Original subtitles

Welcome to the Messe Centre here in Zurich,

as FIFA's Executive Committee vote on the World Cup bids.

The World Cup is beloved by hundreds of millions of people.

And rumours of corruption have swirled around it for decades.

As you can see, everybody's gathered and really excited.

This is the first time they've actually announced two hosts simultaneously.

It is now my pleasure to welcome on stage the President of FIFA.

Sepp Blatter was the guy at the top. He set the tone.

FIFA is not corrupt. People in FIFA were corrupt.

The 2018 FIFA World Cup will be organised in...

Russia.

What we were investigating were closely guarded secrets

held at the highest level of some of the world's most powerful governments.

Russia has won 2018. We move on to 2022.

The winner is... Qatar.

That is astonishing!

What the Qataris and the Russians were doing was corruption on an industrial scale.

In football, to get the World Cup, everything is possible.

I understood what was happening, that this was bribes.

It all comes down to money.

People who have even a casual understanding of what FIFA represents

associate it with corruption and cronyism

and a lack of transparency.

FIFA's corrupt. I don't know what's going on.

World organisation FIFA is incredibly corrupt.

FIFA is corrupt to its core and probably all the way to the top.

Many people will look at Sepp Blatter as the most despicable man in world sport.

Fraud, bribes, money laundering, racketeering. You name it.

Somewhere, sooner or later, somebody is gonna get caught in FIFA.

What has been revealed so far is a Mafia-style crime syndicate.

My only hesitation in using that term

is that it is almost insulting to the Mafia.

I always say that being an investigative journalist isn't a proper grown-up job

because it's too much of a caper, it's too much fun.

Just the ability to cause trouble for people

who are wielding power corruptly

and to stick up for ordinary people who are getting screwed over.

It's a really thrilling feeling.

My name is Heidi Blake.

I worked for the Sunday Times Insight Investigations Team for about three-and-a-half years.

We are the part of the newspaper which is given more time

to investigate longer-term projects.

I'm Jonathan Calvert,

I'm the Insight editor of the Sunday Times.

Corruption is an awful thing in the world.

In order to encourage reform, you've got to open up the truth.

In 2014, Jonathan and I were approached by a trusted source

who we'd worked with previously,

who told us that they were in contact with someone

who had access to a vast cache of documents,

which they said could potentially blow the lid off

the Qatari bid to host the World Cup.

We started off being written off, being the unconventional bid.

No one saw that we had a chance to win.

Countries campaign very hard to win the right to host the World Cup

because it is the biggest event, in terms of sports, in the world.

The World Cup goes far beyond football.

It brings the whole planet together for four weeks every four years.

Football is a global language.

If you want to connect people emotionally,

if you want to connect them culturally,

then use their game.

You know, kick a ball around.

Looking for Klinsmann, ever aware of his presence.

Klinsmann with it, turns... scores!

What a goal!

Where the World Cup is played really mans a lot to the country, the federation.

It means a lot to the growth of soccer in that area.

But while the host company certainly reaps benefits,

the single greatest benefactor of the World Cup is FIFA.

It's their event.

And it is the biggest driver of revenue for that organisation

and has been for quite a while.

I'm so not a football fan that embarking on this story,

Why do people care about football?

What is exciting about football?

When I started to realise just how corrupt world football really was,

that's when I got interested.

We met the source in a London hotel.

They were keen for us to go ahead but there were conditions.

They weren't just gonna hand the information over to us,

it was too sensitive.

Which meant that we couldn't have them in our office

and we had to go a long way outside London

and view them on the computers belonging to the source,

in a tiny office which we called "the bunker".

We had to operate under intense secrecy.

We weren't even allowed to tell our friends and family what we were working on or even where we were.

We were monitored constantly by CCTV.

All of our activity was monitored by a keystroke monitor on our computers.

We could not download anything.

We could access and view the files but we couldn't take anything away.

In the world of FIFA, it was entirely plausible

that there could be people watching,

that people would be trying to discover who our source was.

And it was important that we kept it secret.

So it was kind of under those conditions that we began our research

to understand the organisation of FIFA and its structure and history.

I had the privilege I was in FIFA during extremely interesting times.

And I could observe much more than probably other people could observe.

My name is Guido Tognoni, I was Media Officer in FIFA.

My job was to give FIFA an international image

to create football as No.1 sport in the world.

When I started with FIFA in '84, nobody knew FIFA.

FIFA is the governing body of world soccer.

It has 211 member nations and six different confederations

which are the continental areas that make up those member nations.

FIFA started from scratch, it was an amateur association.

And then the Brazilian Joao Havelange became president in 1974.

Havelange was the President of FIFA for decades

and really oversaw its growth.

But the brain of football was in Zurich

with the former General Secretary Sepp Blatter.

Et voila.

Football is at its best, I would say, in the organisation today.

I am proud of what I have done.

Sepp Blatter is the twinkly-eyed, grandfatherly,

white-haired overlord of world football.

A man who's cultivated this kind of avuncular image

but who actually is a rapacious powerbroker.

Sepp Blatter is a master at patronage politics.

He knows how to play this game, how to work it.

He is FIFA, his whole life is FIFA. He can survive any controversy.

I am a positive human being.

Smiling is the best weapon to show your teeth to your opponent.

Together with his predecessor, Joao Havelange,

Blatter revolutionised the world of football.

Every single country in the world, pretty much,

has its own football association.

Regardless of the population of the country,

every single member association has one vote at the FIFA Congress.

So a country like Brazil with a couple of hundred million people

has one vote for the FIFA Presidency.

So does the Caribbean island of Montserrat with a population of 5,000

And that means there's huge power concentrated in parts of the world

where you have lots of countries with tiny populations.

Havelange looked and said, "Africa's got 50-some nations

that each have one vote."

It was a politically calculated move

that we're going to go to a country

and we're going to say, "What do you need?

And in return, when it comes time to vote for re-election,

you're gonna give me your vote."

Havelange doled out vast sums of development money

to football associations around the world.

In doing that, he secured the loyalty of voters at the FIFA Congress

who could be relied upon to back him in successive presidential elections.

There's a culture of bribery and patronage

that Sepp Blatter and his mentor Havelange established within FIFA

that just meant that nobody even really stopped to think

that what they were doing was wrong.

Blatter and Havelange accepted bribery as part of the system.

They built their power on bribery

and they observed the corruption growing and growing

and they never intervened against it.

They not only ignored it, they even cultivated it.

And this is where the tiny Gulf state of Qatar comes into the story.

Because when Blatter stood to be the President of FIFA in 1998,

he won with help from Qatar's top football official,

Mohamed bin Hammam.

Mohamed bin Hammam was one of the most powerful figures in world football.

For many years, he was the President of the Asian Football Confederation.

He is a billionaire in his own right.

It was bin Hammam who bankrolled Sepp Blatter's campaign for the presidency in 1998.

Blatter and bin Hammam were close friends in those days.

Blatter had many friends - as long as they were helpful for him.

And bin Hammam himself, he liked to help people.

Bin Hammam would also help you if you were in trouble. He's that type of person.

How are you? Fine, thank you.

Welcome to Doha. Thank you very much.

And thanks to bin Hammam,

Blatter was able to satisfy the needs of the African delegates.

There were a crucial series of meetings that bin Hammam held

in a hotel suite on the eve of the election,

where the leaders of African football were invited

to a private audience with bin Hammam.

Rumours swirled that bin Hammam was generous in doling out brown envelopes stuffed full of cash.

Blatter didn't pay bribes himself.

So when he says to anybody, "I didn't pay, didn't bribe anybody"

then literally, he's right.

But money was given. This is a fact.

Mohamed bin Hammam is a character who came to really fascinate me

and Jonathan in the course of our research.

He was born into a relatively ordinary family in Qatar

and he really was a self-made billionaire.

He set up a construction company in Doha in the '70s, Kemco,

and won a load of state contracts to build the skyscrapers

which were then shooting up all over the city.

At the same time, he was a real lover of football, which was rare in Qatar.

As a young entrepreneur in his early 20s,

he took on the role of managing a local football club

and was hugely successful,

managed to steer the club from absolutely nowhere

to winning a whole load of leagues.

And in doing so, he caught the attention of the then Crown Prince,

who later became the Emir of Qatar.

For a long time, Qatar was relatively undeveloped.

In the 1950s, they started to discover liquid petroleum gas,

which was the thing that would make the country enormously wealthy,

especially the Qatar Royal Family.

Qatar is a rigidly hierarchical society

with the Royal Family at the apex.

It runs a sovereign wealth fund which holds huge real estate holdings

in New York, London, across Europe and around the world.

During the course of the investigation,

we realised just how much they owned.

The Shard is owned by the Qataris.

Canary Wharf is owned by the Qataris

and this building is owned by the Qatar Investment Authority.

Bin Hammam got a place on the Emir's advisory counsel

and kind of became part of the Qatari elite.

But at the same time, he has a deeply subservient relationship with the Royal Family.

He had a nickname, actually. They called him "the Slave".

This was partly a really shocking reference

to his distant African ancestry.

And partly a reference to his slavish devotion to the Qatari Royal Family.

The Emir took over from his father determined to modernise Qatar,

to build Doha up,

to try to position Qatar as a major player on the world stage

by investing in the arts, in media and in sport.

And so bin Hammam became a key pawn in the Emir's strategy

to turn Qatar into a global powerhouse,

in this case in the field of sport.

Working in any sporting event is amazing

because you're working with people from all over the world.

So it's a very gratifying thing to do.

My name's Phaedra Almajid and I was the Media Specialist for Qatar 2022.

Internally, what is the feeling among the Qatar bid team

about your chances to win the host rights?

It was always positive.

It was always positive. Um...

We had Mohamed bin Hammam.

I mean, that's number one.

Whatever we needed, we had.

No one had a budget.

Qatar would do anything to win.

Mohamed bin Hammam, at the beginning, he was himself critical

and asking himself whether Qatar was the right place to host a World Cup.

But if the Emir wants this,

then Mohamed bin Hammam has no choice than delivering.

Qatar is a country where women are treated as second-class citizens,

where homosexuality is a punishable crime,

where the press is heavily censored.

FIFA conducted its own objective analysis of the various bids

which found that Qatar was an unsuitable place to host a World Cup

and a dangerous place to host a World Cup.

The summer temperatures would be a hazard to the health of the players

and the fans.

Doha simply didn't have space for the kind of stadium infrastructure

that was going to be required.

There was no football infrastructure at all in Qatar.

There were hardly any teams.

They would have to build nine new stadiums.

And there wasn't enough room for them in Doha

so they would have to kind of create a whole new city.

It has a large workforce of workers from countries like Nepal and India.

They work in punishing and dangerous conditions,

often on the construction sites which are building these many skyscrapers

which define the Doha landscape.

Foreign workers now outnumber Qataris by more than four to one.

They're kept on a tight leash by a system called kafala,

that gives the employer the right to decide where they work

and when or even if they can leave.

They are owned by another individual lock, stock and barrel.

That's slavery.

Sepp Blatter, in all fairness, didn't want to go to Qatar.

He wanted to go to Russia then to United States.

America changed the whole dynamics of the World Cup,

because America, when it hosted it in 1994,

it made so much money for FIFA.

I hope to have the chance to welcome all of you in 2022.

I told the President my idea,

that the World Cup 2022 shall go back to the United States.

We would not have this discussion if it came out as I wanted.

Sepp Blatter was the most powerful man in sports for a long time.

But when it came to making the most significant decisions,

the Executive Committee had all the power.

The Executive Committee, or ExCo,

was a group of a couple of dozen of the most powerful

leaders in world football.

It's incredibly powerful, particularly in relation to

the awarding of the rights to host a World Cup,

because that's a decision taken solely by the Executive Committee.

They decide in a secret ballot and they don't have to explain their decision

or be accountable for it in any way.

The FIFA Executive Committee was made up of quite a few extraordinary people.

So you'd have super-famous football players in Franz Beckenbauer

and Michel Platini.

At the same time, you'd have billionaires like Mohamed bin Hammam

and you'd also have some kind of football administrators

who'd found their way to the top.

If you were a country that was bidding for the World Cup,

you were only focused on these 24 people.

"How can I make them like me more?"

This was an unbelievable career.

They go to World Cups, they stay there for one month or six weeks,

they live like in a paradise.

They got the feeling they were the masters of the universe,

not only of football.

FIFA's international headquarters in Zurich

kind of resembled the lair of a Bond villain.

There's a couple of floors above ground

but the vast majority of the building is subterranean.

The members of the Executive Committee can meet in the centrepiece

which is its boardroom - again, underground, shrouded in darkness.

The men who control the game gather around a huge oval table,

a bit like the one in Dr Strangelove.

Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!

There are those who will tell you of the supposed sordid secrets

that lie deep in our Bond villain headquarters

in the hills above Zurich.

They would have you believe that I sit in my office,

with a sinister grin,

gently stroking the chin of an expensive white Persian cat.

But it's not what we are. That's not FIFA. That's not me.

For almost as long as I can remember,

there have been questions about the ethics behind

how decisions were made by the Executive Committee

in terms of where the World Cup is held.

Almost all of the awards of World Cup hosting venues -

2002, 2006, 2010 - were tainted.

So the idea that FIFA was going to award two World Cups

in the same voting process

was rife with problems.

The reason our source trusted us with the Qatari documents

is because of my prior work investigating FIFA.

Back in 2010, somebody had told us there was corruption in the bidding

for the two World Cups which were 2018 and 2022.

Doesn't want to zip all the way.

I decided that probably one of the most effective ways

of getting under the skin of FIFA was to go undercover.

My colleague and I pretended to be representatives

of a group of companies in America

that wanted the American bid to win.

We would organise meetings round the world with various FIFA executives

and get them talking about what it would take to win.

When it comes to talking about things like corruption and bribes,

people are very circumspect, they don't normally say it outright.

What was extraordinary about this was just how open everyone was

about the culture of bribery.

It was as if it was expected that this was the moment

when they could earn their fortune.

And this was their payback for being loyal and supportive of Sepp Blatter

We wrote our story and it went around the world, it was huge.

Football's world governing body FIFA says it's investigating allegations

made in the Sunday Times that two of its officials agreed

to sell their votes in the contest to host the 2018 World Cup.

Are you pleased at what the Sunday Times did

in uncovering corruption inside FIFA?

No, I am not pleased about that

because this is not very fair.

Football's world governing body, FIFA, has suspended two members of its Executive Committee.

When FIFA's Executive Committee decides the destinations

of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups,

there will now be just 22 men, not 24, entitled to vote.

What we did was really hated by the FIFA Executive Committee members.

Blatter had to keep them onside so he had to attack us as well,

even though all we'd done is actually exposed the corruption.

What can you do against the international media

saying FIFA is corrupt?

FIFA is not corrupt.

People in FIFA were corrupt.

But as they were members of FIFA,

naturally they say,

"Who is responsible? It's the President."

When we were in the bunker,

I remember being quite paranoid.

We'd work from kind of early in the morning till way past dark at night.

We'd go home and I'd wonder who the people in the car park were

who were watching us.

FIFA is a very cloak and dagger world.

We were having to operate ourselves in a very cloak and dagger way.

Working under those conditions at length - we were there three months -

does start to get to you.

We'd been given a huge cache of emails and documents and bills

and flight records and all sorts of things.

It all centred on Mohamed bin Hammam.

The main people involved in the Qatar 2022 bid

were Hassan Al-Thawadi and the Chairman,

who was His Highness Sheikh Mohamed.

Mohamed bin Hammam was never an official member of the bid team.

But I don't think anyone thought that he wasn't part of the bid team.

Mohamed bin Hammam was working hand in hand with the Qatar bid

despite their denial that they had anything to do with him whatsoever.

They were so close that the bid team had its offices in the same building

as Mohamed bin Hammam ran his Kemco operation.

Your own bid chairman described him as Qatar's biggest asset in the bid.

Is that not the case? Yes.

Mohamed bin Hammam is in favour of the bid.

There were two processes going on.

You'd have the official Qatar bid who did all the obvious publicity,

they'd have the brand ambassadors and all that.

And then you had the secret process which was undertaken

by the man who knew all the characters, Mohamed bin Hammam.

Bin Hammam knew it'd be very difficult for FIFA Executive Committee members

to justify casting their votes for such a strange and outside candidate as Qatar.

So what he did was, he went around the world forging alliances

and doling out largesse to buy up the support

of dozens and dozens of football officials

across Asia and Africa in particular.

He travelled to the Bahamas, he travelled to Cape Town,

he travelled to Tokyo, he travelled to South Korea.

And he would lavish them with spending money and private cruises

and stays in five-star hotels and incredible meals.

He would meet with them and ask them about things they needed

and talk to them about the Qatar World Cup bid.

We could see there were then these very intense flurries of activity

in the Kemco accounts directly following those meetings,

where bin Hammam's assistants would be instructed to dispense sums

ranging from $10,000 to $200,000 at a time,

directly into the bank accounts of the very football officials he'd met.

There were lots of different payments,

the first direct evidence we'd found that bribes were being paid

in exchange for World Cup support.

"I sincerely thank you from the bosom of my heart

for your continuous support.

And I hereby provide you with the full bank details

that you can use for any transfer."

I thought frankly that it was a fantasy for Qatar at the beginning.

But dreams can come true.

My name's Sunil Gulati.

I was the Chairman of America's 2010 World Cup bid for the 2022 event.

When we started the process, I believed we were gonna win.

We're gonna announce 18 cities with an average capacity of 78,000 seats.

Far bigger than anyone else could hope to get.

Magnitude is enormous.

Every team in the World Cup will have home fans without travelling.

What it'd be able to do for the world of soccer,

economically, culturally, was a big part of our pitch.

United States went really hard after the hosting rights

for the 2022 World Cup.

They put together a really extensive campaign,

they had a bid committee that brought in all types of celebrities

to help make the case.

Listen.

It's the roar of millions of soccer fans all across the United States

calling for the FIFA World Cup.

The US have numbers... Dempsey's missed it...

Donovan hasn't!

It's Landon Donovan!

The past 25 years have been a wonderful journey,

both for me personally and for the sport of football in my country.

Going to Switzerland and being part of the 2022 bid

was a bizarre experience.

And for a 28-year-old kid who was so naive to that world,

it was fascinating.

I was thrilled to be there, giving that presentation to ExCo members.

And naively thought it would matter.

Looking down and seeing people sleeping, not paying attention,

on their phones, did make me think it was a foregone conclusion.

People had already made up their minds.

Sunil Gulati understood very clearly

that he could play the game dirty

but he didn't want to do that.

I remember having conversations with him,

"Sunil, do you think this kind of stuff is going on?"

He was, like, "Landon, there's stuff going on."

I went and met Mr Blatter before we announced we were gonna bid

and I said, "Look, we're not gonna do whatever it takes."

He understood that. We were gonna play absolutely by the rules.

When you say, "do whatever," what do you mean?

Just that.

Just that.

To use a soccer metaphor, if the ball was a yard away from the line

and there was a chance to punch it in with a handball, we wouldn't do.

Did you bribe FIFA members to win the World Cup?

Plain and simply, no.

At no point did you pay any money or gifts,

or anything which would be on FIFA's rules to win influence

in the race for 2022?

We never broke FIFA's rules.

When we went to Angola for the African Football Federation meetings

all the big ExCo members were staying in the same hotel.

I was called to go to Hassan's room.

So there was Hassan.

Obviously there was me.

There was Diallo, who was part of the bid team

but not part of the bid team.

He came to us from Mohamed bin Hammam.

There were a couple of meetings with the FIFA ExCo members

Hayatou, Adamu and Anouma.

Hayatou came in and Hassan said,

"We want, of course, your vote." And that seemed pretty normal to me.

And then Diallo just dropped a bomb that, you know,

"We'll give you $1 million for your football federation."

Hayatou laughed and said, "No, I can't do much with $1 million."

And Diallo said, "$1.5 million."

Kind of when you watch movies, you think of bribery and corruption

like, underground, in a tunnel somewhere.

So I remember being just very shocked,

like not sure what was really happening.

And I remember on the second or third time this was repeating itself

I just started laughing hysterically,

because it was obviously at that point I understood what was happening,

that this was bribes.

There was nothing extraordinary about the moment for those men.

As a watcher, bystander, it was an extraordinary moment

that I'll never forget.

The more we worked on this story, the more aware we became

of just how high the stakes were.

It became clear to us that what we were investigating

were closely guarded secrets held at the highest level

of some of the world's most powerful governments.

Mr President, on behalf of the government,

it gives me great pleasure to welcome you here in Downing Street.

The members of several bid teams, including the England bid,

had engaged their own private spy networks to spy on each other

and to conduct counter-espionage operations

to try and defend themselves against being spied on.

These are big, kind of global clashes going on,

which is why you find there's not just an ordinary football focus.

Intelligence agents and private detectives were involved.

Christopher Steele is a respected former MI6 officer.

And he shot to prominence during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The infamous Steele dossier alleged that the Trump campaign

was co-ordinating with Russia.

A lesser-known fact about him is that during the 2010 bidding process,

he was hired by the England team to spy on their Russian opponents

for the 2018 World Cup.

My name's Christopher, known as Chris, Steele to my friends.

I served in the British Embassy in Russia,

it was the Soviet Union when I started.

And it was a tumultuous time.

And I think those of us who served there never forgot what had happened

and the lessons we had learnt.

At the beginning, the Russian bid doesn't seem to have had

much interest from Vladimir Putin.

Vladimir Putin is not a football fan

compared with, for example, his passion involved in, say, ice hockey

But of course, eventually Putin realised

that this was a prestige project for Russia,

that it required winning at all costs for political reasons.

Football is pretty popular in Russia

and it would have not gone down well with the man on the street

if they had failed to win this tournament.

When he realised that Russia wasn't actually doing very well,

he called in some of his oligarchs and demanded

that they started to work for the bid.

Modern Russia's default mode is to engage in corruption

and underhand dealings and breaking the rules.

And it's the only way they really achieve very much.

We had produced intelligence that one of the European ExCo members

had been offered a valuable painting from the Hermitage.

And seemed to have accepted it.

He admitted it, but said, "Oh, it's a painting of no value.

I put it upstairs in my attic."

The US bid committee was, like, handing out free pens to FIFA voters.

And the England bit got into all kinds of trouble

for buying designer Mulberry handbags for the wives

of all of the FIFA Executive Committee members.

But what the Qataris and Russians were doing

was corruption on an industrial scale.

There was no way that other countries were gonna be able to compete.

It's a competition between states,

so the whole state apparatus is devoted to securing the World Cup.

There was intelligence that there had been a dialogue going on

between Russia and Qatar, not natural bedfellows.

But at the end of the day, both have strong energy interests,

both have interests in the Middle East.

And that opened up the potential for there to be some kind of trade-off.

Sources on the England team had gathered intelligence about a vote swap,

which the Russian team had allegedly done with Qatar.

"If you get your voters to back my bid, I'll get mine to back your bid."

And this whole thing had been sewn up around a big bi-lateral oil deal

in which Qatar agreed to invest billions and billions of dollars

in developing the oilfields of the Yamal Peninsula.

It's an incredibly difficult place to prospect for oil

but it's incredibly rich in its supply.

And so it was in both countries' interests.

What we could then see in our own documents was that bin Hammam

played a key role in brokering those meetings.

He had hosted the Russian bid team and the Russian Energy Minister

on a trip to Doha at which this deal was allegedly discussed.

The Yamal Peninsula deal I think says it all.

This is how the operation was conducted

and the sort of assets that Russia and Qatar brought to bear.

The World Cup's bound up with the sort of unseen way

in which the world really works.

Unseemly, I would say, and unseen.

There was a lot of negative attention being focused on Russia

as they were annexing Crimea and committing atrocities

that many people would look at and say, "This is unacceptable."

The focus on Russia, on Putin,

on any of the people that are involved in doing those things,

is shifted when you then turn on the lights

around a giant event like a World Cup.

If you can host a tournament,

it's a glue that sort of increases the popularity

of unstable authoritarian governments.

And I think that was part of this equation and still is.

A World Cup does not produce money for the country.

The country has to expend a lot of money for the World Cup.

The economy naturally will take some money by tourists and so on

but it is not an economic matter.

It's a prestigious matter.

Qatar is actually quite an isolated country in the Middle East.

It has significant Sunni enemies around it like Saudi and the UAE.

And therefore if Qatar can become the first Middle East country

to host a major sports event like this,

then that does solidify the regime and its stability,

I think, significantly,

both in the region and in the wider world.

Michel Platini, the former French footballing superstar

and FIFA Executive Committee member,

had previously pledged his support to the American bid.

But he came under increasing pressure from Nicolas Sarkozy,

the then French President, to switch his support to Qatar.

That was because Sarkozy was eyeing a number of major deals with Qatar.

He was keen that Qatar buy up and bail out

his favourite football team, Paris St Germain,

which was haemorrhaging money financially.

And a big deal by which Qatar Airways would buy up

50 planes from Airbus, the French company.

And one week before the decision,

I got a phone call from Michel Platini.

And he told me, "Something has happened.

Now you will be in difficulties."

He was the President of UEFA at that time

and he told me that he was asked

that his group should vote for Qatar.

And four votes, they go to Qatar.

Then it was impossible for US to win.

Platini lost courage.

He should have said to the President, "No.

We go to do something for the world and not only for one country."

Football was being used as a bargaining chip

in these huge international deals.

Another way of looking at it is that these huge international trade deals

were actually the bargaining chip being traded around in world football in exchange for World Cup votes.

The winner...

to organise the 2022 FIFA World Cup is...

Qatar!

It was the biggest accomplishment of the history of Qatar, in my opinion.

It was a super accomplishment for bin Hammam.

Everybody in Qatar knows what Mohamed bin Hammam

has done for football and for the FIFA World Cup.

Bin Hammam was an absolute hero.

He was kind of almost a god in his own country for the work he did.

How do you feel about that particular coup that was pulled off?

I'm very proud, not only because the World Cup is going to be in Qatar.

Qatar in this case also are representing

all the small nations and all small countries.

This is my biggest defeat I have ever witnessed.

Bin Hammam's victory took Blatter by surprise.

When bin Hammam did it by securing such widespread support

across the continent of Africa in particular,

which is really the heartland of Blatter's own base,

that was a real threat to Blatter.

He knew bin Hammam had long harboured ambitions

to go for the FIFA Presidency.

And very soon after the World Cup decision,

he started manoeuvring against bin Hammam in pretty overt ways.

Blatter came out and announced unilaterally

that he was instituting a new anti-corruption committee

to oversee FIFA, to look at the World Cup bids.

Now we have these independent bodies

and we have to follow what they are going to find out.

The next thing Blatter did was to declare

that he thought it may be impossible to play the tournament in Qatar in the summer.

If something happened, the FIFA Executive Committee

can change the venue of the World Cup,

can take away the rights to organise the World Cup.

Everything, we can do.

It became clear to bin Hammam that to protect Qatar's World Cup bid,

he needed to be the man in charge of world football.

And so that was really what spurred him

to launch his own campaign for the FIFA presidency in 2011.

Mohamed bin Hammam, although once a close ally of Blatter,

is now calling for change.

This actually may be one of the weaknesses of FIFA today.

He's been there too long? Too long. 13 years as a president.

Let us open the window for fresh air to come.

Meanwhile, Phaedra Almajid came to us

and made allegations about the Qataris.

I write notes to myself, basically.

Like a diary, I guess.

These were some of the notes I took on the night in Angola

where I witnessed a bribe.

I remember needing to share it with someone, just the shock of it.

I never planned to be the whistle-blower.

Parliament was looking into England's failed bid.

As a result of that, they did a call for evidence.

And so we submitted all the evidence that we had picked up

from the six consultants and from the two FIFA ExCo members.

We also included some of the allegations from Phaedra.

I know what the repercussions can be for any whistle-blower.

So I was very scared.

And I wanted to be anonymous.

The Sunday Times hired a lawyer for me.

The lawyer contacted FIFA

and said, "All right, she's willing to give evidence."

We have asked for evidence

and this famous whistle-blower will be in FIFA on Wednesday.

They will tell us if there is something or not.

He mentioned the exact day and time

I would be walking through the FIFA doors.

I mean, you say that,

of course every media member is going to be there.

And I just watched this, I was, like, "Oh, no, I'm not.

I'm not flying to Zurich any time soon when you've just announced it."

What he did was very, very purposeful.

FIFA's not corrupt. Definitely not.

I think that Sepp Blatter is a diabolic genius.

She was there in Angola.

And has she given evidence or not?

Has she evidence?

I don't know. I don't know.

There was hacking into my G-mail accounts, into my Facebook.

I started getting threatening emails about my children.

So I was very scared.

I'm a single mom.

This is the richest sporting organisation in the world

and the richest country in the world

and I know there were no limits.

Who did you think the threats were coming from? The Qataris.

Definitely.

I needed it to stop. I needed the threats to stop.

It was just the fear for my children.

And so I told them, "Look, I'll fix this.

I'll recant everything.

End of story. We'll move on."

You know, do I regret it? No.

I did what I had to do as a mother.

The one man many thought could beat top football chief Sepp Blatter withdraws.

Mohamed bin Hammam of Qatar says he won't stand for FIFA President.

Bin Hammam's decision to drop out at the 11th hour

of the presidential race

was kind of a mystery to his many supporters.

The prospect that he might defeat Blatter in the election

was really the only leverage he actually still held

to protect Qatar's World Cup bid.

But the answer to why bin Hammam suddenly resigned

was disclosed to us when we received a phone call from a source in Zurich.

It was someone who was very close to Mohamed bin Hammam

and had been very close to Sepp Blatter.

It explained to us that Mohamed bin Hamman was invited to meet Blatter

at FIFA headquarters.

When he entered the office, he found Blatter sitting there

with a very senior member of the Qatari Royal Family

and was informed that a deal had been done between Blatter and the Royal.

If Mohamed bin Hammam bowed out gracefully from the FIFA presidential race,

Blatter would ensure the Qatar World Cup would come to no harm,

that the tournament would go ahead.

And if this story is correct,

and I have no reason to doubt the words of Mohamed bin Hammam,

then they shook hands, the deal was done.

It was he who had secured Blatter his first victory in 1998

as FIFA President, his re-election in 2002,

and who had pulled out all the stops

to achieve the seemingly impossible feat

of winning the rights to host the World Cup for his own Royal Family.

And to see these two figures uniting against him was a devastating blow.

And worse still, he was told that he was to retire home to Doha

and really never to speak publicly about any of what had occurred.

He was silenced.

This was a really key moment at which Blatter showed

the full extent of his power as a kind of mob boss

at the top of the organisation,

who is able to cut deals and use alliances

to end someone else's career and secure his own fortunes.

Mohamed bin Hammam says that you made a deal

to let the Qataris keep the Cup

in exchange for bin Hammam dropping out of the presidential race.

Not at all. This is the first time I heard about that.

But not at all.

And I wouldn't enter into such an arrangement.

Definitely not.

Presidente Joseph Blatter.

Sepp Blatter has been re-elected.

Blatter won another four-year term as head of soccer's governing body.

There is not one single doubt

that the World Cup 2022 will be organised in Qatar.

I just remember what a very prominent member of the Qatar Organising Committee told me,

is that, "We played the rules of FIFA."

You have to blame FIFA, not the countries, neither Russia nor Qatar.

They had no choice.

If they want the World Cup, they have to play the FIFA rules.

The FIFA rules are dirty, so where is the problem? It's with FIFA.

We are honoured to win in this tough and fair fight.

From bottom of my heart,

thank you.

It's incredible how easy it was to go to Russia.

Have they paid?

But we come back to Qatar.

Do you think Qatar paid bribes to win the World Cup?

You know, I don't know if they paid.

Because I have not seen.

But in football, to get the World Cup, everything is possible.

Everything is possible.

Giving a World Cup to a specific country

will always create a very heated discussion of yes or no.

Because it is connected with that game of football

that is so emotional to us.

Because it's so popular, because it connects us all,

there will always be politics part of it.

I would love a world where sport was pure

and politics didn't come into play, corruption didn't come into play.

Unfortunately, it's the reality.

FIFA's a business.

It's an institution but there are people behind the institution.

And it's really important to remember that people can be corrupt,

people can be bad, people can make bad decisions.

And when that happens, it can turn really ugly really fast.

The decision makers, most of them,

never played the game, never felt the game like the fan is doing.

That is the issue that a lot of us players, coaches have,

with those that run the business side of things.

That kills you.

Sepp Blatter and the members of his Executive Committee

really treated FIFA like their own personal fiefdom.

They behave as though the game belongs to them

and they can do with it whatever they want to enrich themselves

and to further their own advantage.

And they do that without really any regard

for the hundreds of millions of people who genuinely love football

and actually care about the game.

There's a well known phrase in The Beautiful Game.

The Beautiful Game is the wonderful thing

of watching Pele or Johan Cruyff

or those great players who played in the World Cups.

But this was the Ugly Game.

This was the football administrators,

this was the corrupt deals behind those football matches.

We were on a really tight deadline trying to produce this story.

We knew that for it to achieve maximum impact,

we needed to land this bombshell right ahead of the 2014 World Cup,

which was taking place in Brazil that year.

So we had to kind of draw a line and then get it written.

And it was a lot of writing.

We were working really long hours.

It was kind of 16, 17, 18-hour days, seven days a week.

The Sunday Times is going to devote the first 11 pages to the story,

which, as our managing editor said, is unheard of in peacetime.

We felt kind of daunted by the magnitude of what we'd uncovered

and how explosive it was and what the repercussions might be.

And when it broke, it went around the world like a flash.

Mr bin Hammam.

It wasn't Brazil that was making headlines today.

It was future hosts Qatar.

The story that Heidi and Jonathan did shook world sport.

And it exposed just how corrupt that process was.

For those running FIFA, all the noise about Qatar is the last thing they needed

as they prepare for a difficult World Cup here in Brazil.

But the claims aren't going away.

Now they need to convince the world they're treating them seriously.

We felt there was surely no way the World Cup could go ahead in Qatar,

given what we had documented.

Mr President, are you worried about more allegations of corruption?

It was pretty astonishing the way Sepp Blatter

just totally ignored the evidence.

Sepp Blatter said the British media's latest wave of allegations about Qatar

was motivated by racism.

If corruption allegations against Qatar's bid are proved,

should there be a revote?

For a start- No, listen.

Let me answer. Let me answer.

I am not a prophet. That's all.

So we wait the results and we will see what will happen.

There was a whitewash and basically FIFA was doing what it always did,

which was to avoid engaging with the corruption at its heart.

It was frustrating. It was intensely frustrating.

We couldn't get FIFA to take this thing seriously.

Sepp Blatter remained in place as President of FIFA,

despite presiding over this complete charade.

It felt like we'd failed at forcing a change.

But what we didn't know was,

that all the time we'd thought it was up to us,

the FBI were investigating,

and the whole FIFA house of cards was about to come crashing down.

Until you have somebody involved in the conspiracy

explain to you what is going on,

the case will not break open.

People said, "FIFA's like a mob and gangsters and stuff."

But I never thought of Chuck as that. But I guess he was.

We were opening up the tip of a big old iceberg.

It is a monumental takedown.

This is the biggest sports bust in history.

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