When Sepp Blatter joined Fifa in 1975 it had just twelve employees. Forty years later, the FBI have accused 14 executives of 47 counts of money laundering, racketeering and tax evasion linked to alleged kickbacks totalling more than $150m. Football has become the premier global sport, a television and commercial powerhouse, while Fifa, the organisation which runs it, turned bad.
The crumbling of Fifa and the shock resignation of Blatter days after his re-election in June 2015 is the most spectacular story of corruption sport has ever seen. There are international investigations into alleged bribery and fraud committed by some of Fifa’s top executives, and the deeply murky vote surrounding the awarding of the 2018 and 2022 World Cup tournaments to Russia and Qatar is under sharp scrutiny, with criminal investigations under way in the US and Switzerland.
This is a story of globalisation, of the changing geography of wealth and power, of how a most beloved of sports could be so rotten at the top. David Conn writes the definitive account of Fifa’s rise and fall, the key, larger-than-life personalities and power-brokers responsible for it, told with a love of the game.
The crumbling of Fifa and the shock resignation of Blatter days after his re-election in June 2015 is the most spectacular story of corruption sport has ever seen. There are international investigations into alleged bribery and fraud committed by some of Fifa’s top executives, and the deeply murky vote surrounding the awarding of the 2018 and 2022 World Cup tournaments to Russia and Qatar is under sharp scrutiny, with criminal investigations under way in the US and Switzerland.
This is a story of globalisation, of the changing geography of wealth and power, of how a most beloved of sports could be so rotten at the top. David Conn writes the definitive account of Fifa’s rise and fall, the key, larger-than-life personalities and power-brokers responsible for it, told with a love of the game.
