Warner promised Blazer that when the money arrived, $1 million of it would be his.
“I’m proud of my vote for South Africa and proud of FIFA,” Blazer told a reporter a few days later from his apartment high above Manhattan.
But as time passed, Blazer realized he had never seen a dime. He occasionally asked Warner about it, but never managed to get a straight answer. It seemed, he slowly gathered, that the South Africans had run into difficulties in finding a way to make the payment, and Warner had eventually turned to FIFA’s general secretary to intercede on his behalf.
After a long and heated negotiation, a total of $10 million, in three payments, was wired by FIFA in early 2008 to accounts that were registered under the names of CONCACAF and the Caribbean Football Union, but were in fact controlled solely by Jack Warner. That December, Warner finally gave Blazer part of what he was owed, wiring $298,500 to an account he held in a Cayman Islands bank.
It was aggravating, and yet typical of how things had evolved between the two old friends.
Blazer’s vote on the FIFA ExCo counted exactly as much as Warner’s, yet he was forced to beg for full payment of his meager slice of the big pot. The email Warner sent to Blazer, then, came as a relief. Hopefully this unpleasant remnant of old business could at last be put to rest.
On September 23, a check for $205,000, drawing from the Caribbean Football Union account at a Republic Bank branch in Port of Spain, was drafted and then sent to Blazer. It was made out to a company he controlled, Sportvertising Inc., which was registered in the Cayman Islands. It wasn’t the full $701,500 Warner still owed him for his purchased vote, but at least it was a start.
Four days later, Blazer deposited the check into an account he used for day trading stocks at Merrill Lynch. The brokerage had an office on Fifth Avenue less than a block away from Trump Tower, and taking the check there was certainly much less hassle than mailing it to his bank in the Caymans.
“For deposit only,” Blazer wrote on the reverse.
The minor convenience would come at a very high price.
FIVE
* * *
THE VOTE
A THIN CRUST OF ICY snow coated the grounds of FIFA’s Zurich headquarters early on December 2, 2010, as members of the Executive Committee arrived to cast perhaps the most important votes in soccer history. Without stopping, they glided past security in black chauffeur-driven Mercedes S-Class sedans, then down a long ramp leading directly into the bowels of the building.
There they alighted on the third subfloor without ever having to step outside or be observed by the crowds of journalists who had been gathering since before dawn at the building’s entrance. The building, known in soccer circles as FIFA House, was an imposing symbol of what the once humble sports governing body had become.
Designed by a noted Swiss architect and built for $200 million, the building, opened in 2007, presented a cold, inscrutable facade of shiny glass covered by steel mesh, set so far back from perimeter fences and guard posts that it could not be seen from the street.
It stood in remarkable contrast to FIFA’s first Zurich home, a shabby two-room suite that it rented above the city’s busiest avenue for more than twenty years. The new headquarters stood on a secluded, eleven-acre lot high above the city. The expansive property boasted a full-sized soccer pitch, several smaller playing fields, and a fitness center, as well as six carefully maintained gardens stocked with exotic plants imported from around the globe at great expense. Each represented one of the different regional confederations governing world soccer; a lush rain forest made of Pacific Northwest pines, ferns, and mosses stood in for CONCACAF, for example.
Sometimes called an “underground skyscraper,” five of FIFA House’s eight floors were subterranean, and the building’s grand lobby, redolent in contrasting polished and rough-hewn stone, was quietly decorated with expensively discreet flowers. Access was tightly controlled, and doors throughout the building could be opened only with high-tech fingerprint sensors, giving visitors the distinct impression of being in a clandestine military installation. Or a bank vault.
The aesthetic was rigorously Swiss, with almost no adornment anywhere, but it was clear that no expense had been spared. Even the elevators, with see-through glass doors, were fitted with strangely entrancing glowing lights on the outside of their carriages. The lights served no obvious purpose, but seemed to whisper, softly yet confidently, that money had been spent here.
The beating heart of both building and institution was found on the third sublevel. There sat the executive boardroom, where FIFA’s ExCo made soccer’s most critical decisions. It was a room within a room—a dark impenetrable war chamber ripped from some Cold War political drama, with tall curved walls sheathed in hammered aluminum and floors of polished lapis lazuli. Black-stained oak desks were arrayed in a large square beneath a massive crystal chandelier in the oval form of a stadium bowl.
No sunlight was allowed to penetrate the enclosure, Blatter explained on occasion of the building’s opening, because “places where people make decisions should contain only indirect light.”
Nearby was a suite of immaculate, spacious bathrooms reserved for FIFA executives, and beyond them an achingly beautiful, and staggeringly expensive, glowing meditation chamber made entirely of onyx slabs illuminated from within. The room, created in deference to Muslim members of FIFA’s Executive Committee, contained two simple benches and a prayer rug, with a green arrow in the doorjamb pointing in the direction of Mecca.
Finally, at the far end of the floor, there was a lounge furnished with modern upholstered sofas and armchairs, where, between meetings, ExCo members were served refreshments beneath a crepe chandelier.
Hanging on the wall at one end of the lounge was one of the only works of art visible anywhere within FIFA headquarters: a neon installation in curving script by the Italian artist Mario Merz. It posed an intriguing question: Noi giriamo intorno alle case o le case girano intorno a noi?
“Do we revolve around the house, or does the house revolve around us?”
* * *
At the turn of the twentieth century, the soaring popularity of the relatively new sport of soccer led to demand for organizing matches between clubs hailing from different nations. But the way the sport was played varied enormously from place to place, and the need for a single organizing body that could ensure fair matches between countries grew increasingly apparent.
Britain’s four soccer associations, which viewed themselves as the sport’s inventors and greatest practitioners, were uninterested in submitting to a higher authority. England’s Football Association, already forty years old, was particularly skeptical, writing dourly that it “cannot see the advantages of such a federation,” and refusing to have anything further to do with it.
Undaunted, seven continental groups—representing France, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland—met in the back room of a Parisian sports club on May 21, 1904, and decided to organize without the Brits.
They called their nonprofit organization the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, and by joining, the pioneering officials pledged to adhere exclusively to its statutes, giving it supreme authority over the sport. Everyone was to play the game by the same set of rules on the pitch. Perhaps most importantly, FIFA would demand absolute allegiance from its members, and the complete exclusion of any soccer associations that did not prove to be faithful members of the club.
Within a few months, Germany agreed to pay the annual membership fee of 50 French francs, and eventually England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland joined as well. South Africa became the first non-European member, affiliating in 1909; Argentina and Chile joined in 1912; and the United States entered the fold the following year.
In 1928, under pressure from its members to create a tournament that would rival the popularity of soccer at the Olympics, while also admitting professional players—which the International Olympic Committee did not�
�FIFA announced plans for the first World Cup.
Five countries submitted bids to host. But Uruguay’s soccer association, which had won gold medals in the 1924 and 1928 Olympics, offered to cover the travel costs of visiting teams, to build a huge new stadium at its own expense, and to share any profits with FIFA, while absorbing all the risk of a financial loss by itself.
“These arguments,” FIFA later noted, “were decisive.” Unwilling or unable to make such financial commitments, the other countries dropped their bids and thirteen nations ultimately competed in the first World Cup, which was an instant hit. On July 30, 1930, seventy thousand fans filled Montevideo’s brand-new Estadio Centenario to watch Uruguay defeat Argentina, 4–2, in the final.
The event’s surging popularity did not, however, net substantial financial gains for many years. For its first several decades, FIFA largely persisted thanks to annual fees paid by its members, plus small commissions it charged on ticket sales at international matches. It gave away, free of charge, the broadcast rights to its first televised World Cup, held in Switzerland in 1954, and even at the 1974 World Cup in West Germany, the majority of tournament revenue still came from ticket sales.
That rapidly changed with the advent of modern communications and advertising, and soon television and sponsorship deals far outstripped gate income. Because such a large share of FIFA’s revenue began to derive from the World Cup, the nonprofit opted to measure its finances in four-year cycles concluding with the championship tournament.
The cycle ending with the 1974 World Cup netted a tidy profit of just under $20 million. For the 2007–2010 period culminating in South Africa, FIFA booked a record profit of $631 million and FIFA’s cash reserves reached $1.3 billion. The World Cup had become the largest and most lucrative sporting event in human history.
* * *
When in Zurich, FIFA ExCo members stayed at the Baur au Lac, a 165-year-old monument to the very Swiss aesthetic of expensive understatement. The hotel, close on the banks of Lake Zurich, prides itself on absolute discretion, but does admit to having put up, among others, Haile Selassie, Austrian Empress Elisabeth, and Kaiser Wilhelm II.
During FIFA meetings, the men controlling world soccer could often be found sprawled on overstuffed couches in the Baur au Lac’s lounge, in suits, thawbs, and robes, gossiping about the sport’s recondite politics over pricey cocktails and elaborate tea services on silver trays.
Just weeks before the December 2010 World Cup vote, two ExCo members, Nigerian Amos Adamu and Tahitian Reynald Temarii, had been suspended by FIFA’s Ethics Committee following an undercover sting operation by The Times of London that caught them on tape offering to sell their votes in exchange for six- and seven-figure bribes. Blatter called it “a sad day for football.”
The committee’s remaining twenty-two constituents were a colorful, if motley group that included a number of former professional soccer players, a medical doctor, a hardware store owner, executives of airlines and oil companies, a champion middle-distance runner, several professional politicians, a handful of lawyers, and at least two billionaires.
On the eve of the vote, December 1, the nine nations making World Cup bids had staked out the Baur au Lac to make one last lobbying push, bringing in as much firepower as they could muster to sway the ExCo members their way.
Australia, vying for 2022, had dispatched supermodel Elle Macpherson to Zurich, along with the billionaire chairman of its soccer federation, mall developer Frank Lowy. The rival American delegation included national team star Landon Donovan, actor Morgan Freeman, sitting attorney general Eric Holder, and former president Bill Clinton.
England, the odds-on-favorite for 2018, meanwhile, had been humiliated several days earlier by the airing of a BBC documentary accusing three ExCo members of taking millions of dollars in bribes from the sports marketing firm International Sport and Leisure. The report also claimed that Jack Warner, a fourth ExCo member, had attempted to scalp more than $80,000 worth of tickets at the 2010 World Cup.
Terrified of the thin-skinned FIFA officials’ wrath, England’s bid team had tried to get the BBC to delay broadcast of the report, produced by investigative journalist Andrew Jennings. Unsuccessful, the English bid resorted to insults, calling the report “unpatriotic” and “an embarrassment.”
Despite growing signs that the odds were stacked against it, England had rented two suites at the Baur au Lac and flown in its “Three Lions”—Prime Minister David Cameron, Prince William, and David Beckham—to make a final appeal. Then, in a bit of encouraging news for the English, word came that Vladimir Putin would not be coming to Zurich for the vote. The Russian leader noted he was staying away because, he told the press, ExCo members should “make their decision in peace and without any outside pressure.”
For their part, members of England’s bid had lurked in the Baur au Lac until well after midnight, buying ExCo members glasses of aged single-malt whisky and desperately attempting to cut last-minute deals to push their effort across the victory line. Before turning in, Jack Warner had effusively embraced Prince William, a sure sign, it seemed, he’d send his vote England’s way.
Shortly before going to bed in his immaculate residence tucked away on a secluded street in a posh Zurich neighborhood, Blatter received a phone call from President Barack Obama.
He had met the president in the Oval Office during a four-day visit the previous year, and couldn’t help but feel a surge of excitement when he heard his voice on the line. The call, short and formal, lasted only a few minutes.
Blatter had publicly expressed support for the U.S. bid on numerous occasions, pointing to the vast commercial opportunities that such an event would provide. Speaking in heavily accented but precise English, he reiterated that posture on the phone, deliberately noting that he had only one vote and could not tell other ExCo members what to do.
“How are our chances?” Obama asked.
Blatter paused and softly sighed. “Mr. President, it will be difficult.”
“I understand. Well, good luck,” Obama replied before hanging up.
They never spoke again.
* * *
“I am a happy president,” said Blatter, looking not particularly happy as he announced that Russia and Qatar had won and would be hosting the World Cup in 2018 and 2022.
He stood at the podium before a huge crowd and grimaced. The hundreds of journalists on hand to witness the result of that morning’s vote rushed to file accounts of the Russian delegation, including Roman Abramovich, high-fiving and whooping as Blatter handed deputy prime minister Igor Shuvalov the World Cup trophy onstage. Minutes later, Qatar’s royal family followed suit, embracing one another, close to tears.
Chuck Blazer, in a dark suit and one of his trademark colorful ties, was sitting in the auditorium’s front row, which had been reserved for the ExCo. Squeezed between Mohamed bin Hammam of Qatar and Nicolás Leoz of Paraguay, he did not join in the cheering, and rose only to briefly embrace the suddenly exultant Qatari beside him, before slumping back into the chair.
Directly behind him, Bill Clinton whispered with Sunil Gulati, president of the U.S. Soccer Federation, then rose to shake hands with the politicians and royals in the room. Blazer, America’s highest-ranking soccer official, remained motionless, staring stonily ahead. He had voted for Russia rather than England to host the 2018 World Cup, but later admitted he had been shocked when the U.S. did not win the 2022 World Cup.
Just a few hours later, Vladimir Putin touched down in Zurich, exultant.
At a hastily assembled press conference, he thanked Blatter and insisted that Russia would be ready by 2018, and that he hoped Abramovich, who he said was “wallowing in money,” would chip in for some of the stadium construction.
“Would it be fair to say,” one excited journalist fawned, “that you are the cleverest prime minister in the world by staying away and winning the contest from so many thousands of miles away?”
“Thank you,” Putin said, replyin
g in Russian and smiling. “I’m glad I insisted on giving you the floor. Thank you, it’s very nice to hear this.”
Soccer fans in Australia, Korea, Japan, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, and Holland, all of whom had come up empty-handed, bemoaned the vote and questioned its fairness.
Commentators in the press questioned how it could be possible that the two countries least suited to host the World Cup had won, pointing to the inhospitable climatic conditions of Qatar, where daytime temperatures in June and July, when the World Cup was always held, routinely surpassed 115 degrees.
Nobody took it harder than England, where the vote dominated headlines for weeks on end, and all conversation on the topic was reduced to agonized soul-searching, finger-pointing, and anguished gnashing of teeth. Despite all its efforts, the country had humiliatingly garnered only two votes—from its own representative on the ExCo and from Cameroon’s Issa Hayatou—to host the tournament.
British Prime Minister David Cameron, who had flown back to London on pressing business earlier that day, first heard the news from an advisor sharing the back seat of his bulletproof Jaguar on the way to Downing Street from Heathrow. The two men slumped in their seats.
“We did our best,” Cameron finally said before lapsing into stunned silence.
One member of England’s bid team cornered Jack Warner and asked him why he had promised his vote and then voted otherwise. The Trinidadian hissed his reply: “Who is going to stop us?”
Another member of that team, riding in a shuttle back to central Zurich from the auditorium where the results had been announced, noticed FIFA’s general secretary, the tall and handsome French lawyer Jérôme Valcke, burying his face in his hands, and muttering to himself.
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