Stay ConnectedSoccer is the most popular sport in the world. It boasts some 250 million players in 200 nations. It’s the sport of the people. At the top of the professional pyramid is FIFA – a somewhat mysterious group of elite businessmen who promote the sport and organize the biggest international contest on earth, the World Cup. The contest generates billions in revenue and attracts billions of fans.
But behind the spectacle lurks an ugly truth.
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The five-star Baur-Au-Lac Hotel in Zurich, Switzerland caters to the world’s elite. Among its regular patrons, members of FIFA, which has its headquarters nearby. In May of 2015, just as the sun rose over bucolic Lake Zurich, authorities raided the hotel. The corrupt empire the Lords of Soccer had built was crashing down around them. Many FIFA’s biggest names would find themselves in handcuffs, led out by Swiss police as part of a raid that took down more than a dozen soccer officials, indicted on a range of charges, from money laundering to racketeering.
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Chuck Blazer was one of the most powerful men in international soccer - or football, as most of the world knows it. As a member of FIFA’s executive committee, he was among an elite few who managed the World Cup, the globe’s ultimate sporting competition. To his fellow Lords of Soccer, Blazer was loyal; and like many of them, he was utterly corrupt. In November 2011, two federal agents stopped the eccentric sports executive outside his Trump Tower apartment. They offered him a deal - spill the tea on FIFA’s secret world of bribes and money laundering or go to prison for tax fraud. Blazer took the deal, setting in motion the largest international corruption investigation in history.
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