Pod Save the World - World Corrupt Episode 2: “The Most Corrupt Thing I’ve Ever Seen”

Episode Date: October 15, 2022

Roger and Tommy dig into the history of FIFA, the governing body of international football, and trace FIFA's long history of corruption up to the moment they awarded the World Cup tournaments to Russia and Qatar. Tariq Panja of The New York Times shares insight into how FIFA operates and former Justice Department official Matt Miller recounts the misconduct he witnessed firsthand at a World Cup bid.

World Corrupt is brought to you by Tommy John. Football season's coming, but footballs aren't the only ones being knocked about. Keep your balls well situated and new Tommy John underwear. And Tommy John underwear, you're that much more comfortable. You can do everything better. Name a problem with those other underwear brands. Tommy John has already solved it. I'll give them this.

It's much better than the full-body cloth underwear I wore prior to making the switch. I'd imagine so, Raj. Tommy John's breathable, lightweight fabric has four times a stretch. of competing brands, and they come with, wait for it, a no-wedgy guarantee, thanks to a non-rolling waistband and legs that never ride up. Plus, they support a horizontal quick-draw-fly. The hammock pouch. Fantastic feature. Hammack pouch support stops the awkward swing and flap, giving everyone something to be grateful for, oh boy. The same way I'm grateful that our producers gave you the bulk of this adjury, Tommy. I would not have had it any other way, Rod. Tommy John

makes an amazing product. And it's why they don't have customers. They have fanatics. Go to tommyjohn.com slash world. If you go right now, you get 20% off your first order. 20% off at tommyjohn.com slash world. Tommyjohn.com slash world. See site for details.

In your career, there's pieces of information, events, moments that do take the breath away, that are stunning. Qatar getting the world cut 10 years ago. I'll never forget that moment at all. And it was the most corrupt thing I've ever seen in my career, and I spent a couple years working in New Jersey politics. Welcome back to World Corrupt Episode 2, a crooked media and men in Blazers mashup. Combination is unlikely as little Nazex and Billy Ray Cyrus, target of the listeners who,

like me, believed that Old Town Road was just a thinly veiled allegory for the dangers of sports For those of us who like a little less nuanced than horses taken to Old Town roads, brought to the subject of governments and regimes using sports to paper over cracks of their human rights atrocities. Welcome, we are very open about our intentions to explore how the World Cup... That greatest and most watched event in the sporting world. How that competition ended up being awarded to the tiny Gulf state of Qatar. Qatar is one of the richest nations per capita, located on a finger of natural gas-rich desert in the Persian Gulf, which had never qualified for the tournament

and which is a population about the size of greater Las Vegas. Here we go with episode two, Raj. May I ask again the public notary of Zurich to give me the envelope. Thank you. Okay, Raj, what were we looking at there? That looked like the finale of the status award show of all time. Oh, that would be the Emmys, Tommy. This is the announcement of who would host the 2020 World Cup.

And it happened back in our Lord's year, 2010 AD in Zurich, Switzerland, been live around the world from FIFA headquarters. So we talked a little bit about this in episode one, but remind me for all time's sake, what is FIFA again? It turns out, Tommy, breach yourself FIFA. It's more than just a video game. Who knew? And we're going to talk much, much more about that in this episode.

But FIFA is the Federation International, the Football Association, the body that governs global football and the World Cup. Think about it as a spawning Congress equipped with Wolf of Wall Street de Caprio level morals. And who is this gentleman we are listening to who sounds like some sort of septuagenarian bad man villain? That is a Swiss gem who was then the president of FIFA, set blatter, or the man who the late great Robin Williams join the live draw for the 1994 World Cup held at Caesar's Palace in the actual Las Vegas. Nevada. He purposely kept referring to him and said Blatter.

Mr Blatter, so nice to meet you after feeling you for so many years. Nice to have you. Thank you very much. Thank you. You're full, I guess. Good. God bless Robin Williams. And as for Blatter, he was a gent who worked his way up from being a marketing executive for Swiss watches and turn it into becoming the de facto dictator of global football as president of FIFA from 1998 to 2008 to 2000. And the bloco on December 2nd, 2010, crossed the podium in his cold tiny hands and announced the votes for hosting rights to not one but two World Cups.

First, the 2018 tournament. Ladies and gentlemen, I do hope the name of the winner is on both sides because I don't know. Stop right here. If anyone out there listening find themselves in the position of having to announce a blatantly fixed award in the future, you might not want to publicly declare, I hope this is printed on both sides,

because, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I have a corruption 101 question for you here. If it's printed on both sides, do you get bribes twice? Are there many fine kickbacks on both sides, to paraphrase another corrupt monster who won't go away? That is really a question that I normally kick over to my agent, but shortly after that pledge of innocence about, quote, not knowing, set latter announced the 2018 World Cup would be held in Russia.

A decision we hit on last episode, and one that fails fodder for it all takes exposed tweet of some kind. But next up was the announcement for 2022. And one detail I've not told you, Tommy, was that a badly kept secret in the American soccer community anyway was that the 2022 World Cup was thought to be a lock to be coming right here.

Yep, soccer's coming home, baby. It was meant to be coming to the United States, an event that was intended to put the game I love over the top in the nation I had thought. So, Raj, back in 1986, when, as you probably recall, the Boston Red Sox were on the cusp of winning their first World Series since 1918.

My lovely parents, they'll hate me for telling the story, had taken the bottle of champagne out of the fridge. They were preparing to pop the cork when a player named Bill Buckner let a ground ball roll between his legs and the socks went on to lose the game. It sounds like you were in a bit of a similar situation here. Tommy, what went down was Buckner S. For me, times a million. I was actually watching in my office in New York City.

I honestly had a beer open ready to celebrate this moment with the joy I would if, say, Tracy Chapman announced she was going to drop in a new York. album. I felt a little bit like Hillary Clinton on the night of the 2016 election. This was going to be our moment. Too soon. My moment. Nothing could stop us now and then. The winner to organize the 222 FIFA World Cup is Qatar. Oh, Seth Blatter, you bastard. Since Mr Blatter needed just six seconds to break my heart. How about I give you the elevator pitch for why guitar instantly felt like a total

lunatical, impractical, impractical place to hold a World Cup? Please, I'd love to hear it. 122 degrees in the summer. Okay, that's bad. Zero infrastructure. You know, they needed to build eight stadia. One of which...

Get this, Tommy. One was meant to be built in a city that did not yet even exist outside of the PowerPoint in which it was pitched to FIFA. And in terms of football, no tradition. They were ranked, I think, 113th in the world at the time. So room to grow.

Let me see if I can one-up you with how bad the political situation is in Qatar. So same-sex relationships can be punished with jail time. Women aren't afforded the same rights as men. And roughly 90% of Qatar's population are foreign workers who do not have the rights of citizens. They are often forced into exploitative, dangerous working conditions. And it's these workers who will have to build all the infrastructure necessary. for the World Cup. So to understand how a country like this could never mind be awarded a World Cup, even be considered as a finalist for the thing, we're going to understand how the governing body

that awarded it makes those decisions. Today, we're going to talk about FIFA for a minute and the way it's co-opted the world's game, fused it with technology and broadcast rights at the end of the day in order to line their own pockets in one of the single most blatant acts of corruption in sporting history. We are essentially going to learn how a sport that fills millions around the world with true joy and a sense of connection and memory making cross-generation late is run by such a bloody, truly awful set of human beings. Because really, you can think about the World Cup as the world's greatest blockbuster movie franchise that's played out live. It almost makes it easy to take FIFA's clout for granted. But the origins of FIFA and its tournament over a century ago, now,

Seem quaint and naive in comparison. All right, Tommy, brace yourself. I'm ready. Quick, potted history of FIFA. I'm just going to give you the highlights. Founded 1904 in a backroom of the Union de Societ, Froncés, the sport in France. I imagine men bicycling with baguettes in baskets.

A lot of mustache twirling. I'm sure there were scattered monocles amongst the plotters as well. Love it, love it. No World Cups at the outset. It was all just Olympic football tournaments, all. amateur huffing and puffing. And that was where the world met. It wasn't actually until 1930 that the first World Cup proper was held.

It was in Uruguay, El Campionato Mondialda football. This was one of your favorite World Cups, right? I mean, I think we would all would like to forget about the 30s for a lot of reasons. But the U.S. men's national team came in third. This was like the best ever, right? The U.S. men's national team made it to the semi-bloody finals, Tommy. Why don't we talk about that more proudly as a nation? Own it.

It remains the United States best ever finish at a men's World Cup. United States had a team, albeit largely made up of British expats, big boys, gents who steamrolled their opponents. They were so large physically. They were nicknamed the shopputters. I love that. I want a T-shirt. And they made it to the semi-final, where we lost 6-1 to Argentina.

In a game that was closer than it sounds. I'm making that bit up, but I like to say it. But third place and a trip home on the steamship, the SS Monarcho, oh, bite your arm off for third place and a trip home on a steamship this World Cup. Now, look, I'm proud of our boys at this cup, but it does not sound quite like the global competition that the entire world stops to watch that we know of now. How did it change?

In a word, television. Heard of it, Tommy? I have. I love it. Oh, me too, in the face. And TV was the technology that would be. be really at the heart of FIFA's expansion plans as that technology just became more and more widespread first across Europe and then into Africa. In the words of soccer historian David Goldblatt, every four years in early July, television provided the single greatest simultaneous human

collective experience, the World Cup final. Bobby Moore led England up to the Royal Box to receive the Jewelry May Cup and the winners medals. And the clips that hit the entire world simultaneously for a whole month. And in a handful of years, televised soccer had become the world's most popular form of entertainment. And the global brand juggernaut began to emerge. That football soil was fertile. It was almost begging for seeds of corruption. And thus we enter the modern period of FIFA.

And to do that, we've enlisted the help of a great friend of this pod. Oh, yeah, I'm Tariq Panja. I'm a global sports correspondent. with the New York Times. Let me just begin by saying, I love Tariq's writing. He, on an almost daily basis, does what we hope to accomplish on this podcast. Tariq navigates the intersection of sports and politics. And he told us that to understand FIFA's culture of corruption,

we first had to understand one man. Shra Havelange is a former Brazilian football administrator. And I guess you could describe him as the father of the modern FIFA or the modern FIFA system. system, he realized very quickly the power of football because, of course, he as a Brazilian, would have seen the enormous impact of the success of that Pele-led, golden Brazilian football team. I would argue put Brazil on the international map and made it a place that people adored. Havillange basically short-circuited the system.

he realized that FIFA is one member one vote. Quick question here, Raj. What does he mean one member one vote? Is this an electoral college situation that I need to learn about? We've got ourselves an electoral college situ, Tommy. Oh, no. Kind of, because Tarek's really talking about the way FIFA elects its president. Essentially, when Havelange ran for the office for the first time,

each country that was a member of FIFA had a single vote for president. And if you're trying to stack the vote in your favour, what do you do? You just create more members. He visited 80 plus countries. He was on his way around the world, basically creating football federations in Africa and other parts of the world and say you should be members of FIFA. And when you're members of FIFA, you should vote for me because I'm your friend.

And what does that mean? He promised them money. FIFA wasn't doing that before. So essentially he built a political machine, old school style. It needed to be fed. They made football the global game. And they made sure that advertisers started pouring into this. You see billboards for the first time with blue chip companies that we will recognize today.

You see television advertising beginning as well. And you could say that is the formation, the birthplace. It wasn't the United States and professional sport there of modern sports sponsorship. was born there because all those promises that Havelange made to get these votes, they needed to be paid for. He got Coca-Cola on board and Adidas and then we see the money tree stuff. So Pavalange wins the presidency and immediately uses that power to line his own pockets. What we know Havelange did thanks to Swiss prosecutors who detailed it in 2010 is that he sold FIFA's TV and marketing rights to an innocuous name company, aren't they all,

named international sport and leisure. Nothing to see here. It's only international sport. But it was founded, by the way, by an old Havillange crony, horse Dasler, who, if that last name sounds familiar, is also the son of Adidas founder Adidasler. And this allowed ISL as they catchally became known

to distribute these rights, which are worth astronomical amounts at this point. And then give kickbacks to Havelange. And between he and his son-in-law, who also happened to be a Brazilian football executive. They were given $42.5 million over eight years as, quote, side payments for this. It's a great job if you can get it. Yeah, my God, I got to get me of some side payments.

That sounds like a good deal. Who doesn't love side payments, Tommy? And this podcast should be sponsored by side payments, but we don't want to get too mired in the who's, the what's, the whens, the where's, the whys of it all. You mean the facts, like the AP style book? I hate those things. Hey, those pesky things, the facts. What we want to tell you is that FIFA was corrupt AF,

and the genit was running it from 1974 up to 1998 was on the hot take. And in 1998, the bloke who succeeded him was cut from the same smarmy cloth. You remember him, that Swiss infection of you down below's set Blatter. Blatter learnt the kind of pork barrel nature of, of sports governance, sports politics at the knee of Jua Avalanche. Set Blatter is a diminutive fellow. He had a very large personality,

a man who basically was confident in his ability to get people to like him. It doesn't mean the fans to get the people that count. That's the thing with FIFA. He didn't care if he was booed. That didn't matter because the people that boo him are supporters.

They don't have a vote. Blatter managed to call him. Curry favor in the same way as Travolange through force of personality and through he was a canny wheeler dealer as well he was able to get the people that mattered to him to like him in enough numbers people would describe him as kind of a charming figure you know in some ways he was kind of quick-witted if you would in that world but outside of it and you've seen most people would abhor some of the stuff that he would come out with. You've seen reports of, you know,

when he talked about women's football, wearing tighter shorts. Did that guy just say that women should wear tight shorts, Raj? Is that what Sep Blatter just said? Sep Blatter, yes, he is. Whatever kind of guy you're meaning, that kind of guy. If you think about Havelongers,

Don Corleone, like I do, Blatter then, some sort of awful kind of Michael Fredo hybrid who just also happens, to Poseido for FIFA when its bottom line was going to the moon. The period 98 to the end of Set Blatter saw an enormous increase in television income through sales of broadcasting rights all around the world and sponsorship agreements. You know, what we're talking about in the Set Blatter era was over that four-year period,

each sponsor would be paying circa 100 to 150. million dollars to have their brand exclusively, certainly when it comes to their category, connected to FIFA. The point we have to remember here is there's nothing bigger in terms of eyeballs on the planet. FIFA's World Cup in particular, it is bigger than the Olympic Games. I think maybe for listeners in the US, that might be a little bit hard to believe because I think in the States, the Olympics is the thing that the entire family comes together for. But I guess in much of the rest of the world, it is the Football World Cup. And that is immensely powerful, particularly when there's the scarcity of it being held every four years.

So what Tariq saying is that football's popularity essentially allows the head of FIFA to out like, well, Spectre in the bomb movies. Or maybe even worse. I hate to say this, Tommy. Facebook. Oh, no. The step-bladder do karate like Mark Zuckerberg does and then tweeted. that. I don't think anyone does karate like Ockberg does. It's the way of the empty fist. But whenever, all these organisations, FIFA more than any, operated in an ether.

There's above even heads of state. If you see the way the FIFA entourage rolls and you see they're genuflecting from leaders of nations, you kind of have to rub your eyes and say, is this really happening? You know, for example, a FIFA jet plane will, land on an airstrip in a capital city somewhere. The red carpet will be rolled out. Perhaps the leader of the country will be there on the tarmac to meet the FIFA president. Hang on a minute.

This is the guy from football. If people keep treating you like that, you will end up believing that this is exactly how you're supposed to be treated. I remember talking to a FIFA executive committee member and he said, do you know what? I'll be honest with you. It would be very hard to give this up. But really, there is no work when you sit on the FIFA Council. You are there to be photographed next to people, to be seen in the royal box in stadiums, and to be in these photographs of videos that the government wants to project to its people. In some countries, having FIFA in your country

meant something that you could project as your own power as a national leader to your people. And isn't that something? And as Americans, we don't have to look too far to glimpse exactly what that self-important FIFA administrator looked like. Tommy, it's time to get personal. Are you a cat guy? Thank you for asking.

I mean, I had several cats growing up. My wife actually wants to get a cat. We don't have one currently. I don't dislike them. Is that too long of an answer? don't know anymore. We'll save that for a podcast we are working on for 2023, Vitor Filines today. It's time for the next tale, which is that of an American called Chuck Blazer. That's a great name. You don't even need a passport. You're clearly from the United States,

right? I mean, only the United States could give us. It's not been a fictional character, although he sounds like that one. This is a real bloke. Chuck Blazer, who thanks to FIFA and Conquer Calf, I know that's a mouthful, but that's FIFA's collection of North American, Central American and Caribbean federations, and it crushes together into that beautiful sound of like Crush Nuts, Conker Calf, and climbed into the rarefied air where one can keep in Midtown New York City apartment solely for his pet cats. You know, I'll let Tarit pick it up from here. You only need to see him once and you'll never forget him. That was Chuck Blazer, both large in terms of his personality, but also particularly in terms of his look.

If he wasn't working at Conkercaf as its Secretary of General, his kind of chief marketer, he would be on perennial Santa Claus duty. You just had to put him in a red suit, and he would be, you know, giant bushy beard, bear of a man, Chuck Blazer became known as Mr. 10%. because every contract, broadcast or marketing contract, 10% at least 10% of it would find its way to Chuck Blazer in payment. But also in kind, there were cars, there were homes in the Bahamas, there were these two apartments at Trump Tower where Chuck Blazer lived.

One for him and one for... One for him and one for his cats, famously. Appointments for cats! Tommy, when I told you, FIFA's tale was one of sordid corruption. I was not crapping you. You were not. And so now we have a picture of the type of organisation we're dealing with, as we have back to that voting for which countries would host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups,

the ones we played at the very top of this show. Dateline, early December 2010. Let's go back to Zurich, Switzerland. A British Prime Minister David Cameron, David Beckham, former President Bill Clinton of the US and others arrive in Zurich to try and get these last minute votes. There was these last presentation. So this is what you pay huge money to these fancy consultants for

Australia hire Nicole Kidman, the US bring in Morgan Freeman. Tommy, can I ask you one favour? Please. All I'm asking you, just remember that the US even activated Morgan Bloody Freeman. We're going to return to old red from the Shawshank Redemption later in this pod, but back to Tareke. None of it really matters anyway. A big show,

videos and the last kind of pull on your heartstrings, this is why we deserve the World Cup. For this process, each bid had to provide a bid book, which is essentially a detail breakdown of how if you give my country the World Cup, this is what it would look like, everything from financial guarantees, hotel arrangement security, all the elements that goes into putting together the most popular event on the planet. Now, of the 22 people who eventually voted, just one requested to read these bid books. And that speaks volumes to, I guess,

the nature of who these people are and what they're driving motivations were for when it came to this, because they couldn't care about the detail. You had 22 members, not 24 Exco members, because two of the members had earlier been caught trying to sell their votes to undercover reporters from the Sunday Times newspaper in the UK.

Oh, X-K. We're talking about the FIFA Executive Committee. They've since re-branded themselves to call themselves now the FIFA Council, but it's still the 24 votes of these men, and in 2010, they were all men, who ultimately decide which country would host a World Cup. And God, is it ever a motley crew? There was all of this vote-trading, backroom dealing, that, again, was against the regulations at the time.

But then you've got to think, whose rules are they and who is enforcing the rules? It's FIFA enforcing FIFA's rules. We'd heard this rumor about Qatar, but you think, really? Don't forget, this is going to be June and July, the heart of the summer. Yes, they're absolutely loaded, but it is the most ill-thought-of, ill-conceived location. But, you know, for the 22 FIFA members, it turns out a lot of that didn't matter a jot.

Set Blatter opens up the envelope and he mentions Qatar. Q delirious celebrations in one pocket and perhaps stunned silence everywhere else. What was your emotional reaction? Qatar, being as it was so insane, just took the breath away and took the focus away, if I'm honest, at that moment in time. And in your career, there's pieces of information, events, moments that do take the breath away, that are stunning, Qatar getting the World Cup 10 years ago, I'll never forget that moment at all.

And there you have it. A journalist for the New York Times, no less, with decades of experience, a gent who's seen it all or thought he had, a gent who's covered all events all over the world pointing to this moment 12 years ago as one that it'll never forget. I mean, believe me, he feels like he's seen it all. but the way that he's able to paint this picture

proves a way that this second is singed in his memory. And for those of you who are interested in the mind-boggling sums of money that are pouring into football. And some of you actually may be thinking, hmm, a career of football sounds bloody good to me as a result of listening to this podcast. I'd encourage both sets of you human beings to read Tarek's book, Football's secret trade,

how the player transfer market was influenced. trade too. World Corrupt is brought to you by Athletic Greens, a product I literally use every day, including today, by the way. I started taking AG1 because look, I wanted a better gut health, I wanted a little more energy, Raj, and I wanted a better way to start my day. I just love the name. Tom Brady, TB12, Cristiano Ronaldo, CR7, Athletic Greens, AG1. And with one, delicious scoop of AG1, you're absorbing, 75, high-quality vitamins, minerals, whole fruit, food-sourced ingredients, probiotics and adaptogens to help you start your day right. This special blend of ingredients supports gut health.

It supports your nervous system, your immune system, your energy, recovery, focus, all the things. It's lifestyle-friendly, whether you're keto, paleo, vegan, dairy-free, and gluten-free. Kosha. I didn't know that. Right now, it's time to reclaim your health and arm your immune system with convenient daily nutrition. It's just one scoop and a cup of water every day.

That's it. No need for a million different pills and supplements to look out for. your health. To make it easy, Athletic Greens is going to give you a free one-year supply of immune supporting vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase. All you have to do is visit Athletic Greens.com slash world. Again, that's athletic greens.com slash world to take ownership over your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance. Now, Raj, it turns out that Tarek is not the only one who had these layers upon layers of corruption seared into his memory. I am Matt Miller and I was the head of the Office of Public Affairs at the Department of Justice, which is a fancy title for being the lead spokesman.

Tommy, busting out the big guns. The big guns indeed. I know Matt from my years in politics and from the Obama administration, but what made me so excited to talk with him for this show is the fact that Matt was part of the delegation that the United States sent to make that last minute plea to FIFA's executive committee in Zurich in 2010. then President Biden was actually supposed to go, then Vice President Biden, but because of a last-minute switch, I think there was a funeral he had to attend. The U.S. sent then- Attorney General Eric Holder, and so Matt went along with him. I was incredibly excited because I had just watched the South African World Cup in the summer. And an incredible World Cup had gotten really into it, had just that fall started to follow the Premier League. So I was incredibly excited to go see this bid for two future World Cups.

I didn't know much about FIFA, but I thought, you know, we're taking Morgan Freeman on the plane with us. Bill Clinton's going to be there. We'll check out this major international sports headquarters. It's got to be fun. Morgan Freeman! Oh, we got Freeman at the tip of the US charm offensive spear. We can't miss with Sergeant Major John Rawlings helping us. Thomas, I promise we'd come back to him.

When you're on a plane with Morgan Freeman, do you ask him to, like, record your voicemail message and stuff? Like, what do you do with Morgan Freeman? It's funny. It's funny you say that. That is exactly what I plan to do. I started the trip thinking, by the end of this trip, I'm going to get Morgan Freeman to record my voicemail message for me. And he was so standoffish and so uninterested in talking to any of us lowly staffers. And I can't blame him.

I can't blame him for it that I never got up the courage to do it. I was pretty sure he would have said no. You know, I'm pretty sure Morgan, was just saving all his energy for when they landed so we could give us all when he got in front of blatter. Look, from the scene that just got painted about when they hit the ground, it doesn't quite sound like that's what happened, Raj, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. Let's go back to Matt.

We got in the night before the bid, got in late. We'd flown during the day. And so started the day of the bid with a meeting with Sineal Galati and his team. Sineal was the head of U.S. soccer and was running the bid. and he kind of gave us the lay of the land of all the countries that were bidding, how Qatar was going after members, both kind of the over-the-table stuff and the under-table stuff that they were up to. And he was really confident about the bid. You had to get, you know, there were 22 members of, I think it's called the X-Com, the committee that voted. And so you

had to get a majority of them. And Sunil thought they had locked up six or seven votes, definite yes votes for the United States. And then he thought, they had another, I think it was eight or nine that were probably votes or votes that were going to be with either Japan or Australia in the first round, but we're definitely going to come our way in the second round. And I remember sitting there listening to that and we walked out of the meeting and I said to Holder, this sounds like somebody who's never counted votes before. It's been my whole career in politics. If you have six definite votes and eight or nine leanings, you have six votes. You don't have, you don't have 12 or 13 or 14 and you're nowhere near

getting them. You only have a vote if it's completely locked up. So that seemed to me a bit naive. But we meet with bladder right before we make the U.S. presentation. And so we go into this room and in the room are bladder, Bill Clinton, Eric Holder, Morgan Freeman, and Landon Donovan, and me. And so Morgan Freeman and Blatter and Holder and Clinton start talking to each other. And they're standing, talking, and sharing stories. And I remember Clinton. and Freeman talking about playing golf with Jack Nicholson. And Landon Donovan and I, we kind of shrink back against the wall. And it was one of those moments where you feel like a child watching the grown men speak. And Landon and I both, it was almost like we were equals, right? International

soccer star on the one hand, nobody staffer for the United States government on the other. But in that room, we were both nobody's. So that happens. We have this talk with bladder, and he's as pompous and self-important, as you would expect. But at FIFA, the weird thing was, it was like he was the emperor in his environment there. I mean, you had a United States president, former United States president there, the sitting attorney general who he ought to have been worried about impressing. It turns out. And Blatter was clear, at least in his own bearing, that he was the most important person in the room. And then we go in, there's a big auditorium where we make the presentation. That was a combination of Sineal talking,

and Landon gave a very short speech, played video of his goal. against Algeria that had, of course, caused the U.S. to advance in the 2010 World Cup. And it ended with a Bill Clinton speech. Morgan Freeman talked. He had narrated the video, and he talked. And it was not like this presentation mattered at all anyway, but Morgan Freeman gets up, and he was there clearly to cash a check. If you haven't lived in the United States, you haven't seen just how wide and deep Americans' love of football really is.

You'd be surprised. Maybe even shocked. I'm sorry, I missed a page. Not bringing his A game necessarily. Essentially, the big takeaway I'm getting from this whole episode, Tommy, is that Morgan Freeman was really mailing it in. Did he not know that I was counting, we were all counted on the World Cup coming to the United States in 2022,

and so much rested on these beautiful shoulders. It's starting to view his entire Uvra in a whole name. New Light. That's a French word for people at home, I think. But it turns out that this might not have been entirely Morgan Freeman's fault. The night, after the presentations before the vote, they're all staying at the Bar-a-Lock Hotel, this beautiful luxury hotel right on the lake in Zurich. And so each of the bidding nations has a suite up on one of the top floors. And the delegates all hung out in the lobby bar. And so what would happen is every country had its dignitaries in a suite upstairs. And one by one, you would send someone down to grab, you know, let's say the representative of pick a country

and bring them upstairs and lobby them for your vote. So we had Holder and President Clinton, and Freeman was there for a little while upstairs, and you would go get a member and bring them up and talk, spend half an hour of them trying to convince them why we had the best bit. And it was pretty clear. So I was upstairs in the suite for a little bit, but mostly down in the bar watching what was happening. It was absolutely clear that the Qataris, and likely the Russians too, were basically just buying votes. People would come up to our meeting and listen to the talk and they'd go, ah, it's a great presentation. And then they would go to the other one and they would walk out, and I don't think they were handing cash over in the rooms, but it was quite obvious that they

were making promises and wheeling and dealing and grabbing votes. And it was that out in the open for everyone to see. And it was the most corrupt thing I've ever seen in my career. And I spent a couple of years working in New Jersey politics. Oh, as I believe they say in New Jersey, tell me, oh, Marana. That is an incredible statement that really perfectly truncates FIFA's idea. Yeah, just to put it home here, someone who worked at the Department of Justice during one of the largest single-day operations in history against the mafia called the awarding of the World Cup the most corrupt thing he's ever seen. Go ahead and hearing you say that, as a football person, bizarrely, I suddenly feel like

slightly proud of football. It's a real superlative, you know, the most. For all the shock of Russia, and of course, Qatar, it's remarkable to know how little anyone had heard or even thought about it as a possibility before those envelopes were opened. And to me, it all comes back to something we speak about in the first episode of this podcast series, something that's going to be a theme. now throughout, that is cognitive dissonance because the moment a ball is kicked, a bit like

Pavlov's dog, we football fans just veer away from all that corruption and perversion, breezing as it may be. We know it's there, it's there in the light of day. But we turn away and we just marvel at the spectacle, the 22 players running around before a rise. And this, this is the great conundrum, because on the one hand, modern sport, and it's not, just football, you could put the Olympics in the very same category. It's just run by organisations whose basic capacity for ethical behaviour has repeatedly been found out and demonstrated itself to be utterly appalling. But on the other hand, major sporting occasions, they give us drama and colour and joy to hundreds of millions of people from every single section of society

all across the world and instantly just anitititise us to the darkness. Cross and Dempsey is denied to get this. Gatley through. Oh, it's incredible. You could not write a script like this. Yeah, no, look, I mean, Roger, I feel this every single Sunday when I watch the NFL. You know, when the game starts, when the whistle blows, I stop thinking about concussions. I stopped thinking about the way they've mishandled controversies.

I stopped thinking about how much money Roger Goodell is paid for some reason. And I just, you know, get excited about the games. May this year be the Bears year. You're looking good. You want a game. We won a Big Point game. But next episode, we are going to delve into all of this from Qatar's perspective. Why a tiny state in a friction-filled neighborhood would even want this World Cup that it's so wholly unprepared for. What did they stand to gate from having every single pair of eyes in the world suddenly trained on them?

We'll explain how sports washing really works and how governments, try to whitewash their reputations by clinging to the games we love. Sport, I think, is it's seductive, it's engaging, but it also helps to communicate an image, a set of values, a reputation that those that seek to sport wash or those that seek to mislead in some way, they can easily buy into this. We'll discuss the machinations involved, and the incredible links countries will go to to bring events like the World Cup to their shores. Until next time, Raj, I'm going to, I don't know, watch the show.

Shoshank Redemption on the Loop and, you know, get busy living or get busy dying. I don't know. What else are going to do? I still can't believe if Freeman voicemail wasn't enough to get blattered to bring the World Cup to the USA. If that wasn't, what will? He probably just wanted Bill Clinton out of his office.