An FBI agent brings out a computer after an operation inside the CONCACAF (Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football) offices in Miami Beach. Alamy Stock Photo
Corruption
‘It’s closer to Game of Thrones’ - The story of football’s biggest administration scandal
Writer and producer Miles Coleman on the Netflix documentary series ‘Fifa Uncovered’.
14 officials were charged, nine of whom were current or former Fifa executives.
Some were led away covered in bed sheets at the five-star Baur au Lac hotel, where they had been due to attend Fifa’s annual congress in Zurich.
The FBI investigation had been underway for several years at that stage, while criminal proceedings were opened over the awarding of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.
The controversy to a degree continues to this day. Fifa are still questioned over the awarding of the World Cup to Qatar, as well as the various related controversies over migrant deaths and human rights.
Many of those involved in the corruption scandal are no longer involved in football, yet whether all have been punished in an appropriate fashion is debatable at best.
A recent article in The Guardian by Barney Ronay, ‘Who was in the room when Qatar got the World Cup,’ conveys the level of systemic corruption that existed within the beleaguered organisation at the time.
‘Fifa Uncovered,’ a new limited documentary series on Netflix, also takes a detailed look at the scandal, using the infamous day in May 2015 as a starting point and going back to explore the origins of Fifa from relatively humble beginnings to the sporting giant it has become.
Coinciding with the onset of the 2022 World Cup, the documentary provides a powerful reminder of just how much controversy the decision to award the tournament to Qatar generated in the first place.
‘Fifa Uncovered’ also contains a number of different perspectives on the story, from journalists who were covering it in depth, such as David Conn and Ken Bensinger, to those who were directly involved in the scandal, including former Fifa president Sepp Blatter as well as Jérôme Valcke, the Fifa General Secretary from 2007 and 2015, who was subsequently banned from football for 10 years by Fifa and received an 11-month suspended prison sentence over bribery charges in a Swiss appeals court.
“I think the biggest challenge for me was getting the people who know this story, and who were in the rooms, to talk about it,” the documentary’s writer and producer, Miles Coleman, tells The42. “Because this is not a salubrious story. It’s not a story that reflects gloriously on everyone.
“Also, sometimes there are documentaries where it’s just about getting the person to speak and spill their secrets. We wanted to make sure that everyone involved felt they were getting their side of the story across and that they were being treated fairly and equitably.
“This is one of those stories where people use words like ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys,’ but you have to remember that these are professionals with careers in the sport, and we’re talking about real people with real lives.”
Former Fifa president Joseph 'Sepp' Blatter who recently admitted awarding the hosting of the World Cup to Qatar had been a mistake. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
Blatter and Valcke are among the most notable participants given how close to this story they were, and the filmmakers were determined to allow them to have their say, despite the heavy criticism both have received on account of having presided over the biggest scandal in the organisation’s history.
“Blatter was an interesting one because he’s an older gentleman, he’s in his 80s,” says Coleman. “Mentally, as happens to all of us, he gets tired.
“So we knew that we were going to have a shorter interview with him simply because of his age.
“Jerome Valcke, on the other hand, is someone who sat with us for about four hours and told us all about his life and his work in football. And I think that’s partly because of the work that we did to make sure that he felt respected and listened to in the process.
“But also, I think it’s because a lot of those people feel genuinely aggrieved. And they feel like they have had their story told by other people. They feel like there have been words put into their mouth, and they feel they’re being portrayed as not who they are.
“And whether or not you agree with that, everyone’s been in a position at some point in their lives where they feel that they’ve been misrepresented and want to go out and clear their name or to give their story the truth.”
And while football bore the brunt of the criticism in the fallout from this controversy, ‘Fifa Uncovered’ highlights how this story goes far beyond just a bunch of sports administrators — former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, ex-President of France Nicolas Sarkozy and Mahmoud Abbas, president of the State of Palestine, are among the lengthy cast of characters to feature.
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“The feeling I had before going into this was there would be a lot more brown envelopes, that the corruption would be a lot more cartoonish and slapstick, and much more about sort of relatively low-grade sums of money being exchanged for favours,” explains Coleman. “And that, of course, happened. I mean, we have pictures in the documentary of literal brown envelopes.
“I think what shocked me was that the corruption and the dealmaking was a level far, far above that. What really shocked me as a football fan was to discover that when Qatar are going around and canvassing opinions on their World Cup, governments are sitting down to talk to governments, and emirs are talking to presidents.
“And what they’re talking about is not just football, it’s fighter jets, it’s the wholesale purchase of football clubs in PSG.
“It shocked me that the level of power politics at play at Fifa is so far removed from how I see football as something that affects people at the grassroots. And it felt to me researching it that Fifa detached from its origins, it stopped being about ensuring every boy and girl could kick a ball into the goal and started being about powerbrokers throwing their weight around and cutting the kinds of deals that really don’t have a place in professional sport.
“It’s not just a football story. If anything, it’s a football story without a lot of balls being kicked. I’ve had a lot of people come up to me and say: ‘I really enjoyed the documentary, but I’m not a football person.’ And I’m not really that surprised by it. In storytelling, it’s closer to ‘Game of Thrones’ or a political thriller, like ‘House of Cards’. It’s actually got very little to do with sport.”
Former Fifa Secretary General Jerome Valcke is among the participants in the documentary. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
Watching the series will not do much for the viewer’s faith in humanity. Such a high number of people become embroiled in the controversy. Most stay silent and the occasional individual who attempts to lift the lid on the shady behaviour that permeates the organistion tends to be swiftly ostracised.
So why is it that so many sports administrators in particular seem prone to corruption?
“In some ways, Fifa was a very self-selecting organisation,” Coleman explains. “So the atmosphere at Fifa was very unique for many years. It was an atmosphere, which had very little oversight and scrutiny.
“It’s obviously not elected by some sort of general election. So you could rise to the top by cutting deals in backrooms and never really be checked outside of that.
“Football itself — tickets to the World Cup, tickets to events, being flown around the world, just on a lifestyle basis, attracts the kind of people who love the good life, who saw this as a party. This was not a widget-making organisation. This was not a UN organisation. It was football — football’s fun, and people love being in its orbit.
“And it did start to attract people who in order to keep up their lifestyle and in order to ensure the good times kept rolling were willing to do increasingly shady things, just to keep the fun going.
“And I do think Fifa leaped into that. The stories that we heard of people walking away from every conference with this watch or a new handbag for the partner definitely felt to us like the culture of Fifa was designed to separate everyone into either insiders or outsiders — outsiders who rejected the Rolexes would never progress in the organisation and insiders who took the Rolexes and loved the Rolexes, would do well in that organisation. But in so doing, they would be bound by a very informal code of silence, a wink, and a nudge to let everyone else around them know that they too are playing the same game.”
One of the great hypothetical questions is whether all the corruption would have been exposed were it not for the highly controversial decisions to award the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar respectively. There is even a ‘sour grapes’ theory that the FBI’s investigation of Fifa was essentially revenge owing to the failure of USA’s 2022 bid to host the prestigious tournament. Yet the fact that the FBI investigation was opened in the summer of 2009, more than a year before the World Cup votes were cast, appears to discredit these claims. So in all likelihood, the corruption would have been exposed at some point regardless of this remarkable development in the story.
“The idea that some FBI agent opens this because they lose the World Cup vote misunderstands not only the role of the FBI but the role of soccer in America,” adds Coleman.
“We’ve been told by multiple people that the World Cup didn’t really move the needle of the investigation. It’s not like it gave them fresh impetus.
“Where the World Cup did give that investigation fresh impetus wasn’t so much on a motivation level, but the fact that there were deals being done in US dollars that might have been looked into, especially with Jack Warner and Chuck Blazer, that’s where it did give them some ammunition.
“Many people in the room in Zurich, the day that the Russia and Qatar bids were announced as having won, felt like Fifa had gone too far in that moment.
“One of the things we heard time and time again, was when Qatar was pulled out in the envelope, the whisper, the rumour, the feeling was this was the beginning of the end, that this was the moment where what was buried, just under the surface, came crashing out.
“For many people in Fifa, and for Blatter, in particular, there’s always been this lingering suspicion of: ‘What if we hadn’t voted for that? Would we still be running the show?’ And the answer is, very possibly.”
Former Uefa President Lennart Johansson unsuccessfully challenged Blatter for the Fifa presidency in 1998. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
There are also a couple of other significant sliding doors moments in the documentary.
In 1998, former Uefa president Lennart Johansson contested a Fifa election with Blatter and lost, with the late Swedish sports official subsequently claiming “brown envelopes” had been handed to delegates.
Furthermore, Michel Zen-Ruffinen, who served as the Secretary General of Fifa between 1998 and 2002 and started out as a lawyer specialising in sports law, presented a report levelling serious accusations against Blatter. A number of vice presidents called for the main man to resign, but in the end, it was Ruffinen who was forced to leave his position.
These two incidents are a testament to Blatter’s power, resilience, and influence while simultaneously serving to paint his supporters in a less-than-favourable light.
But could these two individuals calling for reform have made a big difference or was the corruption so systemic that their influence would not have created any meaningful change?
“It’s a great question because it gets to the heart of what has been the issue at Fifa for so long. The reason Zen-Ruffinen, Lennart Johansson, and many people before or since failed to topple the system is not because they launched a coup at the wrong time. It’s because they tried to do so and were basically outvoted.
“It was not the will of Fifa to reform. In both of those examples, Lennart Johansson lost the popular election of all the member associations and Zen-Ruffinen failed to get the majority backing of the executive committee.
“In other words, the institutions of Fifa looked at reformers, and with all of the authority of the institution itself, basically said: ‘No, thank you.’
“And one of the great mysteries of Fifa, one of the impossible fixes is how do you deal with an organisation where Montserrat has the same vote as Germany, where Vanuatu has the same vote as Brazil. That democratic ideal, which sounds very nice on paper, has caused some issues.
“It leads one to conclude that the issues at Fifa are not about bad apples, but rather are systemic and require wider reform.
“The reason those two examples are so powerful is that they show the actual instruments of Fifa, the chambers, the statutes, the way it is governed, rather than helping it govern better, have held back good governance, and have done so for many years.”
Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
And so we are left with a World Cup in Qatar that, despite the numerous controversies and protests, has ultimately gone ahead much to the frustration of its many detractors.
“Probably the maddest thing about it all is that Qatar have survived, that Qatar are hosting the World Cup, that it has weathered every accusation levelled at it. It leads people to think: ‘What could you do to get the World Cup taken away from you?’
“If all of these accusations have not proved sufficient. where would Fifa or where would global sports as a community draw the line?
“I never doubted that Qatar would host a good World Cup. If anything, I’ve been surprised at some of the stories I’ve heard because I thought the Qatari organisation would be better than what it has been, and certainly more buttoned up and more aligned.
“I’m surprised at things like beer bans, and rainbow hats [being banned], not necessarily from a policy direction. But I’m surprised that the new terms have been so last minute. It leads people to think that basically, there are very few red lines at that level of international sport. And the fact that it’s gone ahead with all of these storm clouds hanging over it makes people look to the future and think: ‘Well, what could be next?’
“I would certainly look at the Saudi Arabian bid for the 2030 World Cup as an incredibly realistic prospect. Many people might think: ‘Well, surely they won’t bring all the scrutiny on themselves again.’ But the fact that it’s going ahead leads me to think that’s exactly what they want to do.”
And what of Fifa? Is there any optimism that it is now in a significantly better place than before all the FBI arrests? Or would it be naive to believe it has suddenly ironed out its substantial flaws?
“I don’t think even the [Gianni] Infantino loyalists would say that everything is perfect. I think, on the one hand, you could look at, for example, the US bidding process for 2026. You could look at the fact that there haven’t been FBI raids and go: ‘Well, clearly things are better than they were before.’ But I think that would be asking the wrong question.
“The issues that we ought to be talking about: sportswashing, Fifa’s relationship with dictatorships and repressive regimes, human rights, and sports, that almost goes well beyond a handful of marketing executives lining their pockets with football cash. And it now goes to pretty much a battle for the future of the sport and what role does Fifa want to play in a very difficult and divided political world. And will it continue to have a human rights and ethics statement on paper that it ignores? What kind of organisation does it want it to be? What are its values? And will the sporting public continue to support them?”
‘Fifa Uncovered’ is available to stream on Netflix now.
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‘It’s closer to Game of Thrones’ - The story of football’s biggest administration scandal
ON 27 MAY, 2015, the world of football was rocked as Fifa officials were arrested on corruption charges.
14 officials were charged, nine of whom were current or former Fifa executives.
Some were led away covered in bed sheets at the five-star Baur au Lac hotel, where they had been due to attend Fifa’s annual congress in Zurich.
The FBI investigation had been underway for several years at that stage, while criminal proceedings were opened over the awarding of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.
The controversy to a degree continues to this day. Fifa are still questioned over the awarding of the World Cup to Qatar, as well as the various related controversies over migrant deaths and human rights.
Many of those involved in the corruption scandal are no longer involved in football, yet whether all have been punished in an appropriate fashion is debatable at best.
A recent article in The Guardian by Barney Ronay, ‘Who was in the room when Qatar got the World Cup,’ conveys the level of systemic corruption that existed within the beleaguered organisation at the time.
‘Fifa Uncovered,’ a new limited documentary series on Netflix, also takes a detailed look at the scandal, using the infamous day in May 2015 as a starting point and going back to explore the origins of Fifa from relatively humble beginnings to the sporting giant it has become.
Coinciding with the onset of the 2022 World Cup, the documentary provides a powerful reminder of just how much controversy the decision to award the tournament to Qatar generated in the first place.
‘Fifa Uncovered’ also contains a number of different perspectives on the story, from journalists who were covering it in depth, such as David Conn and Ken Bensinger, to those who were directly involved in the scandal, including former Fifa president Sepp Blatter as well as Jérôme Valcke, the Fifa General Secretary from 2007 and 2015, who was subsequently banned from football for 10 years by Fifa and received an 11-month suspended prison sentence over bribery charges in a Swiss appeals court.
“I think the biggest challenge for me was getting the people who know this story, and who were in the rooms, to talk about it,” the documentary’s writer and producer, Miles Coleman, tells The42. “Because this is not a salubrious story. It’s not a story that reflects gloriously on everyone.
“Also, sometimes there are documentaries where it’s just about getting the person to speak and spill their secrets. We wanted to make sure that everyone involved felt they were getting their side of the story across and that they were being treated fairly and equitably.
“This is one of those stories where people use words like ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys,’ but you have to remember that these are professionals with careers in the sport, and we’re talking about real people with real lives.”
Blatter and Valcke are among the most notable participants given how close to this story they were, and the filmmakers were determined to allow them to have their say, despite the heavy criticism both have received on account of having presided over the biggest scandal in the organisation’s history.
“Blatter was an interesting one because he’s an older gentleman, he’s in his 80s,” says Coleman. “Mentally, as happens to all of us, he gets tired.
“So we knew that we were going to have a shorter interview with him simply because of his age.
“Jerome Valcke, on the other hand, is someone who sat with us for about four hours and told us all about his life and his work in football. And I think that’s partly because of the work that we did to make sure that he felt respected and listened to in the process.
“But also, I think it’s because a lot of those people feel genuinely aggrieved. And they feel like they have had their story told by other people. They feel like there have been words put into their mouth, and they feel they’re being portrayed as not who they are.
“And whether or not you agree with that, everyone’s been in a position at some point in their lives where they feel that they’ve been misrepresented and want to go out and clear their name or to give their story the truth.”
And while football bore the brunt of the criticism in the fallout from this controversy, ‘Fifa Uncovered’ highlights how this story goes far beyond just a bunch of sports administrators — former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, ex-President of France Nicolas Sarkozy and Mahmoud Abbas, president of the State of Palestine, are among the lengthy cast of characters to feature.
“The feeling I had before going into this was there would be a lot more brown envelopes, that the corruption would be a lot more cartoonish and slapstick, and much more about sort of relatively low-grade sums of money being exchanged for favours,” explains Coleman. “And that, of course, happened. I mean, we have pictures in the documentary of literal brown envelopes.
“I think what shocked me was that the corruption and the dealmaking was a level far, far above that. What really shocked me as a football fan was to discover that when Qatar are going around and canvassing opinions on their World Cup, governments are sitting down to talk to governments, and emirs are talking to presidents.
“And what they’re talking about is not just football, it’s fighter jets, it’s the wholesale purchase of football clubs in PSG.
“It shocked me that the level of power politics at play at Fifa is so far removed from how I see football as something that affects people at the grassroots. And it felt to me researching it that Fifa detached from its origins, it stopped being about ensuring every boy and girl could kick a ball into the goal and started being about powerbrokers throwing their weight around and cutting the kinds of deals that really don’t have a place in professional sport.
“It’s not just a football story. If anything, it’s a football story without a lot of balls being kicked. I’ve had a lot of people come up to me and say: ‘I really enjoyed the documentary, but I’m not a football person.’ And I’m not really that surprised by it. In storytelling, it’s closer to ‘Game of Thrones’ or a political thriller, like ‘House of Cards’. It’s actually got very little to do with sport.”
Watching the series will not do much for the viewer’s faith in humanity. Such a high number of people become embroiled in the controversy. Most stay silent and the occasional individual who attempts to lift the lid on the shady behaviour that permeates the organistion tends to be swiftly ostracised.
So why is it that so many sports administrators in particular seem prone to corruption?
“In some ways, Fifa was a very self-selecting organisation,” Coleman explains. “So the atmosphere at Fifa was very unique for many years. It was an atmosphere, which had very little oversight and scrutiny.
“It’s obviously not elected by some sort of general election. So you could rise to the top by cutting deals in backrooms and never really be checked outside of that.
“Football itself — tickets to the World Cup, tickets to events, being flown around the world, just on a lifestyle basis, attracts the kind of people who love the good life, who saw this as a party. This was not a widget-making organisation. This was not a UN organisation. It was football — football’s fun, and people love being in its orbit.
“And it did start to attract people who in order to keep up their lifestyle and in order to ensure the good times kept rolling were willing to do increasingly shady things, just to keep the fun going.
“And I do think Fifa leaped into that. The stories that we heard of people walking away from every conference with this watch or a new handbag for the partner definitely felt to us like the culture of Fifa was designed to separate everyone into either insiders or outsiders — outsiders who rejected the Rolexes would never progress in the organisation and insiders who took the Rolexes and loved the Rolexes, would do well in that organisation. But in so doing, they would be bound by a very informal code of silence, a wink, and a nudge to let everyone else around them know that they too are playing the same game.”
One of the great hypothetical questions is whether all the corruption would have been exposed were it not for the highly controversial decisions to award the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar respectively. There is even a ‘sour grapes’ theory that the FBI’s investigation of Fifa was essentially revenge owing to the failure of USA’s 2022 bid to host the prestigious tournament. Yet the fact that the FBI investigation was opened in the summer of 2009, more than a year before the World Cup votes were cast, appears to discredit these claims. So in all likelihood, the corruption would have been exposed at some point regardless of this remarkable development in the story.
“The idea that some FBI agent opens this because they lose the World Cup vote misunderstands not only the role of the FBI but the role of soccer in America,” adds Coleman.
“We’ve been told by multiple people that the World Cup didn’t really move the needle of the investigation. It’s not like it gave them fresh impetus.
“Where the World Cup did give that investigation fresh impetus wasn’t so much on a motivation level, but the fact that there were deals being done in US dollars that might have been looked into, especially with Jack Warner and Chuck Blazer, that’s where it did give them some ammunition.
“Many people in the room in Zurich, the day that the Russia and Qatar bids were announced as having won, felt like Fifa had gone too far in that moment.
“One of the things we heard time and time again, was when Qatar was pulled out in the envelope, the whisper, the rumour, the feeling was this was the beginning of the end, that this was the moment where what was buried, just under the surface, came crashing out.
“For many people in Fifa, and for Blatter, in particular, there’s always been this lingering suspicion of: ‘What if we hadn’t voted for that? Would we still be running the show?’ And the answer is, very possibly.”
There are also a couple of other significant sliding doors moments in the documentary.
In 1998, former Uefa president Lennart Johansson contested a Fifa election with Blatter and lost, with the late Swedish sports official subsequently claiming “brown envelopes” had been handed to delegates.
Furthermore, Michel Zen-Ruffinen, who served as the Secretary General of Fifa between 1998 and 2002 and started out as a lawyer specialising in sports law, presented a report levelling serious accusations against Blatter. A number of vice presidents called for the main man to resign, but in the end, it was Ruffinen who was forced to leave his position.
These two incidents are a testament to Blatter’s power, resilience, and influence while simultaneously serving to paint his supporters in a less-than-favourable light.
But could these two individuals calling for reform have made a big difference or was the corruption so systemic that their influence would not have created any meaningful change?
“It’s a great question because it gets to the heart of what has been the issue at Fifa for so long. The reason Zen-Ruffinen, Lennart Johansson, and many people before or since failed to topple the system is not because they launched a coup at the wrong time. It’s because they tried to do so and were basically outvoted.
“It was not the will of Fifa to reform. In both of those examples, Lennart Johansson lost the popular election of all the member associations and Zen-Ruffinen failed to get the majority backing of the executive committee.
“In other words, the institutions of Fifa looked at reformers, and with all of the authority of the institution itself, basically said: ‘No, thank you.’
“And one of the great mysteries of Fifa, one of the impossible fixes is how do you deal with an organisation where Montserrat has the same vote as Germany, where Vanuatu has the same vote as Brazil. That democratic ideal, which sounds very nice on paper, has caused some issues.
“It leads one to conclude that the issues at Fifa are not about bad apples, but rather are systemic and require wider reform.
“The reason those two examples are so powerful is that they show the actual instruments of Fifa, the chambers, the statutes, the way it is governed, rather than helping it govern better, have held back good governance, and have done so for many years.”
And so we are left with a World Cup in Qatar that, despite the numerous controversies and protests, has ultimately gone ahead much to the frustration of its many detractors.
“Probably the maddest thing about it all is that Qatar have survived, that Qatar are hosting the World Cup, that it has weathered every accusation levelled at it. It leads people to think: ‘What could you do to get the World Cup taken away from you?’
“If all of these accusations have not proved sufficient. where would Fifa or where would global sports as a community draw the line?
“I never doubted that Qatar would host a good World Cup. If anything, I’ve been surprised at some of the stories I’ve heard because I thought the Qatari organisation would be better than what it has been, and certainly more buttoned up and more aligned.
“I’m surprised at things like beer bans, and rainbow hats [being banned], not necessarily from a policy direction. But I’m surprised that the new terms have been so last minute. It leads people to think that basically, there are very few red lines at that level of international sport. And the fact that it’s gone ahead with all of these storm clouds hanging over it makes people look to the future and think: ‘Well, what could be next?’
“I would certainly look at the Saudi Arabian bid for the 2030 World Cup as an incredibly realistic prospect. Many people might think: ‘Well, surely they won’t bring all the scrutiny on themselves again.’ But the fact that it’s going ahead leads me to think that’s exactly what they want to do.”
And what of Fifa? Is there any optimism that it is now in a significantly better place than before all the FBI arrests? Or would it be naive to believe it has suddenly ironed out its substantial flaws?
“I don’t think even the [Gianni] Infantino loyalists would say that everything is perfect. I think, on the one hand, you could look at, for example, the US bidding process for 2026. You could look at the fact that there haven’t been FBI raids and go: ‘Well, clearly things are better than they were before.’ But I think that would be asking the wrong question.
“The issues that we ought to be talking about: sportswashing, Fifa’s relationship with dictatorships and repressive regimes, human rights, and sports, that almost goes well beyond a handful of marketing executives lining their pockets with football cash. And it now goes to pretty much a battle for the future of the sport and what role does Fifa want to play in a very difficult and divided political world. And will it continue to have a human rights and ethics statement on paper that it ignores? What kind of organisation does it want it to be? What are its values? And will the sporting public continue to support them?”
‘Fifa Uncovered’ is available to stream on Netflix now.
For the latest news coverage on the Fifa World Cup Qatar 2022, see here >
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