Episode notes
A briefcase. A hotel room. An envelope slid under a door. This is how the biggest deals in world football have been done for thirty years — not in boardrooms, but in back channels. This episode follows the money.
In this episode:
- The architecture of FIFA corruption — the regional confederations, the executive committee, and the voting blocs that made it work
- Jack Warner and the Caribbean: $10 million in bribes traced through a single career
- How South American TV rights deals — Traffic Sports USA, the middlemen, the kickbacks — became the primary vehicle for a quarter-century of payments
- Why FIFA's self-policing structure made detection nearly impossible
Key documents cited:
- US Department of Justice superseding indictment, December 2015
- Cleary Gottlieb compliance analysis
- Bloomberg and PBS investigative reporting on Traffic Sports
Full transcript and source links: thefifafiles.com/episodes/3-the-machine
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