By Marco Hugo Barsotti MHB 
Welcome to a special edition of Radio Nizza and Centrale Milano 1575 kHz. Prompted by the news of June 9th — the criminal complaint filed against FIFA president Gianni Infantino by former UEFA president Michel Platini for alleged false accusation and influence peddling — and ahead of the start of one of the world’s most-watched sporting events, we are publishing the full history of FIFA from its origins in 1930, including the recent corruption scandals. I’m Rachel Costa.
Let’s start at the beginning. Football was not born global: it became global. And to understand how, we need to go back to 1930, to a ship called the Conta Verde sailing from Genoa with European teams on board, headed to Uruguay — a three-week Atlantic crossing to take part in the first ever World Cup. Egypt missed the boat — literally — and the tournament opened with thirteen teams instead of fourteen. A story that is almost comical. Yet it already contains, in embryo, everything that would make FIFA one of the most powerful and controversial organisations in world sport.
Uruguay won that first tournament. In Europe, almost nobody noticed. News agencies sent a brief dispatch, newspapers published a few lines, radio mentioned it in passing. The World Cup was a local event, not a global one. It would take television to transform it into something else entirely.
Through the 1950s and 60s, television screens began to spread into homes across the world. First in black and white, then in colour. And with television came Pelé. He was seventeen years old when he played his first World Cup in Sweden in 1958. A slight teenager from Brazil, capable of things with the ball that no one had seen before. While European teams played systematic, defensive, grey football, he brought something completely different to the pitch: joy, invention, pure virtuosity. Impossible dribbles, shots from distance, backheel flicks that looked like acts of magic.
Pelé became the first true star of the World Cup. And with him, the tournament stopped being a sporting competition and became a global spectacle. It is a mechanism we recognise well: what Michael Jordan would do for basketball in the 1980s, what Mohammed Ali had done for boxing. A superstar who pulls an entire sport towards a new, worldwide, television audience.
But while Pelé dazzled on the field, someone else was building the economic infrastructure that would turn football into a business empire.
That man was Sepp Blatter. Swiss, he joined FIFA in 1975, first as technical director, then secretary general, and finally as president from 1998. He was not a football man in the traditional sense — he was an executive from the watch industry, with a passion for skiing and ice hockey. But he understood something fundamental that would permanently change the way FIFA operated. He understood that football was not a sport. It was entertainment. And that the real money did not come from stadium tickets, but from the sale of television rights.
This insight changed everything. Under his leadership, FIFA became the world’s largest broker of football broadcasting rights, licensing transmission rights country by country, market by market, maximising every single contract. When Blatter joined the organisation, FIFA was a Swiss non-profit that organised a tournament and sold a handful of TV rights without great commercial ambition. When he left, FIFA was sitting on over one and a half billion dollars in cash reserves.
But there was another thing Blatter understood before anyone else: FIFA was a profoundly political organisation. It was made up of 211 national associations, and every country — from Brazil to the Samoan islands — had one vote. Anyone who wanted to become president had to win those votes one by one. Blatter built his support through so-called development funds: money that FIFA distributed to national federations to build pitches, stands, youth academies and training facilities in parts of the world that had no other access to such resources. It was a powerful system, and it produced extraordinary loyalty. Some federation directors still speak of Blatter today as a great humanitarian.
The reality, however, was more complicated. Around his figure there always hovered what English-speaking journalists called a stench of corruption. As early as his 1998 presidential election in Paris, persistent rumours circulated about envelopes containing fifty thousand dollars in cash distributed among delegates the evening before the vote. Never proven, always denied by Blatter. But the suspicion never went away. At every turning point in his career it resurfaced, with new names, new intermediaries, new money flows that were hard to explain.
Then came December 2010. Zurich, FIFA headquarters. For the first time in history, the organisation announced the host nations for two consecutive World Cups in a single session: 2018 and 2022. The bids were numerous and competitive. For 2018: England, Spain, the Netherlands, Russia. For 2022, the United States were strong favourites, with a solid dossier and proven sports infrastructure. And then there was Qatar: a country of three million people, without adequate stadiums, without any football tradition, with summer temperatures approaching 45 degrees Celsius.
Qatar was written off as a bizarre candidacy, almost a gesture. Even FIFA‘s own internal technical report described it as potentially dangerous for player health. Yet in the months before the announcement, Qatar had built a silent and extraordinarily expensive lobbying campaign. Reports put the figure at around ten million dollars per player to secure public endorsements from global football stars such as Zinedine Zidane and David Beckham.
Blatter’s announcement was pure shock. Russia for 2018, Qatar for 2022. The reaction from the football world was immediate and furious. Corrupt, rigged, a disgrace. But the vote was done, and it was not overturned. The question that hung in the air — and would keep coming back for years — was this: how could a country like Qatar have won the World Cup without something having gone wrong in the process?
That was when the United States Department of Justice stepped in. FIFA conducted much of its business in dollars — and that was enough for the DOJ to assert jurisdiction. Dozens of contracts, intermediaries, meetings and payments had passed through Miami and New York. There was a whole network of bank accounts in Florida, entirely traceable if anyone decided to look closely.
The DOJ also found its inside man: Chuck Blazer, the American representative to FIFA. An extraordinary character — white-haired as Father Christmas, with two apartments at Trump Tower in Manhattan (one for himself, one for his cats) and a debt to the American tax authorities of around ten million dollars. To avoid prosecution, Blazer agreed to cooperate. He began recording everything: he hid a microphone in his keychain, placed it on the table at meetings with FIFA executives, and recorded conversations of breathtaking candour. Commercial deals, the names of intermediaries, the amounts of payments — all discussed openly, as if ordinary rules did not apply in that room.
The recordings blew the case wide open. In the early hours of May 2015, Swiss police — empowered by the FBI and the DOJ — raided the Baur au Lac, the five-star hotel on the Zurich lake where FIFA executives had always stayed. Wall Street Journal reporters were outside, watching officials being walked out in handcuffs. Fourteen people were indicted that day, charged with racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering — the same charges used in the United States to dismantle organised crime (RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act).
Sepp Blatter resigned. The man who had governed FIFA for nearly twenty years, elected and re-elected five times, left the presidency as the organisation burned. In the months that followed, he spoke of an American conspiracy, of revenge for the hosting rights not awarded to the United States. No sign of contrition.
Has FIFA changed since then? Partly. Blatter’s successor, Gianni Infantino, repositioned the organisation on even more aggressive financial footing, expanding the tournament to 48 teams and bringing the World Cup to North America for the 2026 edition. Revenue grows, the machine turns. But the fundamental structure remains the same: a non-profit based in Switzerland, with no shareholders to satisfy and no regulators to answer to, controlling the rights to the most watched sporting spectacle on the planet.
And now, on the eve of the 2026 tournament, a new scandal resurfaces: Michel Platini, the former UEFA president, has filed a criminal complaint against Infantino himself — for alleged false accusation and influence peddling. The names change; the pattern does not.
The story we have told today — romantic origins on a ship, a media explosion driven by a genius player, an architecture of power built in silence, and then the crash under the floodlights of American justice — is also the story of how the most powerful institutions in world sport function when they answer only to themselves. Worth remembering, every time you turn on the television to watch a World Cup.
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Note: Some reproduced material (C) Copyright WSJ The Wall Street Journal