US Attorney General Loretta Lynch spoke at a press conference earlier following arrests made in Zurich. She announced charges against nine Fifa officials and five corporate executives.
Statement: We are here to announce the unsealing of charges and the arrests of individuals as part of our long-running investigation into bribery and corruption in the world of organised soccer.
Many of the individuals and organisations we will describe today were entrusted with keeping soccer open and accessible to all.
They held important responsibilities at every level, from building soccer fields for children in developing countries to organising the World Cup.
They were expected to uphold the rules that keep soccer honest, and protect the integrity of the game. Instead, they corrupted the business of worldwide soccer to serve their interests and enrich themselves.
This Department of Justice is determined to end these practices; to root out corruption; and to bring wrongdoers to justice.
The 14 defendants charged in the indictment we are unsealing today include high-ranking officials of FIFA, the international organisation responsible for regulating and promoting soccer; leaders of regional and other governing bodies under the FIFA umbrella; and sports marketing executives who, according to the indictment, paid millions of dollars in bribes and kickbacks to obtain lucrative media and marketing rights to international soccer tournaments.
The 47-count indictment against these individuals includes charges of racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering conspiracies spanning two decades.
FIFA and the regional bodies under its umbrella make money, in part, by selling commercial rights to their soccer tournaments to sports marketing companies, often through multi-year contracts covering multiple editions of the tournaments.
The sports marketing companies, in turn, sell those rights downstream to TV and radio broadcast networks, major corporate sponsors and other entities for significant sums of money.
Beginning in 1991, two generations of soccer officials, including the then-presidents of two regional soccer confederations under FIFA – the Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football, known as CONCACAF, which includes the United States, and the South American Football Confederation, or CONMEBOL, which represents organised soccer in South America – used their positions of trust within their respective organisations to solicit bribes from sports marketers in exchange for the commercial rights to their soccer tournaments.
They did this over and over, year after year, tournament after tournament.
