When the Football Association was founded in England in 1863, football was a game for rich boys. Poor children at the time were working 12 hours a day, six days a week, in mines, mills and factories, and had no time for such things. Because the rules varied from school to school, the association was founded to bring order to the chaos, the year Lincoln freed the slaves. When the sport began to spread across Europe, the English were bemused that foreigners were trying to play their game. In 1904, their idea of an international match was still England-Scotland when some European enthusiasts founded the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, or FIFA, based in Paris. At first, the English refused to join, fearing that FIFA would institutionalize the kind of cheating on the field associated with the game as it was played in France, Italy and Latin America. What nobody anticipated was the creation of a colossus of international corruption.
FIFA is the most corrupt sports regulatory body in the world, outperforming even the Tour de France and the International Olympic Committee. This corruption is enabled by its unique legal status as a Swiss association, like a local tennis club or something. This means that it doesn’t have to publish accounts, has no shareholders and is more or less free from any legal oversight. As FIFA’s World Cup kicks off in the USA, Canada and Mexico, the real match is between American and international organized crime. Who will make the most money out of it? It doesn’t have to publish accounts, has no shareholders and is more or less free from any legal oversight. FIFA is run by Gianni Infantino, a Swiss Italian Lebanese lawyer and businessman who has single-mindedly worked to maximize turnover and profit. (In his estimation, both were served by the creation of the FIFA Peace Prize awarded to Donald Trump .) Under Infantino’s regime, Qatar, Russia the USA and Saudi Arabia have been selected to host World Cups — all countries with no real status as football superpowers, but with luxurious possibilities for bribery and billion-dollar paydays.
Infantino can shrug off anger over scandalous ticket prices, because the real money comes from the global TV audience, by far the greatest show on Earth in terms of market share. But this may soon have competition from the money at stake in match-fixing. The explosion of online sports betting has impacted international football as much as it has the NBA and the NFL. The English Premier League is followed all over the world in part because gamblers trust that its matches are among the last that can’t be fixed. With star players and managers already making millions in salaries and sponsorship, bribery is unlikely to succeed. Most other countries have suffered major match-fixing scandals in recent years. In Brazil, the world’s leading football nation (five World Cup wins), an investigation in 2024 found 109 fixed matches. William Pereira Rogatto, a prominent figure in this activity, described how it worked in detail to a parliamentary commission from his exile in Dubai, concluding that, “Only politics and drug trafficking are more lucrative than match-fixing.” He was philosophical about the suckers. “Betting companies ruin people’s lives, people who don’t have the intelligence to deal with them. I take from the betting companies. The companies take from the people and I take from them.” Interpol has set up a special international group, the Interpol Match-Fixing Task Force or IMFTF, focused on the problem, with a dragnet called Operation SOGA (for Soccer Gambling). Around the Qatar World Cup, they made 1,200 arrests, “hitting criminal syndicates hard,” as their website somewhat implausibly claims. Worldwide, SOGA operations have led to 20,300 arrests. The American competition comes from a traditional source: the Gambino, Genovese and Bonanno families that ran numbers rackets in a more innocent age. Believing soccer to be a game for girls and children, they are still mainly focused on more red-blooded American targets: NBA, baseball and underground poker games. But with sports betting exploding in the U.S. just in time for the World Cup, they are the best placed to take advantage of the fact that Yanks will be gambling on a sport they barely understand. But if the Mob is the home team this time around, the Rest of the World opposition has some impressive players. Interpol identifies the Italian mafia, the Russian mafia and the resourceful Chinese gangs as deeply involved in the worldwide practice. This World Cup will be the biggest betting event in history. As global coverage of obscure leagues and competitions widens the scope for fixing results, match-fixing continues to evolve. While high-technology refereeing and intensive media attention make it difficult to get away with changing the results in high-profile events like the World Cup finals, it is easier to manipulate the tiny details that have recently become the subject of billions in bets. Will a particular substitute be brought on? How many times will the ball be kicked off the field in the first 10 minutes? Enormous sums might suddenly be bet on a particular player getting a yellow card in the first half — and lo and behold, he miraculously starts committing obvious fouls. Or bets might appear relating to a corner kick at a particular time. Impossible to prove; hard even to investigate. One of Infantino’s innovations for this World Cup is to increase the number of countries from 32 to 48, which means that there are many poor countries involved, with coaches and players more open to bribery, and also some richer countries where doping, bribery and cheating are generally seen as the normal way of doing business.
American criminals are more direct and businesslike, on the principle of, “Never give a sucker an even break.” A mark in a poker game won’t realize that everyone in the game except him is working for the Mob, or that the table is fitted with an X-ray machine. It is hard to imagine how a soccer match could be manipulated like this, but that is the whole point, after all. You don’t tell anyone about the X-ray machine.
This World Cup will be the biggest betting event in history, with the increase in the number of teams expanding the gambling possibilities significantly. The 2022 event in Qatar attracted $35 billion in bets worldwide for its 64 matches. The 2026 version, with more than 100 games, is projected to take $50 billion, but with much gambling in East Asia taking place on illegal black sites, gambling being prohibited in China, Singapore and elsewhere, the real number is probably much higher. FIFA’s finances are difficult to pin down thanks to its unusual legal status, but its turnover for the World Cup is somewhere in the $9 billion range, with broadcasting deals the largest single element.
In September 2025, Gianni Infantino was made an honorary citizen of Reggio Calabria, universally understood to be the most mafia-dominated city in Italy. The award was presented by the mayor, Giuseppe Falcomatà, who is himself under investigation for links to organized crime. It was an event reminiscent of the FIFA Peace Prize. “I have the values of this city in my heart,” Infantino said at the ceremony.
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