable statement of protest, and Platini gave him a pat on the back:
‘I congratulate my friend Prince Ali for his admirable campaign,’ he said.
Blatter, acceding to a fifth term, called for unity then, for football to pull together, and insisted that he was best equipped to lead Fifa through its choppy waters.
‘You have seen the results of the congress, and they think that I am still the man to solve these problems,’ he said.
He argued that the spectacle of so many senior people with whom he worked as allies for years having left or been banned by the ethics committee showed that Fifa had taken a tough stance on corruption. Asked if he was worried himself about the US investigation, he replied:
‘I have no concerns. I especially have no concerns about my person.’
Even an operator with the ambition and obsession of Sepp Blatter, though, could not convince himself that he had retaken the Fifa presidency in a manner untainted by the arrests and allegations of twenty-four years of endemic bribery involving $200m. Just four days after the Friday of his fourth election triumph, on Tuesday 2 June 2015, Blatter announced a press conference at the House of Fifa. The world’s media had written and broadcast their fulminating coverage on the Friday, aghast that Blatter seemed to be carrying on regardless, then gone home. The conference room so often packed with indignant questioners, in which we had been told that elegance was an attitude, was eerily empty.
On the fifa.com live stream, he was a little shakier than normal as he walked in, then quite croaky as he read from a prepared statement:
‘I have been reflecting deeply about my presidency and about the 40 years in which my life has been inextricably bound to Fifa and the great sport of football,’ he read. ‘I cherish Fifa more than anything and I want to do only what is best for Fifa and for football.
‘I felt compelled to stand for re-election, as I believed that this was the best thing for the organisation. That election is over but Fifa’s challenges are not. Fifa needs a profound overhaul.
‘While I have a mandate from the membership of Fifa,’ he had noticed, ‘I do not feel that I have a mandate from the entire world of football–the fans, the players, the clubs, the people who live, breathe and love football as much as we all do at Fifa.
‘Therefore, I have decided to lay down my mandate at an extraordinary elective Congress. I will continue to exercise my functions as Fifa President until that election.’
The decision and promise, a completely uncharacteristic turnaround, was that he had accepted four more years was untenable, and would stand down within months. His statement included the assertion, again, that the scandals involved members of the executive committee who were representatives of confederations ‘over whom we have no control, but for whose actions Fifa is held responsible’. He railed against the blocking of two key reforms, the setting of limits to how long people could serve and integrity checks on their fitness to do so, by Platini’s Uefa. But he had recognised he could not continue for years and promised to ‘focus on driving far-reaching, fundamental reforms’, which Domenico Scala would oversee.
He declined to answer questions, so afterwards there was a scramble to understand what had inclined the great survivor to accept that this time it was all over. It was clear that he had not had the celebratory weekend in Zurich he had envisaged for himself when the development money, and his strategies and wiles, secured him his fifth term. It was said that his one daughter, Corinne, had urged him to step down, for his health and for his chance of a respectable legacy. It was speculated that the US authorities were investigating in particular his role in the $10m paid to Warner relating to the South Africa World Cup bid of 2010, which was undoubtedly true, and that he could face charges any moment, which turned out not to be. Other informed people told me that it was vital legally to show the US authorities that Fifa was committed to change, because that way it could maintain its victim status and fend off the allegation that it was indeed a racketeering organisation and become itself subject to criminal charges.
Scala, who was involved with Blatter in the discussions over that traumatic weekend, confirms that people close to him were counselling him, not demanding of him, to stand down.
‘It was not black and white,’ Scala recalls. ‘It was multiple factors. I think he did have a choice, it was not inevitable for him. It was not legal factors; his position had become untenable because public opinion and the media had decided he had become the personification of the ills of Fifa. That may be not completely fair–the alleged crimes were committed in the confederations which Fifa does not control–but there comes a point where you have to protect the organisation you are leading.
‘The pressure was tremendous; in public life, how many people have suffered such pressure?’
Scala said that people around Blatter were persuading him he could still shape the future and end his tenure with some dignity this way, but he could not sustain four years of criminal investigations, global criticism and ordure. Presenting the prospect for Blatter of seeing the reforms implemented, then handing over some months later, Scala said, ‘I was trying to give him a direction to move out in a controlled manner; to have a good exit, salvage some creditable legacy and image.’
In the face of multiple arrests, indictments and Fifa being accused of the ‘World Cup of fraud’, even Sepp Blatter, the lifer at the captain’s table, had had to recognise his position was unsustainable.
‘He should have resigned earlier; in 2011, or after the World Cup in 2014; that would have protected Fifa better,’ Scala reflected, before summing it up: ‘He was out of time.’
Blatter ended his oration with an emotional plea and self-justification, complete with a reference to the politics: ‘It is my deep care for Fifa and its interests, which I hold very dear, that has led me to take this decision,’ he read. ‘I would like to thank those who have always supported me in a constructive and loyal manner as President of Fifa and who have done so much for the game that we all love. What matters to me more than anything is that when all of this is over, football is the winner.’
Then he turned around and began to walk out. A door opened for him, showing light in the corridor outside, in the House of Fifa he had built, inhabited, protected and never wanted to leave, even into his eighties.