The 2026 World Cup Could Be the Most Corrupt Ever

U.S. prosecutors accused individuals (and collaborators) of FIFA’s exclusive 24-member executive committee of choosing World Cup venues and awarding contracts influenced by hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes. According to the indictments, the head of FIFA’s regional Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football, or CONCACAF, Blazer’s boss Jack Warner, raked in $10 million alone for voting for South Africa to be a World Cup venue, a fraction of his total take. Warner, who lives in Trinidad, has denied all the charges and has stayed out of the U.S. since his indictment.

Warner also picked Qatar to host the 2022 World Cup. (Blazer, who lived in Forest Hills, Queens, as a boy and New Rochelle, New York, later on, told confidants he did not, since the U.S. was vying to be the World Cup venue the same year.) Qatar had no stadiums adequate for World Cup play when its bid was accepted. In the course of fulfilling its commitments, hundreds of immigrant workers lost their lives in accidents building the stadiums and other projects for the event—a reality that Qatar’s own World Cup chief has admitted. Human rights organizations say thousands died leading up to the Cup. Staging the World Cup in Qatar cost an estimated record-busting $220 billion.

By the time federal agents confronted Blazer outside Trump Tower in November 2011, he had raked in his own multi-million-dollar income, helping himself to at least a 10 percent cut of every deal he made, and an additional untold fortune under the table throughout his 11-year reign as CONCACAF general secretary. He paid no taxes for 20 years, Gaeta noted, a fact leveraged by agents to force his cooperation in their investigation.