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Chapter 1: What is the significance of the World Cup in global sports?
The World Cup begins this week. 48 countries will compete in a tournament to determine the world's best soccer team. It's the world's favorite sporting competition.
A tournament full of euphoria.
Heartbreak.
Surprises.
With this year's World Cup happening in North America, we're going to be seeing wall-to-wall soccer for the next several weeks. But for a lot of Americans, soccer isn't their go-to sport. I mean, I'm a basketball guy. So I sat down with the Wall Street Journal's two soccer experts who've been watching the game since they were young lads.
The earliest memory, World Cup memory I have is from the 1990 World Cup.
Jonathan Clegg is executive news editor and England fan.
Nine years old, England lost in heartbreaking fashion in a penalty shootout in the World Cup semifinals.
It is my earliest sports memory.
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Chapter 2: How did FIFA's early decisions shape the World Cup's growth?
Uh-huh. So France is my team. And then the moment that kind of sealed it for me was France winning it in 98.
Emmanuel Petit makes a three and secures the World Cup for France.
Their winning the World Cup in 1998 launched me on a life of sin and sports journalism.
Sin and sports. Also a fitting way to describe FIFA, the organization that runs the World Cup. From humble origins, FIFA has grown to become one of the biggest and most powerful organizations in the world of sports and entertainment. Its main job is to dole out billions of dollars worth of TV broadcasting rights for the world's most watched sport. But it's also a non-profit based in Switzerland.
Which means that unlike a public company, for example, it doesn't have shareholders or regulators it has to answer to. So FIFA executives have had a lot of room to do business in their own way. And that way has created some problems.
Blatter's rise starts with the controversy of the 98 vote, and it's sort of tainted by scandal and stench of corruption right from the very beginning.
At every major turn, 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.
Prosecutors started poking around what was going on with this World Cup bid and what was going on with FIFA generally. Gianni Infantino saw his role as FIFA president as essentially the man to fill FIFA's coffers with as much money as humanly possible.
Infantino loves being close to power. And in Trump, he kind of found a kindred spirit.
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Chapter 3: What were the controversies surrounding Sepp Blatter's presidency?
I'm Ryan Knutson. It's June 7th. Coming up, part one, FIFA, a story of soccer and scandal. Okay, so the first thing we need to establish in this conversation is are we going to call it soccer or football?
So I have a take here. I think the whole football versus soccer debate is the most tedious thing in sports.
Yeah, it's weird. It's the sort of thing that I thought that I cared about until I moved here and started calling it soccer and then I realized it doesn't matter. The game is beautiful no matter what you call it.
For the record, we are going to call it soccer. Okay, so now can you tell me the origin story of the World Cup? Where did this tournament begin?
The World Cup is sort of born out of this early 20th century Corinthian Olympic movement where countries have decided that actually the best way to keep peace in the world is to get all of these rivalries out, you know, on the field of play, various athletic competitions. The first major international football competitions are actually at the Olympics.
And then an organization known as the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, aka FIFA, is founded and decides to set up a tournament that they call the World Cup.
This was some, you know, 50 years after the sport had been invented. They decided to host a world championship for the first time. So they settle on Uruguay.
And the problem is that in 1930, Uruguay is an incredibly long way away from most of the countries playing soccer in the world.
Yeah, that's an interesting choice, honestly.
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Chapter 4: How did the 1998 World Cup vote influence FIFA's future?
It's three weeks by boat from Europe. That's a long trip. So a couple of teams decide that they're going to sail together, and a ship called the Conte Verde sets sail and starts picking them up in Genoa, Spain, and I think something like four or five teams end up on this boat. And it was going to be a 14-team event, but Egypt misses the boat. And so the first World Cup has 13 teams instead.
Wow, why did they miss the boat? What were they doing?
The same way we might miss the subway. It's just the thing that happens.
The boat wasn't waiting for Egypt. Wow. Yep, they missed it.
And so who won the first World Cup? This huge home field advantage at the World Cup. And if you haven't spent three weeks on a boat, then you probably are in better shape.
You don't have sea legs going into the game.
Exactly. So Uruguay wins the first World Cup in 1930. I think it's fair to say that when Uruguay lifted what was then the Jules Rimet Trophy, basically no one in Europe knew they had even done it. You get a wire dispatch that's picked up by the newspapers and maybe mentioned in passing on the radio.
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Chapter 5: What role did Chuck Blazer play in FIFA's corruption scandal?
But that's it. This was not a global event and really doesn't become one until after World War II.
Right. I mean, as with so many of our most popular sports, it's really the advent of television.
But what a great sight of the Brazilians, if only their cameras would get on to them.
that turns it from a small event that people attended by boat and which very few people knew about into this sort of global entertainment giant that has become today. And the World Cup is no different.
Through the 1950s and 60s, the audience for World Cup games grew. This era marked the arrival of TV, first in black and white, and then in color. And as games started reaching more and more people around the world, there was a superstar player drawing them in, the Brazilian striker Pele.
The first time he plays at it, at the tournament, is 1958 in Sweden, and he's 17 years old. He's this wiry kid from Brazil who can do incredible things with the ball.
This one is lifted in for Pelé! How does he do it?
Pele is like the first star of the World Cup.
And at a time when, you know, European countries were playing quite a dour version of the game, all based on complex systems, here was a kid who was playing with this individual joy and this virtuosity and flicking the ball over defenders' heads and then, you know, picking it up again. Smashing it in from, you know, miles out.
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Chapter 6: How did the U.S. DOJ investigation impact FIFA?
He is this guy who, as John described, brings all this joy and color and excitement. He really crackles when you watch him on screen.
It seems like he's almost like a Michael Jordan figure, what Michael Jordan did for basketball.
Yeah, or like Muhammad Ali. He's very much of that ilk, the Ali, Jordan.
By the late 1970s, when Pelé retired, the business of the World Cup had transformed from a primarily live experience for fans and stadiums into a globally televised event beamed via satellite into bars and living rooms all over the world. While Pelé dazzled fans on the field, there was an executive at FIFA who was also making big moves behind the scenes to take the World Cup to the next level.
His name was Sepp Blatter.
Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, fans of football around the world.
It's not just Pelé. There is another character. And he couldn't be more different. 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.
Yeah. I guess the one thing he shares with Pelé is a taste for the limelight.
Sepp Blatter started his career at FIFA in 1975, first as a technical director, then secretary general, and then as FIFA's president in 1998.
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Chapter 7: What were the implications of Qatar hosting the World Cup?
And that is the key.
BBC Television brings you the World Cup from Mexico. A festival of football from... NBC Sports presents the 1986 World Cup Final. Brought to you by Budweiser.
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.
When he joined, FIFA was a nonprofit that put on the World Cup and sold the TV rights, but was not maximizing what it could make from those. So it didn't have a ton of money. By the time he leaves FIFA in the 2010s, FIFA is sitting on billions of dollars in cash reserves. More than $1.5 billion, to be exact.
And... The other thing he understands is that FIFA is a profoundly political organization.
How so? Is it like FIFA is like a democracy?
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.
Development money. FIFA brings money in through the sale of TV broadcasting rights.
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Chapter 8: How did FIFA respond to the corruption allegations?
It goes into a pool and gets distributed to all the member nations. Member nations can then spend that money on building soccer infrastructure for their countries.
literally to build soccer pitches and build stands for the spectators to stand in and build youth academies and build training facilities in parts of the world where they don't have access to funds to do that sort of thing. So he's giving money to the developing nations that make up FIFA's 211-member base.
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.
Huh. So he had a great reputation, then, it sounds like, among a lot of the member countries? Among the member associations, he did. If you had to pick a word to describe Sepp Blatter and his way of doing business, what would it be?
I mean, I think... Humanitarian? I mean, you know... calculating he's an opera he's a very canny operator is is probably how i describe him um i mean i think you know it really can't be sort of overstated how sort of revolutionary it was to conceive of a fifa president whose power would lie in you know
the African and Asian and Caribbean voting blocks rather than the traditional places where soccer had been played and invented. And he's not sort of explicitly buying their vote with development funds.
But what he is doing is sort of ensuring a lot of goodwill in those countries for future candidacies when he runs as president, especially because FIFA was not very forensic in terms of following how that money is spent.
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. Any receptacle you'd like full of cash, there were rumors that they were being circulated. A boat, perhaps?
Well, FIFA's history with boats, as we know, is... They had stopped using boats by such time.
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