Jonathan Clegg

I think FIFA puts together a review of the various World Cup bids that have come in, the sort of technical reports, they're called, on the World Cup bids.

And even FIFA's own technical report had dismissed Qatar as like, I think, potentially dangerous place to host the World Cup.

For player health, it would be too hot and that it would not be a reasonable place to host the World Cup.

When Sepps gets up to the sort of lectern to announce the decision, he is about... You're there.

Watching this.

And he proceeds to deliver the most sort of stunning announcement in global soccer history when he announced that the 2018 World Cup will go to Russia and the 22 World Cup will go to Qatar.

No, it was fast, corrupt, crooked.

How can this travesty be allowed to stand?

The announcement that Qatar would get the World Cup was genuinely sort of ground shaking decision in soccer history.

And the calls to sort of overturn that decision or to uncover the corruption that must have led to it in the eyes of so many soccer fans began immediately.

Did it change at all how you guys thought about FIFA or covered FIFA?

Yeah, it did, because I think it was such a sort of momentous thing that, as we said, there had been whispers about corruption.

There had been a sort of, you know, stench of corruption around FIFA for years.

But this was the sort of first time where it was really hard to fathom how this had happened without something sort of going awry or without it just sort of defied all logic that FIFA would come to this decision without something sort of nefarious going on.

US prosecutors started poking around what was going on with this World Cup bid and what was going on with FIFA generally.

And that would soon turn into very bad news for Sepp Blatter.

Chuck was a man of interesting taste.

An odd character.

Yes.

He looked like Santa Claus.