Corrupt Minds Think Alike
Tariq Panja, reporting for The New York Times: The five men should have been in a celebratory mood. FIFA had just pulled off a World Cup that broke records on a number of fronts. Its spectacular culmination, the final, was a day away from kickoff. But their mood was anything but jubilant. The men, a group of top directors known as the FIFA bureau of the management board, had been summoned to a…
Five men found themselves in a state of shock at a secret meeting held at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Manhattan. The gathering, orchestrated by the FIFA bureau of the management board, was mandated to approve a plan that would fundamentally alter the landscape of soccer. The proposal, which aimed to sell a significant portion of FIFA's stake to a group of investors led by Joshua Kushner, president Trump's son-in-law's brother, sent shockwaves through the soccer community.
The mere thought of such a move, privatizing a World Cup event that FIFA had orchestrated for 96 consecutive years, was met with disbelief and outrage. The director's stoic reaction to the potential scheme, expressed as "the dumbest corrupt scheme to privatize the World Cup, or me, for not assuming from the start that the Trump family was involved in it somehow," highlights the magnitude of the impending controversy.
Written by urgent.news from Daring Fireball's reporting — not their text. Machine-written; read the original for the full account.
