FIFA Uncovered (2022) s01e03 Episode Script
Episode 3
1
[Sepp Blatter] The winner to organize
the 2022 FIFA World Cup is
- Qatar!
- [cheering]
[triumphant music playing]
[loud cheering]
[newscaster]
The United States today lost out
on its bid for hosting the World Cup,
the biggest sporting event in the world.
[groaning]
[reporter 1] The desert emirate of Qatar
beat out Australia, Japan,
South Korea, and the United States.
[reporter 2] President Obama says
it was the wrong decision
for the organizing body
to pick Qatar over the US.
The world was shocked
that Qatar 2022 had won,
but how did they win?
I mean, how did this happen?
[newscaster] Average high in June and July
when the event will be held, 106 degrees!
[Amanda Davies] It wasn't expected
against the likes of the USA and Japan,
and the technical report around the bid
had been really quite negative.
[reporter] Qatar had been rated
"high risk."
Deals behind the scenes settle everything.
[Sunil Gulati] By a pretty wide margin,
the best bid for the 2022 World Cup
was the US bid.
[Kevin Payne] I was shocked
and disappointed,
but my immediate reaction was
that they had bought this.
[Piers Morgan] If FIFA's corrupt,
it should be exposed.
And I think that this decision today
is going to rumble on
for a very long time.
[applause]
[Guido Tognoni] The reasoning to go
to Qatar is very difficult to explain.
For FIFA, it is a disaster, and it was
especially during the time when FIFA,
anyway, was in the focus for bribery.
- [man 1] Mr. Blatter?
- [man 2] Mr. Blatter?
[Tognoni] And then the Executive Committee
had not a better idea
than voting for Qatar.
Therefore, I always say
when you blame Qatar
for hosting the World Cup,
you have to blame FIFA
because FIFA is the system.
The system is FIFA.
[dramatic music playing]
[distant horn blaring]
[Leclaire in French] Why Qatar?
Why go play in a country that is so hot,
uh, or in a country
that's going to need to build stadiums?
Why such a small country
with a team
that is ranked so low globally?
[crowd groans]
[crowd gasps]
[Leclaire] If you asked questions
about the working conditions,
human rights, whether European fans
will be able to get there and so on
So, I was shocked, like everyone else.
[in English] I don't think
they expected the world media
and the world reaction
to be so against them.
They received a very, very harsh backlash
after winning.
[Hassan Al Thawadi] When we won,
I was happy and euphoric,
but very, very quickly, I I suffered
a a very serious bout of depression.
It was a very vicious attack that came.
The attack was coming on us.
The attack was coming on FIFA.
Unprecedented attacks
coming from left, right, and center
against us, the country.
The descriptions
that were coming into play
It was very, very close
to being racist attacks.
It was tough.
[sweeping music playing]
[children shouting]
First of all, on behalf of the millions
of people living in the Middle East,
thank you.
[players shouting]
[Sheikh Al-Thani]
Thank you, FIFA, for believing
that expanding the game to the Middle East
and bringing it here
to our region, to our homes,
is the right thing to do.
We go to the Middle East.
We go to the Arabic world.
We go to the Islamic world.
This is development of football,
and don't speak about money.
This has nothing to do with money.
I would say the first very strong decision
where the politics came in
is for the World Cup in Qatar,
and not what was my wish, uh,
to have the United States of America.
[Ricardo Teixeira, in Portuguese]
As I was going in to vote for Qatar,
Blatter comes up to me.
"I want you to vote for the USA
and not Qatar."
Do you think it's appropriate
for the president to stoop to that level?
I didn't respond. He went off.
I got the votes for Qatar, and Qatar won.
[Emmanuel Maradas, in English]
Sepp was cornered completely
by the big members of the FIFA ExCo.
You have the, uh
the head of the confederations.
Issa Hayatou for the Africans.
Michel Platini for UEFA.
You have Jack Warner for the CONCACAF,
and you have Dr. Leoz for the CONMEBOL.
And Bin Hammam from Qatar.
He is the chairman
of the Asian Football Confederation.
They just aligned themselves with Qatar.
There was three CONCACAF members
on the ExCo at the time,
and it was assumed that all three of them
were gonna support the US bid.
So, it comes as a tremendous shock
to Chuck Blazer
to find out that Jack Warner,
his closest ally in FIFA,
appears to have voted for Qatar.
He felt betrayed.
How can you not vote
for your own confederation?
But these guys were old. They weren't
gonna be around for the next vote.
So, if they did the double vote, they got
twice the money. It was payday for them.
[reporter] Doha's skyscrapers
signal the economic rise
of Qatar's gas-rich capital city.
And over the next decade,
they'll likely tower over another boom,
fueled by football mania.
Football in particular,
but sports in general,
always played a very important part
in our culture, uh, in our ambitions,
in, uh, utilizing it as a catalyst,
as a vehicle to pushing forward,
uh, some of the nation's objectives.
[James Dorsey] The Qataris
have created a sports industry.
They've done basically
what other countries
do organically over decades.
They've made sports
part of national identity.
With Qatar, you're talking about it being
part of an actual nation-building mission.
They were looking to get out
of the shadow of Saudi Arabia,
carve out a different character
for themselves,
be a player on the world stage.
They want to be seen
as a force for good in the world.
They want to show that the Arab world
can host a tournament like this
and bring people together.
[crowd cheering]
[Jérôme Valcke] They were everywhere.
They wanted to be seen
as the banker of sports in the world.
There was nothing to be organized
without the support from Qatar.
When the bids were opened
for 2018, 2022 in 2009,
which meant there was
a significant lead-up
and there was an opportunity open,
that's when we decided
we have a shot, we have a chance.
[crowd cheering]
[indistinct PA announcement]
What makes us want to host the
the World Cup is our belief in football.
[Al Thawadi] Bringing the World Cup
to Qatar will bring the World Cup
to the Middle East for the first time.
We were a young bid team.
We had many people
that spoke many different languages,
so we could communicate
with the football world,
and we were humble.
We knew that we were the underdogs.
We knew that people did not see us
initially as serious contenders.
[dramatic music playing]
[distant rumble of traffic]
[in Spanish] During our stay in Doha,
we quickly noticed
this was a government project,
channeled through the World Cup,
to put Qatar at the center of the world.
It was a project of state.
It wasn't a project
of the football federation.
Honestly, I never thought Qatar would win.
They don't have a football tradition.
In the report,
they didn't have the best marks.
They had to virtually rebuild the city,
build all the stadiums.
They didn't have a single stadium
which could host a match.
And build hotels for tourists
and for the teams as well.
But the insurmountable obstacle
was how to play in May, June, July.
We did our reports.
These were sent out.
Any member of the ExCo could call me
and ask me to explain anything.
No one called me.
That's how I reached the conclusion
that not all of them had read it.
If they didn't care that you
couldn't play in May, June, July,
why would they care
about working conditions?
It wasn't an issue.
[horn toots]
[Phaedra Almajid, in English]
We were in Cape Town
when FIFA hosted the FIFA Media Breakfast.
All countries were there
and so all the media is there.
And every bid had
exactly the same parameters,
so we each had a booth.
We had Arab media
that came to visit us, and that was it.
No one came to our booth.
They'd come pick up their freebies,
but that was it.
And then right in the middle
of the whole thing walks in David Beckham.
[photographers shouting]
[Almajid] You'd think
there was an earthquake in the place.
The media started pushing,
climbing on chairs, climbing on tables.
Everybody was surrounding them.
[inaudible speech]
[Almajid] Sheikh Mohammed,
who was the director general
of the Qatar 2022 bid,
turned around to me that day and said,
"Why didn't you get me
that media attention?"
I was gobsmacked
because, I mean, this was David Beckham.
Everyone in the world knows David Beckham.
No one knows who in the world
this little prince is from this country.
The team was extremely small.
None of them had even gone
to a World Cup game in their life.
None of them knew the FIFA politics.
None of them had ever worked
in sports, even.
Um, these were people
who had no knowledge of any of this.
The only person
who had knowledge of FIFA politics
was Mohamed Bin Hammam.
Mohamed Bin Hammam was president
of the Asian Football Confederation.
He was an ExCo member of FIFA,
one of the 24 members.
He was one
of the most powerful men in football,
and he was a Qatari citizen.
He is not a person who is very outspoken.
He likes to be in the background.
He likes to be the the conductor.
[Mohamed Bin Hammam]
I didn't think that the size of Qatar,
and the weather of Qatar,
support any such, uh, ambition, you know?
With Mohamed Bin Hammam, it took
a long while for him to come on board
and be able to be convinced
and supportive of the bid.
[Almajid] We knew that he would be able
to give us the tools and the means to win.
To get the World Cup,
you have to get ExCo members
to vote for you,
so that's what their game plan was.
He knows all 24.
He can, one, help us meet all 24.
Two, he can help us know
what to do to get all 24 votes.
Qatar had been able
to sponsor the African Congress
of Football in Angola.
The transformative point
for us for the bid was Angola,
was the speech that I gave
to the CAF Congress in Angola.
The message resonated
very, very powerfully.
That was when I think a lot of people
started seeing us as serious candidates.
It wasn't just the fact
that we were able to convince
the three Executive Committee members.
It was the fact
that the entire African confederation
was buzzing about our bid.
But it was Angola
that was the turning point.
[inaudible speech]
[Almajid] We were all staying
in the same hotel.
And I was told to go help translate.
So, I went. I talk French.
We welcome into the suite, um,
at different times of the evening,
different ExCo members.
Hayatou, Anouma, and Adamu.
And we were talking
about South Africa, you know,
how Africa was being given its chance
to host the World Cup,
and how the Arab world should be given
the chance to host the World Cup.
And then Hassan offered Hayatou $1 million
for the football federation,
Hayatou's football federation.
And, you know,
in return, we wanted his vote,
and I remember there just being laughter.
And then it was said,
"Well, that's not enough."
And so the price was just upped
to 1.5 million, just like that.
I know it sounds so simple,
but it was so simple.
It was just, "We'll give you this money
for your football federation,
and you give us your vote."
And, "Thank you so much. See you later."
And one by one, we did the same thing
with Anouma and Adamu.
So, $1.5 million was offered
to each ExCo member that evening
in exchange for their vote.
[interviewer] And was that
something that was the
The money was physical or was it verbal?
It was verbal. I never saw money.
That is something I never saw.
And it was made very clear
that the money was going to football.
It was never said,
"It's going into your pocket."
I do need to emphasize that.
It was said it was going
Where it ended up, I have no idea.
I don't know.
Before I went back to my hotel room,
Hassan told me, "You never repeat this
ever again to anyone."
And I was like, "Okay."
[distant horn blares]
[Almajid] I never forgot about it,
but I never spoke about it again
for a long, long time.
I knew my days were numbered,
but in my eyes,
I had never done anything
to deserve being fired.
I was given three days
to leave the state of Qatar.
I was not up to par with the game.
[Conn] Phaedra left in March 2010.
And then in December 2010, after the vote,
she had a conversation with a journalist
from the English newspaper
The Sunday Times
that was looking into what had happened
with the World Cup bidding.
[Almajid] I spoke with Claire Newell,
off the record, about what had happened,
what I had witnessed.
She wrote, I think, a short article,
and that's when everything changed.
I was nicknamed the Qatar whistleblower.
There is no evidence.
We have asked for evidence.
There is a principle in life,
this is, you are innocent
until you are declared guilty.
So stop, please, to say FIFA's corrupt.
FIFA is not corrupt!
Definitely not.
[applause]
[Conn] Phaedra was exposed
as having made these allegations.
And then, all of a sudden,
I'm starting to get threats.
I'm starting to get anonymous calls,
emails, social media.
I'm very, uh, scared.
[interviewer] And and
and who are you scared of?
All those I've upset by speaking out.
And those who have tried
over and over again to silence me.
I was basically told,
"Either you're going to sign an affidavit,
um, stating that you lied,
or else we will legally come after you."
[ominous music playing]
[interviewer] I'd love to get
your reaction about Angola
and Phaedra's allegations.
And the other was
the Sunday Times headline,
"Qatar bought the World Cup."
But what I'd like to know actually
is initially your reaction
when you see those.
[Al Thawadi smacks lips]
Hmm.
Look, my my reaction is, you know,
especially on on the Phaedra situation,
it's well, actually,
both of them, it's frustration.
It's frustration
because they're inherently false.
And there are facts on the ground
that prove they're false.
[suspenseful music playing]
I do believe that they conducted
some business at a global level
with people to help secure their votes.
I don't think anybody had ever done
anything at that scale before.
Whether you call that corrupt or not,
I mean, that's just the way
international business gets done.
[dramatic music playing]
A FIFA World Cup in Qatar would provide
unrivaled commercial opportunities.
[Conn] There were some big deals
that were done at a governmental level,
like the story of a big gas deal
between Qatar and Thailand
because there's a Thai representative
on the ExCo.
The suggestion that
it was linked to winning favor
is completely denied by everyone involved.
And another FIFA ExCo voting member,
Marios Lefkaritis,
sold some land to Qatar
for 32 million euros.
He's always said that
that had nothing to do with his vote.
[Teixeira in Portuguese]
The Emir of Qatar came to Brazil.
He stayed for a while
and even visited President Lula,
who was also in favor of Qatar.
We held a lunch here in Rio de Janeiro.
Present at the lunch was
the Emir of Qatar, Dr. Havelange, myself.
There were eight or nine of us.
That was when we decided
we would support Qatar.
I have received favors, exchanged favors.
That's normal.
But I have never been bribed
to do anything in my life.
[background conversation]
[inaudible]
[Conn, in English] It was only
weeks before the vote
that the UEFA president, Michel Platini,
who's very influential
in terms of who the European delegates
on the ExCo will vote for,
goes to a lunch with the President
of France, Nicolas Sarkozy,
and the son of the Emir of Qatar
at the Élysée Palace in Paris.
[Leclaire, in French] He was surprised to
see a whole Qatari delegation was there,
and Platini was not forewarned.
So, his version was
that he received a "subliminal message,"
these are his words,
from Sarkozy, telling him
it would be better if he voted for Qatar
rather than the USA,
for the best interests of France.
Platini fell into a trap set by Sarkozy.
Sarkozy used Platini
to say to the Qataris,
"Look, I have Platini in my pocket."
"France will vote for you,
for the World Cup,"
which was huge for the Qataris.
[Platini] Okay, I'll tell you
how it happened.
As I understood it, France would be happy
if I voted for Qatar.
I understood that,
but no one ever asked me anything.
Nicolas Sarkozy never asked you
to vote for Qatar?
No. Maybe that's why
he sold my vote to Qatar.
Maybe he knew I would vote for Qatar.
And so he sold my vote,
for the sake of France, to Qatar,
in order to
in order to obtain many things.
[Conn, in English]
It's absolutely remarkable
what happened
after Platini votes for Qatar.
The Qataris' estate fund
buys Paris Saint-Germain,
the main football club of Paris,
and injects who knows
how much money into it.
beIN Sports,
which is the Qatari broadcaster,
bought the TV rights
for French football for huge money.
[cheering]
[Conn] On top of that,
there are very big trade deals
that happen between Qatar and France,
including the Qataris buying
a lot of French Airbus airplanes.
The decisions that lead
to the World Cup going to Qatar
are happening in the very,
very highest levels of politics,
but any impropriety
is completely denied by the Qataris.
[interviewer] Buying the World Cup,
paying off ExCo members.
You know the allegations.
You know what they are.
The geopolitical deals
that were done between Thailand,
between Russia,
between Qatar, between Sarkozy.
What what geopolitical deals?
[interviewer] These are
what the allegations
What? I'm gonna ask you, what?
[interviewer] Okay, gas, um
Gas deals between whom and whom?
- [interviewer] Between Thailand and Qatar.
- The facts are on the ground.
The facts are on the ground.
Some things are, you know, uh,
some things are extremely unrealistic.
This is our natural resource. This is
something we're building our future on.
It's not gonna be utilized
for the sake of a vote for a World Cup.
[inaudible speech]
[Al Thawadi] It feeds into the stereotype
of Arab sheikhs throwing money around.
This is why this World Cup is important
because we need
to break down a stereotype.
[crowd cheering]
[Al Thawadi] We abided by the rules.
We abided by our moral values.
We won on the merits of our bid.
We won on the merits of the vision
and the fact that this is the time
for the first World Cup in the Arab world,
in the Muslim world, to come.
- [Blatter] Qatar!
- [cheering]
[Al Thawadi] When it was announced,
you'll see everybody else
euphoric and shouting,
and you'll find me standing statue-still
'cause I couldn't see Sepp Blatter
from where I was sitting.
I was just standing still
until I heard my team screaming,
"Yes, we did it, we did it."
[cheering]
[Bin Hammam] In the Arab world
was a huge celebration.
In Asia, there was a huge celebration.
[audience applauding]
[cheering]
[horn toots]
[cheering and applause]
[Bin Hammam] But what is not making me
feel comfortable is what Blatter is doing.
You know, he he put us in his mind
to to eliminate Qatar.
This is actually what, uh
uh, what doesn't make me comfortable.
[newscaster] Will he or won't he?
That's the question we're here to answer.
The person we're talking about
is Mohamed Bin Hammam.
He supposedly is, uh, thinking
about challenging Sepp Blatter
for the FIFA presidency.
[Bin Hammam] I'm actually known
as a Blatter supporter.
Definitely I was
an honest advisor for him,
and I will say, yes,
I have contributed to his success.
[Tognoni] Mohamed Bin Hammam
considered Blatter as his friend,
and he was absolutely loyal to Blatter,
but it was a one-way street.
[inaudible conversation]
[Tognoni] Blatter promised
after the '98 election
that he will stay only for two terms.
This was deleted,
and then Blatter stayed for a third term,
and then Bin Hammam was upset
because he didn't accept
that Blatter didn't keep his promise.
I thought that Blatter
would not be interested in 2011.
The president has to have a limit,
a maximum by three terms.
So, I felt this is not good
for the football.
Not good for the game.
But there was always supposed to be
a second candidate.
[Tognoni] For Blatter, it was a shock that
Bin Hammam brought the World Cup to Qatar.
This was a total surprise.
For the first time ever,
he saw his limits of power.
If there was a person here
who had more power than himself,
at least in one special event,
this was Mohamed Bin Hammam.
[newscaster] I think
Bin Hammam is an independent man.
He's had his time with Sepp Blatter.
I think he, like most of us,
has had enough of Sepp Blatter,
thinks Sepp has single-handedly ruined
the good name of FIFA,
and he understands
that somebody's got to come in.
[Tognoni] But I think
Blatter couldn't control his ambitions.
He was the real Machiavelli of of sports.
[applause]
[reporter] After 13 years,
Sepp Blatter is well-used
to the trappings of presidential power.
During that time, he's received honors
and accolades all around the world.
But not everyone would applaud
the way he runs FIFA.
[Blatter] I wanted
to maintain my position.
I couldn't abandon
[chuckles] all my years
in development of football
and all my years as secretary general
and as president.
[Tognoni] Blatter insisted
on loyalty for everyone,
but the problem of him was that he was
not loyal to all his political supporters
during all the years,
to Mohamed Bin Hammam, for example.
[Bin Hammam] In 2009,
there was election in Asia
for the FIFA seat, which I am occupying.
There is another candidate,
and I was very much surprised
to see that Blatter took his side.
For me, it was quite strange.
I am supposedly his friend.
He thought that I am a danger for him,
and he wanted to remove me from FIFA.
So, I just
said that I will not make him
comfortable in his life.
[chuckles]
Sepp Blatter,
the man who runs world football,
is facing his first challenge
for the presidency of FIFA in nine years.
Mohamed Bin Hammam has told the BBC
that it's time for greater transparency
in the way the game is run.
Mr. Bin Hammam is head
of the Asian Football Confederation.
[Mary Lynn Blanks]
To take on Sepp Blatter is huge.
I frankly didn't think it was possible
for anybody to topple him
because he was so well-seated.
[reporter] Sepp Blatter has used
the billions of pounds
generated by the World Cup
to shore up his power base.
He won't walk away
from his cherished prize without a fight.
[distant horns tooting]
[distant seagulls crying]
[Bin Hammam] I wanted to see
the Caribbeans in Miami,
and I couldn't get a visa.
There is no reason
for the authorities to say,
"No, we are not going to give you a visa."
I am presuming that there is somebody
who doesn't want me to go to the States
to address the the Caribbeans.
[Gulati] It was a tense few days.
There was a presidential election
going on.
Mr. Bin Hammam wasn't there,
and Mr. Blatter was there.
CONCACAF, at the time, was run by a guy
named Jack Warner, who was president.
The general secretary was a gentleman
named Chuck Blazer, who was American.
And then on stage at the congress,
Mr. Blatter, off the cuff,
does a development grant
for a million dollars for CONCACAF.
It was about as blatant
as one could be in terms of, you know,
"Let me give you a gift
for your region, Mr. Warner,
in front of all your members,"
thirty or sixty days
or whatever it was before an election.
[Bin Hammam] I was not happy about this.
I am a candidate.
I want to see the people.
I have to speak to the people.
So, I said, "Mr. Warner,
give me another opportunity."
Then they they organized
this, uh, congress in Port of Spain.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Conn] All the Caribbean
Football Union countries
were invited to the Hyatt Regency Hotel
in Port of Spain in Trinidad,
which is obviously
the power base of Jack Warner.
Jack Warner himself had a travel company
and was paid $363,000
to organize the travel for the event.
[Bensinger] Chuck Blazer had not thought
it was a good idea
for Warner to hold this event.
He shouldn't have this breakout thing
just for the Caribbean,
and they should run it,
at least publicly, above board.
[Blanks] There were quite a few attempts
at him trying to stop it,
but Chuck didn't scare him.
Should have scared him, but he didn't.
[Eric Labrador, in Spanish]
I obviously knew about Jack Warner.
Jack Warner,
as the confederation president,
he offered an opportunity to Bin Hammam.
And we obviously went there
to listen to what he had to offer.
On the first day,
Bin Hammam did his presentation.
And something strange happened
after Bin Hammam spoke.
We were told about a gift
to help the federations.
They invited us to a place
to pick up the gift.
I waited my turn,
and I went into the room,
and there were
some officials from the CFU.
They handed me
an envelope marked "Puerto Rico."
And when I opened the envelope,
there was money in cash.
The sum of $40,000 in cash.
I immediately said, "What's this for?"
"This is for you to use
for whatever you want within football."
They obviously gave
that sum of money to everyone.
Had I been told,
"This is in exchange for a vote,"
I would have said, "I won't take it!"
In fact, I returned the money.
[Conn, in English]
Sadly, most of them took the money,
but there were
three or four notable exceptions
who refused to take the money
and reported it,
and that had
very far-reaching ramifications.
[dramatic music playing]
Within a few hours, news of these bags,
these literal envelopes stuffed with cash,
makes it to Blazer, who's in New York.
This put Chuck Blazer
in a really uncomfortable position.
He'd worked with Jack Warner
for almost 20 years.
So, we're watching a friendship unravel.
He had told Warner repeatedly
not to hold this conference in Trinidad,
and he refused to do it.
Now this is happening.
Now, like, the most blatant corruption
he's ever seen
in all his years in football
is happening right under their noses.
They're handing out stacks of cash.
Warner had become increasingly
a bit of a public embarrassment to Blazer
and to football in general,
and so Blazer decides to turn Warner in.
He's gonna report Warner
to the high-level officials
at FIFA in Zurich.
[dramatic music continues]
[Blanks] The day he had to make the call
to talk about the cash in the envelopes,
right before he picked up the phone,
he looked at me and he said,
"This will not end well."
[church bell ringing]
[Valcke] I remember
when I got called by Chuck Blazer,
telling me that something happened
in the Caribbean.
And Chuck Blazer sent me these pictures.
I went to Blatter, saying, "I, uh,
I have been called by Chuck Blazer,
and he told me that this and that happen,"
and I call the president
of the Ethics Committee.
I told him, "You should come to Zurich
immediately by train."
It was a Sunday. "We should meet
because we have a a big problem."
[Tognoni] There are
many strange things there.
Mohamed Bin Hammam fell into a trap.
The other thing is, why did he do so?
Obviously, Bin Hammam was convinced
that he should do some favors
to the members
of the Caribbean Football Union.
And he did it, and he fell into the trap.
There was no bad intention of me
to to bribe people, you know.
[ice cream van jingle plays]
[Bin Hammam] It's again,
you know, a conspiracy.
Don't forget that I am fighting FIFA,
with all their resources.
So, definitely they can build a story
a thousand times more
than I can build a story.
Today, we saw an announcement
from FIFA's Ethics Commission
that they're investigating
claims of corruption
that involved Jack Warner
and FIFA president candidate
Mohamed Bin Hammam.
[reporter] Have you ever tried
to buy votes?
Uh, I have never intended to do so,
all my life.
[reporter] Did did
did you ever give any money
to those officials in the Caribbean?
No, nobody, nobody.
Nobody can claim that he see me anywhere,
you know, doing this.
I want to say again, Mr. Bin Hammam
never, to the best of my knowledge,
gave any money
to the countries in the Caribbean.
Jack, at that point,
was so full of himself.
He thought he was, you know,
immune to any kind of prosecution.
[inaudible]
[Conn] There's a very telling
little episode
after the handing out
of the cash in Trinidad,
and it's captured on film.
[Warner] There are some people here
who believe they're more pious than thou.
If you're pious, open a church, friend.
But the fact is,
our business is our business.
So, I'm making the point here, folks,
that it was given to you because he said
he could not bring the the silver tray
and silver trinkets and so on.
So, I said, "Forget all of that."
"Put a value on it
and give it to the countries."
And the gift you get
is for you to determine
how best you want to use it
for development of football
in your country.
And if there is anybody here
who has a conscience
and wishes to send back the money,
I am willing to take it
and give it back to him.
But don't go and talk of this outside
and believe that you're pious,
and you're holy
and you're better than anybody else.
And I hope I hope that's very clear.
[reporter] What's the future
for Jack Warner in CONCACAF?
For me,
based on the evidence that I've seen,
I don't think there is one.
[reporter] And how about your personal
relationship with Jack Warner?
It's obviously been broken.
[reporter] Okay, so do you think
he feels a sense of betrayal?
Um, I I feel betrayed,
uh, based on what he
The the risk and danger
he put our members to,
to expose them to this sort of situation
where, uh, they were in jeopardy
by accepting, uh, the gifts,
I think is, uh, unconscionable.
[newscaster]
Arriving for a press conference today,
the FIFA president was desperate
to try and move on from the crisis.
[Blatter] Crisis?
What is a crisis?
We are not in a crisis.
We are only in some difficulties,
and these difficulties will be solved,
will be solved inside our family.
[newscaster] But he still found himself
dealing with explosive allegations,
this time about Qatar's bid
for the 2022 World Cup.
[Almajid] It's obvious that things
are going very bad for the Qataris.
They were scared
that they were gonna lose the bid
because of both my allegations
that were out there
and Mohamed Bin Hammam and his story.
[Bin Hammam] Blatter said
a lot of wrongdoing took place
during the World Cup, uh, bidding,
and Bin Hammam is, uh, involved.
He did a lot of things to damage me,
to damage my reputation.
He has no border, actually.
[Ken Bensinger] Sepp Blatter, being
one of the great political minds in sport,
sees in this scandal
coming out of Port of Spain, Trinidad
an opportunity to get rid of his rival.
It's really a drama, how people
are built up and then they fall.
They made a misjudgment on Blatter,
who brought them in as friends
and dropped them as enemies.
He wanted to get rid of rivals, you know,
and the only one
who took the challenge was Bin Hammam.
But Blatter had to find a way out,
and, uh, he made a deal.
One day, Sheikh Jassim,
the son of the emir, came to FIFA.
Bin Hammam also came to FIFA.
[suspenseful music playing]
It was three days before the election.
Sheikh Jassim and Bin Hammam
spoke and spoke.
I don't understand Arabic,
but then Prince Jassim said,
"No, we will speak in English,
uh, because we wanted Mr. Blatter
he knows our conversation."
And he said, you know,
that the emir had said that,
"You shall not contest Mr. Blatter."
"We will support Mr. Blatter
for the election 2011."
[Tognoni] So, uh, Qatar would withdraw
the candidature of Bin Hammam,
and Blatter would not anymore speak
about the way Qatar won the election
to become host country
of the World Cup 2022.
[Bin Hammam] I know
that Blatter will be able to harm us.
He has so many tricks.
I'm not going to jeopardize
I know Blatter can do it.
So, from my side, I said,
"Well, I think I'm I am done."
And, yes, I mean,
these people definitely, you know,
they they harm me the the maximum.
Sepp Blatter has been re-elected
FIFA president
after a major bribery scandal left him
as the only candidate
to deal with a sporting crisis.
Blatter won another four-year term
as head of soccer's governing body
after receiving 186 of 203 votes.
The 75-year-old Swiss executive
has been in office since 1998.
[reporter] Former challenger
Mohamed Bin Hammam has been suspended
over allegations of bribery.
Vice president Jack Warner has
also been suspended over bribery claims,
but says more damaging revelations
for FIFA are about to emerge.
I said before,
FIFA will feel a tsunami coming.
Trust me. You haven't seen it yet.
[indistinct]
Because, at the end of the day,
Blatter has to be stopped.
[newscaster] Sepp Blatter himself
has been cleared of wrongdoing,
but this afternoon,
can expect some tough questions
at a press conference.
He may survive this scandal,
but FIFA's reputation has not.
[Bensinger] One person I know
who benefited from this was Chuck Blazer.
Warner is now out of football,
Bin Hammam is out of football,
and Chuck Blazer,
in what is one of the most astoundingly
upside-down moments in the whole story,
is hailed as a hero.
And news reports
around the world are talking
about how Blazer's a whistleblower
and someone who's there to save the game.
Fair play to Chuck Blazer
because I'll tell you what,
for doing that, he's gotta be
squeaky clean, which is good.
I'm not saying that he wasn't,
but it takes a lot of courage to do that.
[Mel Brennan]
Chuck is not a whistleblower.
Whistleblower is somebody
who looks around and says,
"I don't wanna be a part
of what's going wrong here,"
and lets folks know what's going wrong.
Not somebody who was
an engineer of what's wrong,
who benefited primarily
from what's wrong for decades.
[dramatic music playing]
CONCACAF was located at 56th and 5th
in New York City. That's Trump Tower.
We sat on the 17th floor,
and Chuck lived on the residential side,
and he was on the 49th floor.
I think Chuck was motivated
by maintaining a lifestyle
that FIFA and CONCACAF afforded him.
Every endeavor at CONCACAF
has to begin and end
with making Chuck, personally, some money.
Chuck was taking a minimum of 10%
and sometimes more to himself
with every deal.
[Bensinger] It was abundantly clear
that Blazer had profited
in all kinds of unsavory manners
from the sport.
To me, it's illustrative not just of him,
but in general, the attitude that these
high-level corrupt FIFA officials had,
which was that they were untouchable.
They didn't have the slightest idea
anyone would ever come after them.
It didn't enter their mind
that that was even remotely possible.
[siren wails]
[horns blaring]
So, my experience, uh,
in the FBI, in the New York office,
is that of, uh, organized crime.
At the time, this was back in 2010,
we were being mandated
to broaden our reach,
look for international crime
that was affecting us here in the States.
[siren wailing]
At the same time,
there were some English journalists
who were raising the issue again
of FIFA corruption,
notably the late Andrew Jennings,
a veteran campaigning journalist,
trying to expose FIFA corruption.
President Blatter, I must ask you,
are you a fit and proper person
to control world football?
- Hello again.
- Leave me alone.
- Can I ask you how much
- Leave me alone.
Please don't do that. Can I ask you
how much money you're ma
- Leave me alone!
- [man] Please, do something for us now.
[Jennings] Please don't do that.
Jack Warner, a long-standing executive
at FIFA, football's world governing body,
has resigned.
He was suspended a month ago
following allegations of corruption.
FIFA said that,
as a result of his resignation,
the investigation
into Mr. Warner's conduct had been closed,
and he was presumed to be innocent.
[Bensinger] Jack Warner, in disgrace
after the Port of Spain bribery incident,
resigns before he could be thrown
out of football,
and he promises the FIFA officials
he's gonna unleash a tsunami on them.
And damaging information about Blazer
begins leaking to Andrew Jennings.
Documents that show
that Blazer has all kinds of nice things
he shouldn't have,
like apartments in Miami and the Bahamas,
and a beautiful Mercedes in Zurich,
and that he has
all these incredible assets
and yet no clear sense
of where this money is coming from.
There were checks that Blazer
has deposited into overseas accounts.
All this stuff ends up
in a series of articles
that Jennings writes over the summer.
[Steve Berryman] I had a bunch
of different Google alerts
for a corruption project I had.
And I got one, one morning,
and it was from an article
by, uh, the English journalist
Andrew Jennings.
I think it resonated with me
just because of what football is to me,
growing up around it,
what it is in my heart.
And there there were allegations
in these Andrew Jennings articles
about offshore accounts and Chuck Blazer.
So, I started looking at his background.
[distant siren wailing]
[Mike Gaeta] With an individual present
in our own backyard, in New York City,
with information
that seemed to be credible,
we think we're able to, uh,
to start and begin an investigation.
[distant horns blaring]
[suspenseful music playing]
If there's a crime here,
a case to be made,
it's gonna come down
to whether, um, there is some aspect to it
that really intersects
with the United States.
What we came to learn over time
was that there was a lot
and that was
through the US financial system.
[Berryman] I thought
the best way was to trace money,
follow the money through
the various wire transfer aspects
of how money moves around the world.
Say you're gonna move money
from a bank account in Switzerland
to a bank account in the Cayman Islands.
That wire transfer doesn't go
right from Switzerland
to the Cayman Islands.
They have to have
a correspondent bank in the United States.
And one of the first subpoenas
that we did issue was the FIFA bank,
the UBS in Switzerland?
Well, they have
a correspondent bank in the United States.
So, we got the records
of basically all the wire transfers
going in and out of FIFA.
You know, you may have
one thread of one business name,
and it just starts going out
like a like a spiderweb of leads.
[Evan Norris] They used code names.
They used so many different bank accounts
in offshore jurisdictions
to move the money from point A to point B
to point C to point D to point E
It was just dizzying.
[Berryman] But as we went along,
we didn't know what the payments were for.
[Norris] I knew from the time
that I had spent doing Mafia cases
that there's nothing
like a cooperating witness
in a in in a conspiracy case,
in something that's complex,
to be able to just explain it all.
[Bensinger] The next major moment
is when Steve Berryman does something
that IRS agents are able to do, which is
he pulls Chuck Blazer's tax returns,
and he can reveal what is
sort of the, um, the ace in the hole
that he's got tucked up his sleeve,
and that is there are no tax returns.
Turns out that Blazer had never even
filed taxes for at least 15 years.
And now they have Blazer
right in their sights.
It's pretty much an open-and-shut case.
They can get him
on those tax charges, no question.
Then the question is,
"What do we wanna do with him?"
"Do we just wanna bust Chuck Blazer
and put him away?"
"No, we don't. We want him
because we want an informant."
And so the decision is made
to approach him
and kind of make him an offer
he can't refuse.
[Gaeta] A lot weighed
on the success of this approach.
It was much bigger than Chuck.
Chuck was going to be a first step
towards a much wider investigation.
[dramatic music playing]
[Blanks] We'd just pulled
out of Trump Tower
heading to Uncle Jack's Steakhouse,
and Chuck said,
"Mary Lynn,
go on to the steakhouse with Al."
That was our friend who was with us.
And he got out of the van that he was in
and got on his little motor scooter.
In between the Trump Tower
and another building behind it,
there's kind of an atrium, and he just
wheeled himself right up to the table.
He recognized quickly
the, uh, the situation he was in.
[Berryman] I told him what we had on him.
Wire fraud, money laundering, tax evasion,
the non-reporting
of foreign bank accounts.
The agent said,
"Mr. Blazer, you're looking at 75
to 100 years in jail right now."
"We can take you now
or you can cooperate."
I mean, I remember him
just looking at me
[chuckles] and going
[sighs deeply]
And then he said,
"I, uh, think I wanna help you guys."
"This is probably bigger than you know."
And I think
we suggested that he get an attorney,
and and so so it went from there.
[Blanks] When he came upstairs,
I said, "Well, you know,
your taxes, just just pay 'em."
"Work out a deal. Just pay 'em."
And he goes, "Mary Lynn,
I'm just a fat crook from Queens."
And then chickens came home to roost.
[newscaster] The FBI goes after FIFA.
[man 1] Nobody is above the law.
Suddenly, you are
in an FBI series on Netflix.
This is the World Cup of fraud.
[man 2] Maybe it is
a Mafia-style organization.
[reporter] Sepp Blatter isn't the only
executive with questions to answer.
[man 3] 5,200 is the number
of workers expected to die.
[in French] I'm being blamed
for this storm. Well, then, fine.
[in English] Somewhere
there is always an end.
[in French] I'll take the responsibility.
[dramatic music playing]
[Sepp Blatter] The winner to organize
the 2022 FIFA World Cup is
- Qatar!
- [cheering]
[triumphant music playing]
[loud cheering]
[newscaster]
The United States today lost out
on its bid for hosting the World Cup,
the biggest sporting event in the world.
[groaning]
[reporter 1] The desert emirate of Qatar
beat out Australia, Japan,
South Korea, and the United States.
[reporter 2] President Obama says
it was the wrong decision
for the organizing body
to pick Qatar over the US.
The world was shocked
that Qatar 2022 had won,
but how did they win?
I mean, how did this happen?
[newscaster] Average high in June and July
when the event will be held, 106 degrees!
[Amanda Davies] It wasn't expected
against the likes of the USA and Japan,
and the technical report around the bid
had been really quite negative.
[reporter] Qatar had been rated
"high risk."
Deals behind the scenes settle everything.
[Sunil Gulati] By a pretty wide margin,
the best bid for the 2022 World Cup
was the US bid.
[Kevin Payne] I was shocked
and disappointed,
but my immediate reaction was
that they had bought this.
[Piers Morgan] If FIFA's corrupt,
it should be exposed.
And I think that this decision today
is going to rumble on
for a very long time.
[applause]
[Guido Tognoni] The reasoning to go
to Qatar is very difficult to explain.
For FIFA, it is a disaster, and it was
especially during the time when FIFA,
anyway, was in the focus for bribery.
- [man 1] Mr. Blatter?
- [man 2] Mr. Blatter?
[Tognoni] And then the Executive Committee
had not a better idea
than voting for Qatar.
Therefore, I always say
when you blame Qatar
for hosting the World Cup,
you have to blame FIFA
because FIFA is the system.
The system is FIFA.
[dramatic music playing]
[distant horn blaring]
[Leclaire in French] Why Qatar?
Why go play in a country that is so hot,
uh, or in a country
that's going to need to build stadiums?
Why such a small country
with a team
that is ranked so low globally?
[crowd groans]
[crowd gasps]
[Leclaire] If you asked questions
about the working conditions,
human rights, whether European fans
will be able to get there and so on
So, I was shocked, like everyone else.
[in English] I don't think
they expected the world media
and the world reaction
to be so against them.
They received a very, very harsh backlash
after winning.
[Hassan Al Thawadi] When we won,
I was happy and euphoric,
but very, very quickly, I I suffered
a a very serious bout of depression.
It was a very vicious attack that came.
The attack was coming on us.
The attack was coming on FIFA.
Unprecedented attacks
coming from left, right, and center
against us, the country.
The descriptions
that were coming into play
It was very, very close
to being racist attacks.
It was tough.
[sweeping music playing]
[children shouting]
First of all, on behalf of the millions
of people living in the Middle East,
thank you.
[players shouting]
[Sheikh Al-Thani]
Thank you, FIFA, for believing
that expanding the game to the Middle East
and bringing it here
to our region, to our homes,
is the right thing to do.
We go to the Middle East.
We go to the Arabic world.
We go to the Islamic world.
This is development of football,
and don't speak about money.
This has nothing to do with money.
I would say the first very strong decision
where the politics came in
is for the World Cup in Qatar,
and not what was my wish, uh,
to have the United States of America.
[Ricardo Teixeira, in Portuguese]
As I was going in to vote for Qatar,
Blatter comes up to me.
"I want you to vote for the USA
and not Qatar."
Do you think it's appropriate
for the president to stoop to that level?
I didn't respond. He went off.
I got the votes for Qatar, and Qatar won.
[Emmanuel Maradas, in English]
Sepp was cornered completely
by the big members of the FIFA ExCo.
You have the, uh
the head of the confederations.
Issa Hayatou for the Africans.
Michel Platini for UEFA.
You have Jack Warner for the CONCACAF,
and you have Dr. Leoz for the CONMEBOL.
And Bin Hammam from Qatar.
He is the chairman
of the Asian Football Confederation.
They just aligned themselves with Qatar.
There was three CONCACAF members
on the ExCo at the time,
and it was assumed that all three of them
were gonna support the US bid.
So, it comes as a tremendous shock
to Chuck Blazer
to find out that Jack Warner,
his closest ally in FIFA,
appears to have voted for Qatar.
He felt betrayed.
How can you not vote
for your own confederation?
But these guys were old. They weren't
gonna be around for the next vote.
So, if they did the double vote, they got
twice the money. It was payday for them.
[reporter] Doha's skyscrapers
signal the economic rise
of Qatar's gas-rich capital city.
And over the next decade,
they'll likely tower over another boom,
fueled by football mania.
Football in particular,
but sports in general,
always played a very important part
in our culture, uh, in our ambitions,
in, uh, utilizing it as a catalyst,
as a vehicle to pushing forward,
uh, some of the nation's objectives.
[James Dorsey] The Qataris
have created a sports industry.
They've done basically
what other countries
do organically over decades.
They've made sports
part of national identity.
With Qatar, you're talking about it being
part of an actual nation-building mission.
They were looking to get out
of the shadow of Saudi Arabia,
carve out a different character
for themselves,
be a player on the world stage.
They want to be seen
as a force for good in the world.
They want to show that the Arab world
can host a tournament like this
and bring people together.
[crowd cheering]
[Jérôme Valcke] They were everywhere.
They wanted to be seen
as the banker of sports in the world.
There was nothing to be organized
without the support from Qatar.
When the bids were opened
for 2018, 2022 in 2009,
which meant there was
a significant lead-up
and there was an opportunity open,
that's when we decided
we have a shot, we have a chance.
[crowd cheering]
[indistinct PA announcement]
What makes us want to host the
the World Cup is our belief in football.
[Al Thawadi] Bringing the World Cup
to Qatar will bring the World Cup
to the Middle East for the first time.
We were a young bid team.
We had many people
that spoke many different languages,
so we could communicate
with the football world,
and we were humble.
We knew that we were the underdogs.
We knew that people did not see us
initially as serious contenders.
[dramatic music playing]
[distant rumble of traffic]
[in Spanish] During our stay in Doha,
we quickly noticed
this was a government project,
channeled through the World Cup,
to put Qatar at the center of the world.
It was a project of state.
It wasn't a project
of the football federation.
Honestly, I never thought Qatar would win.
They don't have a football tradition.
In the report,
they didn't have the best marks.
They had to virtually rebuild the city,
build all the stadiums.
They didn't have a single stadium
which could host a match.
And build hotels for tourists
and for the teams as well.
But the insurmountable obstacle
was how to play in May, June, July.
We did our reports.
These were sent out.
Any member of the ExCo could call me
and ask me to explain anything.
No one called me.
That's how I reached the conclusion
that not all of them had read it.
If they didn't care that you
couldn't play in May, June, July,
why would they care
about working conditions?
It wasn't an issue.
[horn toots]
[Phaedra Almajid, in English]
We were in Cape Town
when FIFA hosted the FIFA Media Breakfast.
All countries were there
and so all the media is there.
And every bid had
exactly the same parameters,
so we each had a booth.
We had Arab media
that came to visit us, and that was it.
No one came to our booth.
They'd come pick up their freebies,
but that was it.
And then right in the middle
of the whole thing walks in David Beckham.
[photographers shouting]
[Almajid] You'd think
there was an earthquake in the place.
The media started pushing,
climbing on chairs, climbing on tables.
Everybody was surrounding them.
[inaudible speech]
[Almajid] Sheikh Mohammed,
who was the director general
of the Qatar 2022 bid,
turned around to me that day and said,
"Why didn't you get me
that media attention?"
I was gobsmacked
because, I mean, this was David Beckham.
Everyone in the world knows David Beckham.
No one knows who in the world
this little prince is from this country.
The team was extremely small.
None of them had even gone
to a World Cup game in their life.
None of them knew the FIFA politics.
None of them had ever worked
in sports, even.
Um, these were people
who had no knowledge of any of this.
The only person
who had knowledge of FIFA politics
was Mohamed Bin Hammam.
Mohamed Bin Hammam was president
of the Asian Football Confederation.
He was an ExCo member of FIFA,
one of the 24 members.
He was one
of the most powerful men in football,
and he was a Qatari citizen.
He is not a person who is very outspoken.
He likes to be in the background.
He likes to be the the conductor.
[Mohamed Bin Hammam]
I didn't think that the size of Qatar,
and the weather of Qatar,
support any such, uh, ambition, you know?
With Mohamed Bin Hammam, it took
a long while for him to come on board
and be able to be convinced
and supportive of the bid.
[Almajid] We knew that he would be able
to give us the tools and the means to win.
To get the World Cup,
you have to get ExCo members
to vote for you,
so that's what their game plan was.
He knows all 24.
He can, one, help us meet all 24.
Two, he can help us know
what to do to get all 24 votes.
Qatar had been able
to sponsor the African Congress
of Football in Angola.
The transformative point
for us for the bid was Angola,
was the speech that I gave
to the CAF Congress in Angola.
The message resonated
very, very powerfully.
That was when I think a lot of people
started seeing us as serious candidates.
It wasn't just the fact
that we were able to convince
the three Executive Committee members.
It was the fact
that the entire African confederation
was buzzing about our bid.
But it was Angola
that was the turning point.
[inaudible speech]
[Almajid] We were all staying
in the same hotel.
And I was told to go help translate.
So, I went. I talk French.
We welcome into the suite, um,
at different times of the evening,
different ExCo members.
Hayatou, Anouma, and Adamu.
And we were talking
about South Africa, you know,
how Africa was being given its chance
to host the World Cup,
and how the Arab world should be given
the chance to host the World Cup.
And then Hassan offered Hayatou $1 million
for the football federation,
Hayatou's football federation.
And, you know,
in return, we wanted his vote,
and I remember there just being laughter.
And then it was said,
"Well, that's not enough."
And so the price was just upped
to 1.5 million, just like that.
I know it sounds so simple,
but it was so simple.
It was just, "We'll give you this money
for your football federation,
and you give us your vote."
And, "Thank you so much. See you later."
And one by one, we did the same thing
with Anouma and Adamu.
So, $1.5 million was offered
to each ExCo member that evening
in exchange for their vote.
[interviewer] And was that
something that was the
The money was physical or was it verbal?
It was verbal. I never saw money.
That is something I never saw.
And it was made very clear
that the money was going to football.
It was never said,
"It's going into your pocket."
I do need to emphasize that.
It was said it was going
Where it ended up, I have no idea.
I don't know.
Before I went back to my hotel room,
Hassan told me, "You never repeat this
ever again to anyone."
And I was like, "Okay."
[distant horn blares]
[Almajid] I never forgot about it,
but I never spoke about it again
for a long, long time.
I knew my days were numbered,
but in my eyes,
I had never done anything
to deserve being fired.
I was given three days
to leave the state of Qatar.
I was not up to par with the game.
[Conn] Phaedra left in March 2010.
And then in December 2010, after the vote,
she had a conversation with a journalist
from the English newspaper
The Sunday Times
that was looking into what had happened
with the World Cup bidding.
[Almajid] I spoke with Claire Newell,
off the record, about what had happened,
what I had witnessed.
She wrote, I think, a short article,
and that's when everything changed.
I was nicknamed the Qatar whistleblower.
There is no evidence.
We have asked for evidence.
There is a principle in life,
this is, you are innocent
until you are declared guilty.
So stop, please, to say FIFA's corrupt.
FIFA is not corrupt!
Definitely not.
[applause]
[Conn] Phaedra was exposed
as having made these allegations.
And then, all of a sudden,
I'm starting to get threats.
I'm starting to get anonymous calls,
emails, social media.
I'm very, uh, scared.
[interviewer] And and
and who are you scared of?
All those I've upset by speaking out.
And those who have tried
over and over again to silence me.
I was basically told,
"Either you're going to sign an affidavit,
um, stating that you lied,
or else we will legally come after you."
[ominous music playing]
[interviewer] I'd love to get
your reaction about Angola
and Phaedra's allegations.
And the other was
the Sunday Times headline,
"Qatar bought the World Cup."
But what I'd like to know actually
is initially your reaction
when you see those.
[Al Thawadi smacks lips]
Hmm.
Look, my my reaction is, you know,
especially on on the Phaedra situation,
it's well, actually,
both of them, it's frustration.
It's frustration
because they're inherently false.
And there are facts on the ground
that prove they're false.
[suspenseful music playing]
I do believe that they conducted
some business at a global level
with people to help secure their votes.
I don't think anybody had ever done
anything at that scale before.
Whether you call that corrupt or not,
I mean, that's just the way
international business gets done.
[dramatic music playing]
A FIFA World Cup in Qatar would provide
unrivaled commercial opportunities.
[Conn] There were some big deals
that were done at a governmental level,
like the story of a big gas deal
between Qatar and Thailand
because there's a Thai representative
on the ExCo.
The suggestion that
it was linked to winning favor
is completely denied by everyone involved.
And another FIFA ExCo voting member,
Marios Lefkaritis,
sold some land to Qatar
for 32 million euros.
He's always said that
that had nothing to do with his vote.
[Teixeira in Portuguese]
The Emir of Qatar came to Brazil.
He stayed for a while
and even visited President Lula,
who was also in favor of Qatar.
We held a lunch here in Rio de Janeiro.
Present at the lunch was
the Emir of Qatar, Dr. Havelange, myself.
There were eight or nine of us.
That was when we decided
we would support Qatar.
I have received favors, exchanged favors.
That's normal.
But I have never been bribed
to do anything in my life.
[background conversation]
[inaudible]
[Conn, in English] It was only
weeks before the vote
that the UEFA president, Michel Platini,
who's very influential
in terms of who the European delegates
on the ExCo will vote for,
goes to a lunch with the President
of France, Nicolas Sarkozy,
and the son of the Emir of Qatar
at the Élysée Palace in Paris.
[Leclaire, in French] He was surprised to
see a whole Qatari delegation was there,
and Platini was not forewarned.
So, his version was
that he received a "subliminal message,"
these are his words,
from Sarkozy, telling him
it would be better if he voted for Qatar
rather than the USA,
for the best interests of France.
Platini fell into a trap set by Sarkozy.
Sarkozy used Platini
to say to the Qataris,
"Look, I have Platini in my pocket."
"France will vote for you,
for the World Cup,"
which was huge for the Qataris.
[Platini] Okay, I'll tell you
how it happened.
As I understood it, France would be happy
if I voted for Qatar.
I understood that,
but no one ever asked me anything.
Nicolas Sarkozy never asked you
to vote for Qatar?
No. Maybe that's why
he sold my vote to Qatar.
Maybe he knew I would vote for Qatar.
And so he sold my vote,
for the sake of France, to Qatar,
in order to
in order to obtain many things.
[Conn, in English]
It's absolutely remarkable
what happened
after Platini votes for Qatar.
The Qataris' estate fund
buys Paris Saint-Germain,
the main football club of Paris,
and injects who knows
how much money into it.
beIN Sports,
which is the Qatari broadcaster,
bought the TV rights
for French football for huge money.
[cheering]
[Conn] On top of that,
there are very big trade deals
that happen between Qatar and France,
including the Qataris buying
a lot of French Airbus airplanes.
The decisions that lead
to the World Cup going to Qatar
are happening in the very,
very highest levels of politics,
but any impropriety
is completely denied by the Qataris.
[interviewer] Buying the World Cup,
paying off ExCo members.
You know the allegations.
You know what they are.
The geopolitical deals
that were done between Thailand,
between Russia,
between Qatar, between Sarkozy.
What what geopolitical deals?
[interviewer] These are
what the allegations
What? I'm gonna ask you, what?
[interviewer] Okay, gas, um
Gas deals between whom and whom?
- [interviewer] Between Thailand and Qatar.
- The facts are on the ground.
The facts are on the ground.
Some things are, you know, uh,
some things are extremely unrealistic.
This is our natural resource. This is
something we're building our future on.
It's not gonna be utilized
for the sake of a vote for a World Cup.
[inaudible speech]
[Al Thawadi] It feeds into the stereotype
of Arab sheikhs throwing money around.
This is why this World Cup is important
because we need
to break down a stereotype.
[crowd cheering]
[Al Thawadi] We abided by the rules.
We abided by our moral values.
We won on the merits of our bid.
We won on the merits of the vision
and the fact that this is the time
for the first World Cup in the Arab world,
in the Muslim world, to come.
- [Blatter] Qatar!
- [cheering]
[Al Thawadi] When it was announced,
you'll see everybody else
euphoric and shouting,
and you'll find me standing statue-still
'cause I couldn't see Sepp Blatter
from where I was sitting.
I was just standing still
until I heard my team screaming,
"Yes, we did it, we did it."
[cheering]
[Bin Hammam] In the Arab world
was a huge celebration.
In Asia, there was a huge celebration.
[audience applauding]
[cheering]
[horn toots]
[cheering and applause]
[Bin Hammam] But what is not making me
feel comfortable is what Blatter is doing.
You know, he he put us in his mind
to to eliminate Qatar.
This is actually what, uh
uh, what doesn't make me comfortable.
[newscaster] Will he or won't he?
That's the question we're here to answer.
The person we're talking about
is Mohamed Bin Hammam.
He supposedly is, uh, thinking
about challenging Sepp Blatter
for the FIFA presidency.
[Bin Hammam] I'm actually known
as a Blatter supporter.
Definitely I was
an honest advisor for him,
and I will say, yes,
I have contributed to his success.
[Tognoni] Mohamed Bin Hammam
considered Blatter as his friend,
and he was absolutely loyal to Blatter,
but it was a one-way street.
[inaudible conversation]
[Tognoni] Blatter promised
after the '98 election
that he will stay only for two terms.
This was deleted,
and then Blatter stayed for a third term,
and then Bin Hammam was upset
because he didn't accept
that Blatter didn't keep his promise.
I thought that Blatter
would not be interested in 2011.
The president has to have a limit,
a maximum by three terms.
So, I felt this is not good
for the football.
Not good for the game.
But there was always supposed to be
a second candidate.
[Tognoni] For Blatter, it was a shock that
Bin Hammam brought the World Cup to Qatar.
This was a total surprise.
For the first time ever,
he saw his limits of power.
If there was a person here
who had more power than himself,
at least in one special event,
this was Mohamed Bin Hammam.
[newscaster] I think
Bin Hammam is an independent man.
He's had his time with Sepp Blatter.
I think he, like most of us,
has had enough of Sepp Blatter,
thinks Sepp has single-handedly ruined
the good name of FIFA,
and he understands
that somebody's got to come in.
[Tognoni] But I think
Blatter couldn't control his ambitions.
He was the real Machiavelli of of sports.
[applause]
[reporter] After 13 years,
Sepp Blatter is well-used
to the trappings of presidential power.
During that time, he's received honors
and accolades all around the world.
But not everyone would applaud
the way he runs FIFA.
[Blatter] I wanted
to maintain my position.
I couldn't abandon
[chuckles] all my years
in development of football
and all my years as secretary general
and as president.
[Tognoni] Blatter insisted
on loyalty for everyone,
but the problem of him was that he was
not loyal to all his political supporters
during all the years,
to Mohamed Bin Hammam, for example.
[Bin Hammam] In 2009,
there was election in Asia
for the FIFA seat, which I am occupying.
There is another candidate,
and I was very much surprised
to see that Blatter took his side.
For me, it was quite strange.
I am supposedly his friend.
He thought that I am a danger for him,
and he wanted to remove me from FIFA.
So, I just
said that I will not make him
comfortable in his life.
[chuckles]
Sepp Blatter,
the man who runs world football,
is facing his first challenge
for the presidency of FIFA in nine years.
Mohamed Bin Hammam has told the BBC
that it's time for greater transparency
in the way the game is run.
Mr. Bin Hammam is head
of the Asian Football Confederation.
[Mary Lynn Blanks]
To take on Sepp Blatter is huge.
I frankly didn't think it was possible
for anybody to topple him
because he was so well-seated.
[reporter] Sepp Blatter has used
the billions of pounds
generated by the World Cup
to shore up his power base.
He won't walk away
from his cherished prize without a fight.
[distant horns tooting]
[distant seagulls crying]
[Bin Hammam] I wanted to see
the Caribbeans in Miami,
and I couldn't get a visa.
There is no reason
for the authorities to say,
"No, we are not going to give you a visa."
I am presuming that there is somebody
who doesn't want me to go to the States
to address the the Caribbeans.
[Gulati] It was a tense few days.
There was a presidential election
going on.
Mr. Bin Hammam wasn't there,
and Mr. Blatter was there.
CONCACAF, at the time, was run by a guy
named Jack Warner, who was president.
The general secretary was a gentleman
named Chuck Blazer, who was American.
And then on stage at the congress,
Mr. Blatter, off the cuff,
does a development grant
for a million dollars for CONCACAF.
It was about as blatant
as one could be in terms of, you know,
"Let me give you a gift
for your region, Mr. Warner,
in front of all your members,"
thirty or sixty days
or whatever it was before an election.
[Bin Hammam] I was not happy about this.
I am a candidate.
I want to see the people.
I have to speak to the people.
So, I said, "Mr. Warner,
give me another opportunity."
Then they they organized
this, uh, congress in Port of Spain.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Conn] All the Caribbean
Football Union countries
were invited to the Hyatt Regency Hotel
in Port of Spain in Trinidad,
which is obviously
the power base of Jack Warner.
Jack Warner himself had a travel company
and was paid $363,000
to organize the travel for the event.
[Bensinger] Chuck Blazer had not thought
it was a good idea
for Warner to hold this event.
He shouldn't have this breakout thing
just for the Caribbean,
and they should run it,
at least publicly, above board.
[Blanks] There were quite a few attempts
at him trying to stop it,
but Chuck didn't scare him.
Should have scared him, but he didn't.
[Eric Labrador, in Spanish]
I obviously knew about Jack Warner.
Jack Warner,
as the confederation president,
he offered an opportunity to Bin Hammam.
And we obviously went there
to listen to what he had to offer.
On the first day,
Bin Hammam did his presentation.
And something strange happened
after Bin Hammam spoke.
We were told about a gift
to help the federations.
They invited us to a place
to pick up the gift.
I waited my turn,
and I went into the room,
and there were
some officials from the CFU.
They handed me
an envelope marked "Puerto Rico."
And when I opened the envelope,
there was money in cash.
The sum of $40,000 in cash.
I immediately said, "What's this for?"
"This is for you to use
for whatever you want within football."
They obviously gave
that sum of money to everyone.
Had I been told,
"This is in exchange for a vote,"
I would have said, "I won't take it!"
In fact, I returned the money.
[Conn, in English]
Sadly, most of them took the money,
but there were
three or four notable exceptions
who refused to take the money
and reported it,
and that had
very far-reaching ramifications.
[dramatic music playing]
Within a few hours, news of these bags,
these literal envelopes stuffed with cash,
makes it to Blazer, who's in New York.
This put Chuck Blazer
in a really uncomfortable position.
He'd worked with Jack Warner
for almost 20 years.
So, we're watching a friendship unravel.
He had told Warner repeatedly
not to hold this conference in Trinidad,
and he refused to do it.
Now this is happening.
Now, like, the most blatant corruption
he's ever seen
in all his years in football
is happening right under their noses.
They're handing out stacks of cash.
Warner had become increasingly
a bit of a public embarrassment to Blazer
and to football in general,
and so Blazer decides to turn Warner in.
He's gonna report Warner
to the high-level officials
at FIFA in Zurich.
[dramatic music continues]
[Blanks] The day he had to make the call
to talk about the cash in the envelopes,
right before he picked up the phone,
he looked at me and he said,
"This will not end well."
[church bell ringing]
[Valcke] I remember
when I got called by Chuck Blazer,
telling me that something happened
in the Caribbean.
And Chuck Blazer sent me these pictures.
I went to Blatter, saying, "I, uh,
I have been called by Chuck Blazer,
and he told me that this and that happen,"
and I call the president
of the Ethics Committee.
I told him, "You should come to Zurich
immediately by train."
It was a Sunday. "We should meet
because we have a a big problem."
[Tognoni] There are
many strange things there.
Mohamed Bin Hammam fell into a trap.
The other thing is, why did he do so?
Obviously, Bin Hammam was convinced
that he should do some favors
to the members
of the Caribbean Football Union.
And he did it, and he fell into the trap.
There was no bad intention of me
to to bribe people, you know.
[ice cream van jingle plays]
[Bin Hammam] It's again,
you know, a conspiracy.
Don't forget that I am fighting FIFA,
with all their resources.
So, definitely they can build a story
a thousand times more
than I can build a story.
Today, we saw an announcement
from FIFA's Ethics Commission
that they're investigating
claims of corruption
that involved Jack Warner
and FIFA president candidate
Mohamed Bin Hammam.
[reporter] Have you ever tried
to buy votes?
Uh, I have never intended to do so,
all my life.
[reporter] Did did
did you ever give any money
to those officials in the Caribbean?
No, nobody, nobody.
Nobody can claim that he see me anywhere,
you know, doing this.
I want to say again, Mr. Bin Hammam
never, to the best of my knowledge,
gave any money
to the countries in the Caribbean.
Jack, at that point,
was so full of himself.
He thought he was, you know,
immune to any kind of prosecution.
[inaudible]
[Conn] There's a very telling
little episode
after the handing out
of the cash in Trinidad,
and it's captured on film.
[Warner] There are some people here
who believe they're more pious than thou.
If you're pious, open a church, friend.
But the fact is,
our business is our business.
So, I'm making the point here, folks,
that it was given to you because he said
he could not bring the the silver tray
and silver trinkets and so on.
So, I said, "Forget all of that."
"Put a value on it
and give it to the countries."
And the gift you get
is for you to determine
how best you want to use it
for development of football
in your country.
And if there is anybody here
who has a conscience
and wishes to send back the money,
I am willing to take it
and give it back to him.
But don't go and talk of this outside
and believe that you're pious,
and you're holy
and you're better than anybody else.
And I hope I hope that's very clear.
[reporter] What's the future
for Jack Warner in CONCACAF?
For me,
based on the evidence that I've seen,
I don't think there is one.
[reporter] And how about your personal
relationship with Jack Warner?
It's obviously been broken.
[reporter] Okay, so do you think
he feels a sense of betrayal?
Um, I I feel betrayed,
uh, based on what he
The the risk and danger
he put our members to,
to expose them to this sort of situation
where, uh, they were in jeopardy
by accepting, uh, the gifts,
I think is, uh, unconscionable.
[newscaster]
Arriving for a press conference today,
the FIFA president was desperate
to try and move on from the crisis.
[Blatter] Crisis?
What is a crisis?
We are not in a crisis.
We are only in some difficulties,
and these difficulties will be solved,
will be solved inside our family.
[newscaster] But he still found himself
dealing with explosive allegations,
this time about Qatar's bid
for the 2022 World Cup.
[Almajid] It's obvious that things
are going very bad for the Qataris.
They were scared
that they were gonna lose the bid
because of both my allegations
that were out there
and Mohamed Bin Hammam and his story.
[Bin Hammam] Blatter said
a lot of wrongdoing took place
during the World Cup, uh, bidding,
and Bin Hammam is, uh, involved.
He did a lot of things to damage me,
to damage my reputation.
He has no border, actually.
[Ken Bensinger] Sepp Blatter, being
one of the great political minds in sport,
sees in this scandal
coming out of Port of Spain, Trinidad
an opportunity to get rid of his rival.
It's really a drama, how people
are built up and then they fall.
They made a misjudgment on Blatter,
who brought them in as friends
and dropped them as enemies.
He wanted to get rid of rivals, you know,
and the only one
who took the challenge was Bin Hammam.
But Blatter had to find a way out,
and, uh, he made a deal.
One day, Sheikh Jassim,
the son of the emir, came to FIFA.
Bin Hammam also came to FIFA.
[suspenseful music playing]
It was three days before the election.
Sheikh Jassim and Bin Hammam
spoke and spoke.
I don't understand Arabic,
but then Prince Jassim said,
"No, we will speak in English,
uh, because we wanted Mr. Blatter
he knows our conversation."
And he said, you know,
that the emir had said that,
"You shall not contest Mr. Blatter."
"We will support Mr. Blatter
for the election 2011."
[Tognoni] So, uh, Qatar would withdraw
the candidature of Bin Hammam,
and Blatter would not anymore speak
about the way Qatar won the election
to become host country
of the World Cup 2022.
[Bin Hammam] I know
that Blatter will be able to harm us.
He has so many tricks.
I'm not going to jeopardize
I know Blatter can do it.
So, from my side, I said,
"Well, I think I'm I am done."
And, yes, I mean,
these people definitely, you know,
they they harm me the the maximum.
Sepp Blatter has been re-elected
FIFA president
after a major bribery scandal left him
as the only candidate
to deal with a sporting crisis.
Blatter won another four-year term
as head of soccer's governing body
after receiving 186 of 203 votes.
The 75-year-old Swiss executive
has been in office since 1998.
[reporter] Former challenger
Mohamed Bin Hammam has been suspended
over allegations of bribery.
Vice president Jack Warner has
also been suspended over bribery claims,
but says more damaging revelations
for FIFA are about to emerge.
I said before,
FIFA will feel a tsunami coming.
Trust me. You haven't seen it yet.
[indistinct]
Because, at the end of the day,
Blatter has to be stopped.
[newscaster] Sepp Blatter himself
has been cleared of wrongdoing,
but this afternoon,
can expect some tough questions
at a press conference.
He may survive this scandal,
but FIFA's reputation has not.
[Bensinger] One person I know
who benefited from this was Chuck Blazer.
Warner is now out of football,
Bin Hammam is out of football,
and Chuck Blazer,
in what is one of the most astoundingly
upside-down moments in the whole story,
is hailed as a hero.
And news reports
around the world are talking
about how Blazer's a whistleblower
and someone who's there to save the game.
Fair play to Chuck Blazer
because I'll tell you what,
for doing that, he's gotta be
squeaky clean, which is good.
I'm not saying that he wasn't,
but it takes a lot of courage to do that.
[Mel Brennan]
Chuck is not a whistleblower.
Whistleblower is somebody
who looks around and says,
"I don't wanna be a part
of what's going wrong here,"
and lets folks know what's going wrong.
Not somebody who was
an engineer of what's wrong,
who benefited primarily
from what's wrong for decades.
[dramatic music playing]
CONCACAF was located at 56th and 5th
in New York City. That's Trump Tower.
We sat on the 17th floor,
and Chuck lived on the residential side,
and he was on the 49th floor.
I think Chuck was motivated
by maintaining a lifestyle
that FIFA and CONCACAF afforded him.
Every endeavor at CONCACAF
has to begin and end
with making Chuck, personally, some money.
Chuck was taking a minimum of 10%
and sometimes more to himself
with every deal.
[Bensinger] It was abundantly clear
that Blazer had profited
in all kinds of unsavory manners
from the sport.
To me, it's illustrative not just of him,
but in general, the attitude that these
high-level corrupt FIFA officials had,
which was that they were untouchable.
They didn't have the slightest idea
anyone would ever come after them.
It didn't enter their mind
that that was even remotely possible.
[siren wails]
[horns blaring]
So, my experience, uh,
in the FBI, in the New York office,
is that of, uh, organized crime.
At the time, this was back in 2010,
we were being mandated
to broaden our reach,
look for international crime
that was affecting us here in the States.
[siren wailing]
At the same time,
there were some English journalists
who were raising the issue again
of FIFA corruption,
notably the late Andrew Jennings,
a veteran campaigning journalist,
trying to expose FIFA corruption.
President Blatter, I must ask you,
are you a fit and proper person
to control world football?
- Hello again.
- Leave me alone.
- Can I ask you how much
- Leave me alone.
Please don't do that. Can I ask you
how much money you're ma
- Leave me alone!
- [man] Please, do something for us now.
[Jennings] Please don't do that.
Jack Warner, a long-standing executive
at FIFA, football's world governing body,
has resigned.
He was suspended a month ago
following allegations of corruption.
FIFA said that,
as a result of his resignation,
the investigation
into Mr. Warner's conduct had been closed,
and he was presumed to be innocent.
[Bensinger] Jack Warner, in disgrace
after the Port of Spain bribery incident,
resigns before he could be thrown
out of football,
and he promises the FIFA officials
he's gonna unleash a tsunami on them.
And damaging information about Blazer
begins leaking to Andrew Jennings.
Documents that show
that Blazer has all kinds of nice things
he shouldn't have,
like apartments in Miami and the Bahamas,
and a beautiful Mercedes in Zurich,
and that he has
all these incredible assets
and yet no clear sense
of where this money is coming from.
There were checks that Blazer
has deposited into overseas accounts.
All this stuff ends up
in a series of articles
that Jennings writes over the summer.
[Steve Berryman] I had a bunch
of different Google alerts
for a corruption project I had.
And I got one, one morning,
and it was from an article
by, uh, the English journalist
Andrew Jennings.
I think it resonated with me
just because of what football is to me,
growing up around it,
what it is in my heart.
And there there were allegations
in these Andrew Jennings articles
about offshore accounts and Chuck Blazer.
So, I started looking at his background.
[distant siren wailing]
[Mike Gaeta] With an individual present
in our own backyard, in New York City,
with information
that seemed to be credible,
we think we're able to, uh,
to start and begin an investigation.
[distant horns blaring]
[suspenseful music playing]
If there's a crime here,
a case to be made,
it's gonna come down
to whether, um, there is some aspect to it
that really intersects
with the United States.
What we came to learn over time
was that there was a lot
and that was
through the US financial system.
[Berryman] I thought
the best way was to trace money,
follow the money through
the various wire transfer aspects
of how money moves around the world.
Say you're gonna move money
from a bank account in Switzerland
to a bank account in the Cayman Islands.
That wire transfer doesn't go
right from Switzerland
to the Cayman Islands.
They have to have
a correspondent bank in the United States.
And one of the first subpoenas
that we did issue was the FIFA bank,
the UBS in Switzerland?
Well, they have
a correspondent bank in the United States.
So, we got the records
of basically all the wire transfers
going in and out of FIFA.
You know, you may have
one thread of one business name,
and it just starts going out
like a like a spiderweb of leads.
[Evan Norris] They used code names.
They used so many different bank accounts
in offshore jurisdictions
to move the money from point A to point B
to point C to point D to point E
It was just dizzying.
[Berryman] But as we went along,
we didn't know what the payments were for.
[Norris] I knew from the time
that I had spent doing Mafia cases
that there's nothing
like a cooperating witness
in a in in a conspiracy case,
in something that's complex,
to be able to just explain it all.
[Bensinger] The next major moment
is when Steve Berryman does something
that IRS agents are able to do, which is
he pulls Chuck Blazer's tax returns,
and he can reveal what is
sort of the, um, the ace in the hole
that he's got tucked up his sleeve,
and that is there are no tax returns.
Turns out that Blazer had never even
filed taxes for at least 15 years.
And now they have Blazer
right in their sights.
It's pretty much an open-and-shut case.
They can get him
on those tax charges, no question.
Then the question is,
"What do we wanna do with him?"
"Do we just wanna bust Chuck Blazer
and put him away?"
"No, we don't. We want him
because we want an informant."
And so the decision is made
to approach him
and kind of make him an offer
he can't refuse.
[Gaeta] A lot weighed
on the success of this approach.
It was much bigger than Chuck.
Chuck was going to be a first step
towards a much wider investigation.
[dramatic music playing]
[Blanks] We'd just pulled
out of Trump Tower
heading to Uncle Jack's Steakhouse,
and Chuck said,
"Mary Lynn,
go on to the steakhouse with Al."
That was our friend who was with us.
And he got out of the van that he was in
and got on his little motor scooter.
In between the Trump Tower
and another building behind it,
there's kind of an atrium, and he just
wheeled himself right up to the table.
He recognized quickly
the, uh, the situation he was in.
[Berryman] I told him what we had on him.
Wire fraud, money laundering, tax evasion,
the non-reporting
of foreign bank accounts.
The agent said,
"Mr. Blazer, you're looking at 75
to 100 years in jail right now."
"We can take you now
or you can cooperate."
I mean, I remember him
just looking at me
[chuckles] and going
[sighs deeply]
And then he said,
"I, uh, think I wanna help you guys."
"This is probably bigger than you know."
And I think
we suggested that he get an attorney,
and and so so it went from there.
[Blanks] When he came upstairs,
I said, "Well, you know,
your taxes, just just pay 'em."
"Work out a deal. Just pay 'em."
And he goes, "Mary Lynn,
I'm just a fat crook from Queens."
And then chickens came home to roost.
[newscaster] The FBI goes after FIFA.
[man 1] Nobody is above the law.
Suddenly, you are
in an FBI series on Netflix.
This is the World Cup of fraud.
[man 2] Maybe it is
a Mafia-style organization.
[reporter] Sepp Blatter isn't the only
executive with questions to answer.
[man 3] 5,200 is the number
of workers expected to die.
[in French] I'm being blamed
for this storm. Well, then, fine.
[in English] Somewhere
there is always an end.
[in French] I'll take the responsibility.
[dramatic music playing]