Joshua Robinson

I mean, if Pelé was the embodiment of grace and inventiveness and joy on the soccer field, Sepp Blatter is... He's a Swiss watch executive at the beginning whose real interests lie in skiing, Longines watches, and ice hockey.

He understands something else that's critical to anyone who's ever been in the sports business, and it's realizing that you're not selling sports, you're not selling what happens on grass, you are selling pure entertainment.

And so the money from it doesn't come from the traditional channels of ticket sales or things like that, though they help.

But you are really in the business of selling television rights.

And that is the key.

And he effectively turns FIFA into soccer's largest broker of television rights and marketing rights.

And over the course of the 80s, as he continues to carve that out and carve up the business so that he can parcel it out to as much of the world as possible and charge as much money as possible, he develops this obscure nonprofit in Switzerland into one of the world's most powerful sporting organizations.

And...

The other thing he understands is that FIFA is a profoundly political organization.

So FIFA is a global association made up of the member associations.

That's each country.

But the way FIFA is organized, every country gets one vote.

So when it comes time to elect a FIFA president, allegedly, he builds his power base not by telling them, I think I'm the best steward of the World Cup, but by promising what's called development money.

And I remember in 2015...

John and I did a story where we called around dozens and dozens of federations around the world to sort of explain this phenomenon, how Blatter consolidated power.

And more than one federation director told us, we don't see Mr. Blatter as a politician.

Mr. Blatter is a great humanitarian.

But there was also, for a very, very long time, the vague stench of corruption around him.

At every major turn in Blatter's career, there have been suspicions and very loud whispers

that there were brown paper envelopes full of cash, that there were duffel bags full of cash.