On May 21, 1904, seven men met in the back room of an amateur sports body in Paris. Six of them represented the football associations of Belgium, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland. The seventh was from Madrid FC (now Real Madrid), representing Spain as the country did not yet have a football association. The German representative was stranded across the English Channel, having missed his connection boat. So, Germany hurriedly wired in their support.
At that initial meeting, held primarily to agree on the rules to play international games, the men called their gathering the Federation Internationale de Football Association. Over a century and a decade later, FIFA got another name—a racketeer influenced corrupt organisation.
The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, 1970, was designed to prosecute the American mafia. But it turned out that it also applied to football’s non-profit global governing body.
On May 27, 2015, Swiss police marched into the luxury Baur au Lac hotel in Zurich and took seven FIFA officials into custody. Some were ushered out rear exits, behind bed sheets held up to block the cameras. Within hours, the US Department of Justice had unsealed an indictment charging 14 people with racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering. It initially alleged $150 million in bribes taken across 24 years, from 1991, before expanding the scope of the investigation and updating the figure to $200 million by the end of the year (around Rs1,300 crore then). Attorney general Loretta Lynch called it “rampant, systemic and deep-rooted” corruption. FBI director James Comey said bribes and kickbacks had simply become how FIFA did business.
A year after FIFA’s public fall, Swiss-Italian lawyer Gianni Infantino, who was secretary general of the Union of European Football Associations, became FIFA president on an anti-corruption plank. But, soon after his election, that image collapsed. He was linked by the Panama Papers to questionable UEFA broadcast contracts. In the same year, FIFA’s Ethics Committee probed his unauthorised private jet travel before clearing him. In 2017, he allegedly used a FIFA Congress vote to purge ethics investigators.
By 2020, the Swiss authorities had launched criminal proceedings into secret meetings between Infantino and the Swiss attorney general, allegedly discussing probes into football corruption, before dropping the case in October 2023 owing to lack of evidence. In 2026, former UEFA chief Michel Platini filed a criminal complaint in France accusing Infantino of a targeted conspiracy to derail his 2016 presidential bid. Most recently, Infantino triggered the first serious revolt of his tenure by trying to sell off a 20 per cent commercial stake in the World Cup to private investors, including Joshua Kushner, brother of US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
The backlash against the plan forced Infantino to scrap it. But, in the aftermath, his leadership has been called into question. However, the opposition has now fractured with Infantino slowly getting more support, especially from the smaller nations. This is key as one-nation-one-vote is a founding FIFA principle. The smallest island countries have the same power during elections as multiple-time World Cup winners. Hence, to understand Infantino’s FIFA and how it came to this, we have to return to the early 1900s.
The English, the strongest football association with a flourishing league system, had stayed away from FIFA’s first meeting, scoffing at the European attempt to organise the game. Robert Guerin, the Frenchman who initiated FIFA and came to be its first president, famously complained that dealing with the English was like “slicing water with a knife”. But, by 1906, the English FA came around and its treasurer Daniel Woolfall was elected the FIFA president.
After World War I, he was succeeded by Jules Rimet, a devout Christian who saw sport as an instrument for global good. The Frenchman recognised that players, as working men, needed to be paid and broke with the Olympic tradition of amateurism to embrace professionalisation. This also led to the founding of the World Cup in 1930. At the 1950 FIFA Congress in Rio, Rimet called FIFA a “spiritual community”, and football a channel to impart “the finest human qualities”, listing discipline, moderation and solidarity among its virtues.
In many ways, Sir Stanley Rous, who became the sixth FIFA president in 1961, was an exemplar of Rimet’s principles. But, he unwittingly paved the way for FIFA’s degeneration into a corrupt institution. Though he is not remembered fondly today, Rous had an extraordinary career. A former referee, he was the English FA’s secretary for almost three decades. He streamlined the association’s rules and charged no fee for FIFA’s use of them. He also revised UEFA statutes. As FIFA president for 13 years, working on his FA pension (salary for presidents started in 1998; today, Infantino gets approximately Rs45 crore a year), he strove to develop international football. He even suggested expanding the World Cup to 24 and then 32 teams to give opportunity to teams from outside Europe, but this was blocked by UEFA.
The first of his two major mistakes was in dealing with apartheid. He held on to his belief that sports and politics should not mix and angered African nations by refusing to boycott South Africa. He also told the Soviet Union to play a match in a Chilean stadium that had been used to torture and kill left-wingers. But he also allowed Germany to rejoin FIFA after World War II and refused China’s demand that Taiwan be banned from the organisation. However, the fact remains that he underestimated the emotional impact of his decisions on oppressed populations.
Brazilian businessman Joao Havelange challenged Rous for the presidency in 1974. Typically, Rous barely campaigned. He just issued a pamphlet stating he would stand on his record. Havelange, meanwhile, flew to 86 countries, frequently accompanied by Pele, and offered a new dawn to Africa. He also funded the travel of delegates to cast their votes and helped associations clear dues.
For all the money he spent, it should have been an easy win for Havelange. But it was close—62 to 56 in the first round and then 68 to 52 in the second. Adidas boss Horst Dassler lobbied for Rous as the continuity candidate, and this certainly had an effect in the final count. The new FIFA president did not resent Dassler; instead, he recognised Dassler’s value.
Havelange needed funds to fulfil his election promises and sought sponsorship for development programmes. Adidas could not fully fund the programmes, but Dassler helped to put in place a system to get other sponsors. According to David Conn’s account in The Fall of the House of FIFA, Dassler set up a meeting between beer maker Guinness and Sepp Blatter, a marketing executive recruited by FIFA from Swiss watchmaker Longines. The Guinness delegates told Blatter they were not interested, but gestured across the room toward Coca-Cola executives. After many rounds of discussion, the company paid $1.2 million over three years to get in early on what would grow into an incomparable marketing vehicle and remains a sponsor even today.
FIFA’s income rose steadily through the late 1970s and 80s and Havelange used it to cement his influence. In 1982, Dassler formed International Sport and Leisure, taking over FIFA’s marketing rights. He died of cancer in 1987, but ISL continued to grow, eventually paying for the broadcasting rights to the 2002 and 2006 World Cups years in advance. It was also paying kickbacks to FIFA officials, including Havelange and his son-in-law Ricardo Teixeira, a FIFA executive committee member and chief of Brazilian football. None of it came to light during Havelange’s presidency. The ISL collapsed in 2001, thanks to mindless expansion. Havelange is credited with globalising the game. By the time he hung up his boots in 1998, Blatter had risen to secretary general and stood as his second-in-command.
As FIFA’s incomes kept rising phenomenally in the 1990s, there were complaints about a lack of transparency in how the money was handled. As a result, Lennart Johansson, the president of UEFA, decided to challenge Blatter for the FIFA presidency. The Swede and his camp had reached out to Africa and felt they had cornered Blatter. But the Swiss had learned his electoral lessons from Havelange. If Pele was the star campaigner in 1974, it was Platini in 1998—he split the European votes.
Blatter, well versed in the one-nation-one-vote method, also promised direct financial assistance to every member and flew across the world in a private jet. Johansson, meanwhile, shot himself in the foot. After a trip to South Africa to discuss the country’s desire to bid for a World Cup, he was quoted by a Swedish paper as having said: “The whole room was full of blackies and it’s dark when they sit down together. What’s more, it’s no fun when they’re angry. I thought if this lot get in a bad mood, it won’t be so funny.” Blatter won 111-80.
There were allegations of bribery and vote-buying, and not for the last time. But the new president proved remarkably resilient. Not long after Blatter became president, his secretary general, Michel Zen-Ruffinen, compiled a dossier accusing him of financial mismanagement, and 11 members of the 24-member FIFA Executive Committee joined a criminal complaint filed with Zurich prosecutors. The case went nowhere as Blatter kept everything under control. By 2007, no one could even find a candidate to put up against him.
The 2010 vote for the 2018 and 2022 World Cup hosts brought the scrutiny back, and this time it did not fade. Within days of Russia and Qatar being confirmed as winners, a BBC investigation named senior FIFA officials, including executive committee members, as having taken bribes years earlier from ISL. It was the first time the ISL money had been aired publicly.
In 2011, Blatter was challenged by Mohamed bin Hammam, his fixer. He was forced out of the race days before the election over allegations of buying delegate votes. Jack Warner, another longtime ally who had delivered Blatter the Caribbean bloc for years, was implicated alongside Hammam. Warner in turn claimed FIFA had rewarded his years of vote-delivery with cut-price World Cup broadcasting rights.
Facing the press just after the scandal, Blatter was asked about the crisis. “Crisis? What is a crisis?” he replied, insisting FIFA was only facing “some difficulties”. When someone in the room laughed at the performative news conference, Blatter shot back that laughing was an attitude, adding: “Elegance is also an attitude.” As Conn recounts, one of the reporters later traced the phrase back to an advertising slogan from Longines—Blatter’s previous employer.
The same year, an American official close to Warner folded. Chuck Blazer, under investigation for tax evasion, was approached by federal investigators in November 2011. He agreed to cooperate, and, from 2012, began wearing a wire. Blazer’s help turned years of rumour and settled-out cases into an indictable file that led to the DoJ action on May 27, 2015.
Blatter won a fifth term regardless, and, on June 2, called a news conference at FIFA House. The room, once packed with reporters, was empty this time. The reporters had already filed their stories on his re-election and gone home, assuming that he intended to cling on. Reading from a statement, he said he was stepping down and called an extraordinary FIFA Congress to elect a successor.
He faced the prospect of criminal exposure over a payment tied to South Africa’s 2010 World Cup bid, and it was reported at the time—though never confirmed by Blatter or his family—that his daughter, Corinne, had urged him to resign for the sake of his health and whatever remained of his reputation.
That September, Swiss prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into Blatter on two separate matters. The first was the handing of broadcasting rights to the 2010 and 2014 World Cups to Warner for $600,000 in 2005 (around Rs2.6 crore then)—rights Warner’s company resold for roughly $20 million (roughly Rs88 crore). It was, prosecutors suspected, the very reward Warner had accused FIFA of giving him. The second was a 2 million CHF payment to Platini in 2011 (Rs10.5 crore then). FIFA’s Ethics Committee suspended both Blatter and Platini that October and formally banned them in December, eight years each, later reduced on appeal to six for Blatter and four for Platini.
Neither case ended in a conviction. The 2005 contract investigation dragged on for years before Swiss prosecutors dropped it in April 2020. Blatter was never accused of taking a bribe himself, only of authorising payments and deals considered a breach of his duty to FIFA. Platini’s ban ended his long-presumed path to the presidency. It is after his acquittal in the case that Platini went on the offensive in his allegation that Infantino conspired to weaponise the investigation against him.
Looking back how FIFA got transformed after Rous, Infantino’s tenure is nothing but a natural extension of the trend. So much so that fans of the beautiful game no longer bat an eyelid when they hear about a FIFA controversy. Interestingly, Rous’s policy of keeping politics and sport separate is still followed, but only when convenient to the powers that be. As Aravind Reghunathan, senior lecturer at the Institute for Sport Business, Loughborough University, London, told THE WEEK: “While they try to ban all sorts of political activism by players and teams, the elements of political interference at FIFA seem to be at an all-time high.”
