The Ugly Game: The Qatari Plot to Buy the World Cup

by Heidi Blake

  The reporters fielded a constant flurry of calls from executives, colleagues and lawyers back in London. Martin Ivens, the editor of The Sunday Times, was backing the story all the way and throwing all the might of the publication’s considerable resources behind it. Still, the FIFA Files remained a closely guarded secret, even inside newsroom, so Hymas had prepared a dummy news list with no mention of the Qatar World Cup to maintain the pretence that there would be nothing unusual about the 1 June edition of the paper. Only a select group of people were brought into the secret on a ‘need-to-know’ basis.

  Ivens had deputised Bob Tyrer, the paper’s toughest editor, to run his iron rule over the reporters’ copy. Hymas was in charge of coordinating the stories, jig-sawing all the content onto the 11-page spread and working with selected designers, photographic staff, graphic artists and sub-editors to produce a package which landed a big visual punch. The newspaper’s lawyers, Pia Sarma and Pat Burge, combed through the stories the journalists had sent down from the bunker, checking every word for fairness and accuracy against hundreds of supporting documents which had been couriered to London on an encrypted hard disc.

  The paper’s chief reporter Jonathan Ungoed-Thomas and its defence correspondent Mark Hookham had been filled in on what their colleagues were up to. They were now digging up background on Mohamed bin Hammam’s deals and assiduously contacting the scores of officials the newspaper intended to name to give them their right to respond to the evidence in the files. For secrecy’s sake, they had been moved from their usual desks in the newsroom to sit in the Insight team’s locked box office in a quiet corner on the floor below. Very few reporters had ever been in there before, and they gazed around at the jumble of mug-shots, wall-charts, target lists and scrawled findings plastered all over the walls from past investigations and chuckled.

  ‘Not sinister at all,’ Ungoed-Thomas joked to Hookham.

  Blake and Calvert had written to Bin Hammam detailing the findings they planned to publish that weekend and setting out the questions they wanted him to answer. ‘We are preparing to write a series of articles this weekend concerning new evidence about your central involvement in Qatar’s successful World Cup bid,’ the letter began. ‘We will be publishing evidence of payments you made to senior football officials in exchange for supporting the bid.’

  Soon after pressing send, they received a polite email from Bin Hammam’s son, Hamad. ‘Thank you for allowing us the opportunity to respond to the upcoming articles. However, my father and my family have no comment regarding this matter,’ it said.

  The journalists had also sent detailed questions to Hassan Al-Thawadi, and were amazed by the response that came back. The Qatar 2022 chief did not reply personally, instead instructing the law firm Schillings to send a threatening letter, which arrived at 4.10pm on Saturday. The solicitors wished to inform The Sunday Times that: ‘Mr Bin Hammam was at no time officially or unofficially a member, employee, agent or consultant’ of the World Cup bid, it said.

  Blake and Calvert exchanged an incredulous glance. Officially or unofficially? Sheikh Mohammed had called him the bid’s ‘biggest asset’ before the vote, for heaven’s sake. The letter went on: ‘At no time was he acting under instructions or with the authority of our client or any official individual or organisation on behalf of Qatar’s bid for the 2022 FIFA World Cup™. As Mr Al-Thawadi has previously stated “[Mr Bin Hammam] and Qatar 2022 are completely independent and separate”.’ In fact, it said, officials on the committee had to devote a good deal of time to trying to convince him to vote for Qatar. ‘Our client’s activities in relation to Mr Bin Hammam were . . . primarily directed towards obtaining his support for Qatar’s bid. It is not a secret that ultimately our client was successful in winning his support, as it was with a majority of the FIFA Executive Committee members. All of our client’s dealings with Mr Bin Hammam at all times were entirely above board and Mr Bin Hammam did not have a secret role in our client’s bid as you seek to suggest.’

  The bid’s lawyers accused the journalists of ‘a desperate attempt to find a new angle to criticise our client in order to serve what appears to be a pre-determined agenda intended to discredit our client, and the State of Qatar.’ Their sole aim, the letter said, was to ‘depict our client in a deliberately negative light with a view to pursuing Times Newspapers’ long-standing objective of discrediting its successful bid’. It said ‘any attempt to link our client to any alleged activities that may have been undertaken independently by Mr Bin Hammam would be false, entirely without merit and grossly defamatory of our client’.

  It was a bizarre response. Calvert and Blake had expected the Qatar 2022 committee to distance themselves from Bin Hammam and point out that he had not been an official member of their bid team, but to claim he had no role at all in promoting the country’s World Cup effort was preposterous. There was no evidence showing Al-Thawadi and his men knew Bin Hammam was making illicit payments, but the reporters had documents proving they had worked closely at numerous key moments in the campaign. Nonetheless, they wrote up the denials and inserted them into their stories.

  By 7.30pm on Saturday evening, all the stories had been filed, approved by the lawyers, edited, sub-edited and placed on the page. The reporters had printed the 11 final page proofs as they were emailed through from London and ran across them with red pens poised, weeding out any last tiny slip-ups in the headlines or picture captions. Then, it was time. The chief sub-editor pressed the button and the first edition of The Sunday Times was sent off to the printers. The secret was out and an eerie calm descended on the little attic in the moments that followed. Blake and Calvert staggered out into the soft shadows of an early summer evening, punch drunk with tiredness, nerves and elation. There was nothing left but to wait.

  The story splashed across the front of The Sunday Times under the headline ‘Plot to Buy the World Cup’ ricocheted around the globe before the paper had even hit the newsstands. The subheading read: ‘Huge email cache reveals secrets of Qatar’s shock victory’ and the FIFA Files were puffed as a ‘World Exclusive’ revealing the ‘bribes, bungs and slush funds’ that helped buy the world’s most-prized sporting tournament for a tiny Gulf state in the desert. The splash revealed how Bin Hammam had funnelled more than $5 million into the accounts of football officials across Africa from his ten secret Kemco slush funds to buy support. It also disclosed that Bin Hammam had bunged $1.6 million to Jack Warner and bankrolled Reynald Temarii’s legal and private detective bills to stop votes for Qatar’s rivals.

  As soon as the story went live online, it exploded on social media and shot to the top of the television news bulletins, first in Britain, and then all around the world, reaching an audience of hundreds of millions.46 Calvert and Blake felt like they had detonated a nuclear bomb from their dark little cluttered bunker in this anonymous British suburb. Back at their hotel that evening, they huddled in the corner of the hotel bar with a bottle of prosecco, watching their story roll on the BBC News. Sometime around midnight, they were both jolted awake by a tap on the shoulder. It was Sam, the hotel barman. They had fallen asleep in their armchairs in front of the television. It was time to stumble downstairs to bed.

  They woke the next morning to find the story still leading the television and radio news bulletins, and dozens of missed calls on their mobile phones from broadcasters around the world who wanted to interview them about the FIFA Files. The revelations had caught FIFA in the full glare of the world’s media as its hundreds of delegates prepared to swarm into Brazil ahead of the 2014 World Cup. Many of the men who would be flying into São Paulo for world football’s annual congress that month had hoovered up Bin Hammam’s cash before his disgrace. The story was met with near-universal outrage. Political leaders, national football association bosses, players, anti-corruption campaigners and fans around the world called furiously for Qatar to be stripped of the right to host the tournament and for the World Cup vote to be re-run. There was mounting pressure for Sepp Blatter’
s resignation. The reporters – and the world – waited expectantly to see what FIFA would do. And the breathtaking answer was: nothing.

  The morning after the story broke, Calvert and Blake picked up the phone to FIFA’s ethics investigators. Michael Garcia had launched an inquiry into the Qatar 2022 World Cup bid in November 2012, after the journalists passed him their documents revealing Samson Adamu’s million-dollar dinner deal. Two months later he had widened the probe to encompass all nine countries in the competition for the 2018 and 2022 tournaments, and Tim Flynn had been hired in from the Freeh Group to assist with the project. Blake and Calvert had met Garcia and Flynn when the investigators flew into London the previous year. The former US attorney in charge of FIFA’s investigatory chamber was courteous and charismatic, and the reporters liked him. They had done all they could to help him get to the bottom of the mysterious $1 million offer from Qatar to the son of a voter, handing him documents and putting him in touch with sources. His sidekick, Flynn, was a man of few words, but he had stayed in touch with the Insight team, calling occasionally to ask them questions or request more evidence.

  Calvert and Blake were aware that the investigators had become increasingly frustrated as they toured the globe trying to unravel the World Cup web. In many ways, their hands were tied. Only 11 of the men who had been on the executive committee at the time of the vote remained in place, and those who had gone were out of Garcia’s reach. He had no power to compel anyone who was no longer part of the ‘FIFA family’ to speak to him or supply evidence. That included Bin Hammam and Jack Warner. Nor would FIFA allow the investigators to offer witnesses indemnity against future legal action by anyone they accused, and many would-be whistleblowers were too scared to tell them what they knew without protection.

  By the summer of 2014 Garcia and Flynn had spent 18 months and £6 million on their investigation into the most corrupt bidding process in sporting history, but try as they might, they just couldn’t find a smoking gun. That was the message the journalists had received when they had spoken to Flynn a couple of weeks before. The investigator had told them he and Garcia were still months away from finishing their work. Jérôme Valcke had recently issued a statement saying he wanted to see their report before the Brazil World Cup, but Flynn was adamant that wasn’t possible. There was too much still to be done. The reporters couldn’t tell the investigator that they were sitting on an explosive cache of documents containing enough dynamite to blow the whole probe sky-high, but they were sure Flynn and Garcia would be delighted when they eventually learned of this smouldering mound of evidence they could finally get stuck into.

  It was strange, then, that when the call was connected to Flynn the morning after the FIFA Files went public, he was oddly cool with the reporters. He told them he had not read their stories, and neither had Garcia, but they were going to make a statement later that afternoon. Calvert and Blake were taken aback. Why wasn’t their evidence of Bin Hammam’s covert World Cup campaign of interest to FIFA’s investigators?

  Flynn’s tone was world-weary. He told the journalists that he and Garcia did not believe that Qatar’s most senior football official had played any significant part in his country’s victory. In fact, he said, the official bid team had to work hard to convince him even to vote for Qatar and he only promised his vote in the last months before the ballot. Blake and Calvert looked at one another, agog. Could Flynn be serious? He was parroting exactly what Al-Thawadi’s lawyers had said in their statement the day before. Why was Flynn drinking the Qatari Kool-Aid? They told him they had millions of documents proving Bin Hammam’s pivotal role in securing the Qatar World Cup and Garcia should look at them. Flynn sounded unenthused. He advised the reporters to wait and see what the investigator had to say later that day.

  When Garcia finally released his statement that afternoon, the reporters read it in stunned silence. ‘After months of interviewing witnesses and gathering materials, we intend to complete that phase of our investigation by June 9, 2014, and to submit a report to the Adjudicatory Chamber approximately six weeks thereafter,’ it said. ‘The report will consider all evidence potentially related to the bidding process, including evidence collected from prior investigations.’ That date was just a week away. Garcia was shutting down his inquiry early and closing the door on new evidence the day after learning that The Sunday Times was sitting on a database of hundreds of millions of documents with direct relevance to his work. What had happened? Why didn’t he want to get to the truth?

  The Sunday Times dropped its second FIFA Files bombshell on 8 June, as football’s global elite touched down in Brazil for the annual congress ahead of the World Cup. It revealed how Bin Hammam had exploited Qatar’s vast oil and gas wealth to garner World Cup support. ‘Gas deal turns heat on World Cup,’ the front-page headline read, over a picture of the famous trophy engulfed in flames. Now the first major FIFA sponsor, Sony, had broken ranks and called for the FIFA Files to be investigated properly. Blatter had still said nothing. The FIFA president and his executives arrived in São Paulo amid the biggest crisis in the organisation’s history, with the revelations about the Qatar 2022 World Cup bribery scandal blaring from every airport television screen. Their air-conditioned limousines pushed through streets clogged with angry protests against the exorbitant cost of hosting the tournament in a country where millions live in poverty. It was a perfect storm for the cosseted officials on the Exco, and lesser men might have blanched. But they were soon delivered to the safe haven of the best hotel in town, where waiting in their suites was a goody bag to make them feel more wanted.

  Inside were the usual football trinkets Blatter and his executives are showered with as they travel the globe – but nestled between the Brazilian national team shirt and mascot, they found a gift of extraordinary value. It was a limited-edition commemorative watch created by Parmigiani, the luxury Swiss brand that sponsors the Brazilian football federation (CBF), and it was worth $25,000. The gift should have rung alarm bells for Blatter and his Exco, who had voted in the code of ethics that bans them from accepting gifts of more than ‘symbolic or trivial value’. But while three took a principled stand and reported the ‘excessive’ gift to FIFA, the majority quietly kept the watches. By slipping the Parmigiani timepieces to the bottom of their luggage rather than sending them back, FIFA’s rulers had just buried another land-mine which would later blow up in their faces when it came to the attention of the Insight team three months later.

  For now, though, the family was in fighting spirit. Sepp Blatter stood up at the congress in São Paulo and, at last, faced up to the avalanche of filth tumbling out of the FIFA Files. Would he announce a re-vote on the hosting of the 2022 World Cup? Would he order Garcia to examine all the evidence? Would he apologise to the fans for allowing the face of football to be stained once again with such disgrace? Not a bit of it. With a familiar tone of fatherly disappointment, Blatter told the delegates: ‘Once again there is a sort of storm against FIFA relating to the Qatar World Cup. Sadly there’s a great deal of discrimination and racism and this hurts me. It really makes me sad.’

  Later that day, the president appeared again before the Asian delegates at the congress. ‘We have seen what the British press has published,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what the reasoning is behind this but we must maintain unity.’ He was gearing up for re-election the following year having, once again, reneged on his promise to stand down at the end of this term. The president was nothing if not a deft opportunist and there wasn’t anything quite like a corruption scandal to remind the children of the FIFA family why they needed such a benevolent patriarch at the helm. The room was dotted with men who had grown rich on Bin Hammam’s riyals and not one of them wanted FIFA to change.

  ‘I still have fire inside me and if we show unity that is the best way to deal with those in the world that want to destroy FIFA,’ Blatter told them amid cheers. ‘They want to destroy us. They don’t want to destroy football but they want to destroy the institution. Be
cause our institution is too strong and is so strong, we are sure they will not destroy it!’

  Blake and Calvert watched open-mouthed from their attic hideout as the miniature Blatter on their computer screens brushed away their evidence and accused them of being nothing more than a pair of racists, his voice a shrill whine on their tinny speakers.

  ‘This is too ridiculous for words,’ Blake said. ‘The man has become some sort of ludicrous parody of a dodgy dictator clinging to power.’ It would have been funny if it wasn’t so deeply insulting. And then it got worse.

  Blatter rounded off his response to the corruption crisis by promising a cash bonanza to his bedrock of supporters across Asia and Africa. At a meeting of CAF officials that morning, he promised to use the billions of dollars FIFA was raking in from the Brazil World Cup to bump up their bonuses. ‘It’s for you, for us, for everyone,’ he declared. Speaking to the Asian congress, he promised: ‘I will give bonuses to you – actually two . . . The confederations also deserve it. I’m sure you will be very happy with it.’ The delegates erupted in wild cheers and applause.

  Blatter received a far frostier reception when he popped up before the UEFA congress the following day. The defiance which had so delighted the delegates from Africa and Asia had gone down like a lead balloon in Europe. There was muted applause after Blatter announced he had decided to stand for four more years because he was best placed to lead FIFA through the ‘storm’. Then Michael van Praag, the Dutch FA president, stood. ‘Mr Blatter, this is nothing personal, but if you look at FIFA’s reputation over the last seven or eight years, it is being linked to all kinds of corruption and all kinds of old boys’ networks things,’ he said gingerly. ‘You are not making things easy for yourself and I do not think you are the man for the job any longer.’