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- [00:16]
Sony Kassam
It's 9am on the outskirts of Zurich. A journalist has been given an address and told to show up. He finds a cafe that is agreed to open for just one man. A limo pulls up. A young aide steps out first, then helps a small elderly man onto the pavement. He walks in. The staff greet him by name. He shakes every hand. His name is Sepp Blatter. For nearly two decades, he ran FIFA, the Swiss based organization that controls the most popular sport on earth, soccer. He oversaw billions of dollars. He he helped decide which countries got to host the World Cup. And he survived scandal after scandal. By the time of that morning, he was fighting corruption charges stemming from millions of dollars in bribes and kickbacks. And he wanted to talk.
- [01:08]
Simon Cooper
The FBI had alleged that he was a senior figure in corruption. But he sits down with me and he looks at me and he thinks, who is this guy? How do I charm him? I'm sitting there realizing I now to be very careful not to be charmed.
- [01:23]
Sony Kassam
That's Financial Times reporter and Simon Cooper, the journalist in the cafe. But to understand Blatter and what he built and how it collapsed, you first need to understand the game of soccer itself and how the World cup came to be. I'm Sony Kassam and today on 1440 Explorers, we dig into the story of soccer, the FIFA World cup, and the small group of men who ran the world's game for their own benefit. Stay with us. Every 27 seconds, someone makes their first sale on Shopify. But behind every breakthrough, there's a universe of untold stories. Instock is Shopify's newsletter about entrepreneurship. Sometimes it's a peek behind the curtain of a fast rising brand. Sometimes it's the data and trends changing how we shop and work. Always it's real and unfiltered. Subscribe for free at shopify.substack.com. Soccer is the most popular sport on earth, period. Its biggest event, the World cup final, reached nearly 1.5 billion viewers in 2022. That's roughly 11 times more than the Super bowl in 2026. And yet, if you're listening in the United States, you may have spent very little time thinking about it, because to some, soccer can seem boring.
- [03:02]
Simon Cooper
People say that the lack of goals in soccer is a weakness sometimes.
- [03:07]
Sony Kassam
That's Financial Times reporter and author Simon Cooper.
- [03:10]
Simon Cooper
But in fact, the lack of goals is a strength of soccer. Because when there is a goal, it's this moment of incredible excitement and emotion that you don't get in, say, basketball or baseball, where they're scoring all the time.
- [03:27]
Sony Kassam
A simple game that delivers a rare kind of suspense. And every four years, that suspense builds toward the biggest event in the biggest sport in the world, the World cup, which we'll get to in a moment. Versions of the game existed long before there was anything called soccer or football as most of the world knows it.
- [03:46]
Simon Cooper
People had always kicked balls for thousands of years. And so there's records of the Aztecs doing it, the Chinese, these games that existed everywhere.
- [03:55]
Sony Kassam
Variations on soccer existed all over the world, maybe with slightly different rules or ways of scoring, but the basic idea was the. You have two sides, one ball, and a fight to get it into the other side's space. Then slowly the game gets standardized.
- [04:14]
Simon Cooper
The real change is when they're codified in England in 1863, so a bunch of upper class Englishmen get together. They'd all played versions of football at kind of posh, mostly boarding schools. And they said, let's have the same rules. So we could play against each other even after leaving school, because each school would have its own rules. So in 1863, they write the laws of the game. And at the time, Britain is the world's superpower. It has lots of colonies.
- [04:41]
Sony Kassam
And that matters because once the rules are fixed, the game can travel. Britain had colonies all over the world, so the game and its rules get exported everywhere. The modern version of soccer is simple. Eleven players on each side, one goal at either end. And with one major exception, the goalkeeper. No hands. And that simplicity turns out to be one of soccer's secret weapons.
- [05:05]
Simon Cooper
The fact you see a game, you immediately understand it. You reckon you can do it yourself, and then there's not much equipment is required, so you need a ball. That's kind of it. And you can make a ball out of old rags. If you don't have any money at all.
- [05:19]
Sony Kassam
That opens the game up to almost everyone.
- [05:22]
Simon Cooper
And so poor people also start playing soccer. It's not like fencing or canoeing. It's not like cricket, where you need a grass field that is kept in perfect condition. You can play soccer on any surface.
- [05:38]
Sony Kassam
And once masses of people are playing it, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, masses of people start watching it too.
- [05:45]
Simon Cooper
It becomes very popular very quickly. So by, say, 1900, in a lot of cities, especially in Europe and in southern Latin America, you have very big crowds coming to watch games. And then there's money coming in, because you can charge the spectators, they pay money. And so then what do you do with that money?
- [06:05]
Sony Kassam
You pay players, you build clubs, you schedule more matches. Basically, the game starts to professionalize. And once the game professionalizes, once there are paying crowds, organized clubs, and national teams playing across borders, someone has to set common rules and organize those international matches. Right? That's where the International Federation of Association Football, aka FIFA, comes in.
- [06:31]
Simon Cooper
FIFA is founded in 1904 by men from a few European countries because communications have improved their railways. Soccer is growing. So you want to have a national team that plays against men's national teams from other countries.
- [06:45]
Sony Kassam
National federations popped up in most countries. They organized the sport inside their borders. What FIFA does is it sits right above these federations. It brings those federations into one international structure, setting rules for competition between them and gradually becoming the body that governs world soccer. You might be wondering, wait, why would these national federations agree to give up power? Well, because on their own, they can't run international soccer at all. If every country sets its own rules, its own schedules, its own standards, there is no global game. It's just sort of anarchy. Okay, to understand what happens next, you need one more piece of context. In the early 1900s, international soccer mostly lived at the Olympics. That was where national teams met and where the game presented itself to the world. But there is a problem. The Olympics are for amateurs, meaning players aren't supposed to be paid. Yet, as we've seen, soccer is changing. Clubs are growing, crowds are exploding, and the best players are now professionals. So the biggest international stage in the sport has a basic flaw. It can't fully accommodate the sport as it actually exists. The game's top global competition is still built around amateurs. And so FIFA starts thinking, if soccer is going to become a truly global sport, it needs its own tournament, one that belongs just to soccer, not one that shares the stage with track and field and hammer throwing.
- [08:24]
Simon Cooper
They say, we should have a World Cup. We should have a kind of tournament where the best teams in the world play against each other. World championship.
- [08:31]
Sony Kassam
That idea becomes reality in 1930 when FIFA stages the first World cup in Uruguay. It's all very early days. It's small and almost experimental. Of the four European teams competing, three come over on the same ship, and they all train on the ship's deck.
- [08:49]
Simon Cooper
It's like a holiday outing. It's incredibly exciting.
- [08:55]
Sony Kassam
And that excitement fills the home country. The Uruguay stadiums are packed.
- [09:00]
Simon Cooper
And at the end, it's decided, you know what? This World cup experiment, it kind of works. We like it. Let's do it again.
- [09:06]
Sony Kassam
And they do. What follows is a series of escalating successes. Newspapers start writing about it. Radio starts to Broadcast games. And because the rules are easy to grasp and the drama is easy to feel, the World cup quickly gives soccer a global reach. Even if in the United States it never quite catches on the same way. Overshadowed by baseball and later American football. Then in the 1950s, comes the next great TV.
- [09:35]
Simon Cooper
With television, it reaches these new territories and it starts to become really the global game, not just the Euro, Latin American game.
- [09:43]
Sony Kassam
And television doesn't just make the World cup more visible, it makes it more valuable. With a tournament now broadcast into millions of homes, the audience explodes and the money follows. By the 1960s, the World cup was starting to look like the World cup of today. Every four years, the whole world tries to qualify. Of these teams, around 16 make it to the knockout phase. Lose once and you're out seven games to win it all. One country lifts the trophy and for four years calls itself the best in the world. And the scale is massive by the modern era. The final match alone draws over a billion viewers. Entire countries stop to watch. It's not just a tournament. This is one of the largest shared events on the planet. By the 1970s and 80s, under FIFA's longtime president, Joao Avalonge, and his Swiss number two step bladder, the world cup is no longer just a championship. It's a stage where politics, national identity and power all play out. And nowhere is this more on display than in the 1986 World cup, specifically the quarterfinal match between Argentina and England.
- [10:57]
Simon Cooper
So four years before, in 1982, Britain and Argentina have fought the Falklands War over the possession of a few islands off the coast of Argentina.
- [11:05]
Sony Kassam
Britain won, but some 650 Argentinian soldiers were killed. So when Argentinian legend Diego Maradona takes the field against England, this is not just a game. It's loaded with revenge and national pride.
- [11:19]
Simon Cooper
Maradona trying to drive forward again. Steve Hodges put it in the air. And Maradona jumps. And Maradona scores. England claim handball, scores two legendary goals. One with his hand. He cheats. And then soon after that hand goal, he scores a goal where he dribbles through the whole England team. Just one of the best goals in the history of soccer. Maradona turned past two and runs away from reed and then gets past Butcher and Pasta Nova. And Maradona goes on. Why it's so famous is because it's about more than soccer. It's about politics and national pride and nationalism. Off the field, it's about the soccer. But it's also about more than the soccer. World Cups are a great way to understand the world and as the World
- [12:07]
Sony Kassam
cup grows, FIFA's power grows with it. Because FIFA doesn't just run the tournament, it also controls one of the most coveted decisions in global sports. Who gets to host it? Countries would spend years building their case. Stadium plans, transit plans, new hotels, security. They would lobby super hard and make huge promises. But the final choice was not made by the full FIFA membership, meaning the 211 member associations. This is basically how the Olympics operate. You have hundreds of member associations that all vote no. This decision used to be made by a small executive committee, just a few dozen men voting behind closed doors. And this is where the scale of the World cup starts to collide with the FIFA. That is still really small and insular. Because while this is now the biggest event in the biggest sport in the world, some of the most important decisions still sit in the hands of a tiny circle of officials. Investigators would later say it was a setup that invited abuse. In 2015, the US Department of Justice accused FIFA officials of running a sprawling bribery scheme involving more than $150 million. And looming over all of it was FIFA president Sepp Blatter. He had run FIFA for 17 years. He was not charged in the main US case, but he led the institution at the center of it. He had mastered its politics and outlasted almost everyone around him. Now that whole world was starting to collapse. After the break, Simon Cooper sits down with Blatter in a cafe outside Zurich, face to face with the man who knew better than almost anyone how FIFA really worked.
- [14:10]
Simon Cooper
I'm told to go to this cafe at the edge of Zurich. So I go out to the edge and it's becoming farmland, there's hills, it's
- [14:20]
Sony Kassam
nine in the morning. On the outskirts of Zurich, Switzerland, Simon Cooper has been given a street number where he's supposed to meet Sep Blatter, the longtime FIFA president and for years one of the most powerful men in world soccer. After some searching, Simon finds the cafe.
- [14:38]
Simon Cooper
Cafe is closed, but the cafe is opening specially for set. And then this limousine stops outside and this young man gets out and he helps this tiny older man out of the limousine. The FBI had alleged that he was a senior figure in corruption. He was fighting all these corruption allegations. But he comes out and he sits down with me and he looks me in the eye. And a lot of powerful, important people you interview, they don't really care who you are. They're not interested in the people around them. They. He looks at me and he thinks, who is this guy? How do I charm him? And I'm sitting there Realizing I now have to be very careful not to be charmed.
- [15:18]
Sony Kassam
If you want to understand how FIFA worked at the height of its power, Blatter is your guy. He didn't just witness that world, he grew up inside it. For nearly two decades, he sat at the top of FIFA. If corruption became part of the institution, it happened on his watch.
- [15:35]
Simon Cooper
And so I sit down with him for a couple of hours. He gives me the story of his life in football and how he rose to the top of soccer.
- [15:44]
Sony Kassam
Blatter joined FIFA in 1975. He was in his 30s. The FIFA president at the time was Joao Havalange, the Brazilian who had taken over in the 1970s. And FIFA still looked small. Its Zurich headquarters had just 12 staff members. Blatter rose fast inside that world. He started as technical director in 1981. He became general secretary, which is basically the top administrator in the building. Then in 1998, he took over from Havalonge and became FIFA president himself. Okay, what does the president of FIFA really preside over? First, the most valuable thing FIFA owns,
- [16:23]
Simon Cooper
the biggest property, maybe in all of sports, is the Men's World cup, which we're having again this summer. And the Men's World cup brings in several billion every four years.
- [16:36]
Sony Kassam
And that money comes from television rights, sponsorship and marketing deals, licensing, hospitality, and ticket sales. In FIFA's own finances, the World cup is the engine for the 2019-2022 cycle. FIFA brought in $7.6 billion, mostly tied to the tournament. In theory, that money is supposed to go back into the sport, to its 211 member associations, to training centers, fields, equipment, travel, and youth programs. As we'll see, that's not always what happened. The president's other huge job is helping decide where the World cup goes next. Countries bid and make their case, then FIFA chooses. And that prize is so prestigious that governments line up for it, even though economists have spent years warning that hosting often doesn't pay off and can even hurt tourism. So to recap, the FIFA president oversees the bidding process for who gets to host, sells the television and commercial rights, and decides how the money moves back. In the cafe outside Zurich, Simon is sitting across from Sepp Blatter, taking it all in as he recounts his life and the ins and outs of his rise to the presidency. Blatter leans in as he talks, holding eye contact, gesturing with his hands, drawing Simon in with the ease of someone who has spent decades winning people over. There's a warmth to it, a sense that you've been brought into his Circle. But Simon knows that's not really why he's there. At a certain point, the conversation has to move away from the polished life story and toward the harder chapter, when that system came under real pressure, when scrutiny intensified, and when things inside FIFA began to come apart. So Simon pivots to that period and starts walking us through what they talked about.
- [18:36]
Simon Cooper
If you're a president of a small federation, say, on a Caribbean island, and there's maybe 500 people in your country that play soccer, organized soccer, which is not unusual, you know, there's a lot of small countries in the world, and then FIFA typically gives each federation the same amounts of money. So whether you're Germany, China, or island in the Caribbean Sea, you get, say, $20 million from the FIFA World cup rights is the basic. Now, if you're the president of a small island football Federation, you get $20 million from FIFA. Well, you don't have to necessarily tell anyone. You put it in your pocket. You get it paid into a bank account, offshore bank account. So a lot of that money disappears.
- [19:14]
Sony Kassam
Simon says it's not just the small
- [19:16]
Simon Cooper
countries in the US as well. You had Chuck Blazer, who was the main American within FIFA. He was taking enormous amount of kickbacks. So a lot of the money that was meant for US Soccer was disappearing into Chuck Blazer's accounts. The guy had two apartments at one point in Trump Tower paid for from FIFA money, one of which was for his cats.
- [19:37]
Sony Kassam
What Blatter understood is that power inside FIFA didn't come from the biggest countries. It came from the votes. And there were a lot of them, dozens of smaller federations, each with the same vote as Germany or Brazil, many of them reliant on FIFA money to run. And so over time, FIFA and Blatter built a system where World cup money flowed out in the name of development with so little oversight that it was ripe for abuse. But we should mention the striking thing about Blatter is that he didn't seem driven, first of all by the fantasy of becoming super rich. The reporting on him points instead to something more political. A man obsessed with holding the presidency, with staying at the center of the game, with being the one person world soccer ran through. Simon Cooper says there was never much of a real enforcement system here. No serious mechanisms checking where the money was going, no real appetite to look too closely.
- [20:38]
Simon Cooper
FIFA doesn't really have that. FIFA doesn't want its most senior, most powerful people to be sent to jail. I mean, FIFA exists to serve those people. There's very little control on FIFA. It's just a kind of a few guys in a cash box in Switzerland. Switzerland, historically, has left them alone to do what they want.
- [20:54]
Sony Kassam
And under Blatter, that weak oversight didn't just create opportunities for abuse, it created leverage.
- [21:01]
Simon Cooper
Okay, you've given them money, they vote for you as FIFA president. And also, if you ever, one of them turns against you, makes trouble for you, you say, oh, well, I have some evidence that you've been stealing money. And then you produce that evidence and the guy is disciplined and he disappears.
- [21:17]
Sony Kassam
That is where the fault lies. Not that Blatter personally pocketed every dollar that went missing in some federation far from Zurich. There isn't a clear public finding that he knowingly approved of every theft. The problem is that he ran a patronage system. FIFA money went out, political support came back, and the lack of oversight meant officials could misuse funds while the president got their loyalty. That feedback loop is what made the whole structure so rotten. By this point, the problem inside FIFA wasn't just money flowing out with too little oversight. The real problem was that the World cup was now one of the most valuable events in the world. Countries wanted the prestige, the contracts and influence that came with hosting it. And for years, the decision of who hosted rested not with all of FIFA's members, but with the small executive committee. That's important, because by now, FIFA had spent years operating in a culture where money, favors and political loyalty were all mixed up. So when countries competed for the World cup, they entered a system that was already vulnerable. By 2010, the stakes were unusually high. FIFA was choosing two hosts at once, the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. The United States wanted 2022 badly. It put in a serious, well funded bid that carried the weight of the world's most powerful country. And when Simon Cooper looks back on Sepp Blatter's presidency, this is the moment he returns to.
- [22:51]
Simon Cooper
I think the big thing he regretted is kind of the biggest moment of his tenure. It's December 2, 2010, in Zurich.
- [22:57]
Sony Kassam
Blatter is on stage. The cameras are on. He's about to announce the hosts of the next two World Cups. It's a big, splashy, slightly tacky event, but for soccer, this is the Oscars. No one knows what's inside the envelope until it's opened. So he takes one envelope.
- [23:17]
Simon Cooper
And so the 2018 FIFA World cup, ladies and gentlemen, will be organized in Russia.
- [23:30]
Sony Kassam
And even that is unsettling. Russia is already a controversial choice, fresh off the 2008 war with Georgia and increasingly seen in the west as an authoritarian state using big global events to polish its image. But that's not the real shock. Plenty of people already suspected 2018 might go to Russia. And then Blatter opens the second envelope for 2022.
- [23:56]
Simon Cooper
The winner to organize the 2022 FIFA World cup is Qatar. So when he pulls the word, the name Qatar out of the envelope and he holds it up and he says, qatar, he is not smiling, which you're supposed to smile. Obviously, you're unveiling the host of the World Cup. But he's thinking, oh, my, my 22 guys have chosen Russia and Qatar.
- [24:29]
Sony Kassam
That reaction is telling because Blatter had, yes, helped build the system, but he actually didn't fully control every person inside it. And now the executive committee had made two decisions that were going to bring enormous scrutiny. Russia was controversial for many reasons, but Qatar was explosive.
- [24:51]
Simon Cooper
It's a tiny Gulf state, 300,000 Qataris. But this country is way too hot to host a summer World Cup. You know, temperatures well above 110 degrees in summer, and there's no soccer culture. You know, games there might attract 300 spectators.
- [25:05]
Sony Kassam
And for the United States to lose that vote to Qatar made the result much harder to brush off. This wasn't just surprising, it looked suspicious. Even before the vote, two FIFA executive committee members had been suspended over allegations they were willing to sell their votes. Later, US prosecutors would allege that bribes were paid in connection with Qatar's bid at the cafe. Simon puts it to Blatter directly. Some executive committee members took money to vote for Qatar. Right, But Blatter stays firm. I don't know that, he says. I don't know. People said they have given money, but in the know or not in the know, Vlatter is no fool. Standing there on stage, he has to sense that this is the moment the scrutiny is about to become impossible to contain.
- [25:56]
Simon Cooper
The Western countries are going to be very angry and the US is going to seek retribution. And the US was quite right to seek retribution because bribes were paid. But I think if the US had won, the FBI would not have been pushed to investigate the bribery within FIFA.
- [26:13]
Sony Kassam
For years, FIFA's internal culture had been tolerated. But this vote forced the system into the open. The same closed structure that let money move quietly through FIFA had now touched the most visible decision the organization could make. Once Russia and Qatar won, the scrutiny intensified. Investigators, journalists and prosecutors started pushing harder. The questions became who had voted for whom, exactly what promises had been made, what shady payments were made? As Simon sits across from him, taking it down nearly word for word Blatter says quote if the US had had the World cup, then the whole organization of FIFA would not have been in such a crazy, critical situation. The Americans, bad losers attacked FIFA. Blatter wasn't charged in the main US bribery case and was later acquitted in Swiss court. But this was still the beginning of the end for him. The system he had spent years mastering was now impossible to contain. Sponsors start to pull back, Viva's leadership is unraveling and the legitimacy of the World cup itself is now in question. Days after being re elected president, Blatter announces he will step down after nearly 20 years at the top. The system that kept him in power is the same system that brings him down. Back outside the cafe, the morning has settled into something quieter. Blatter's driver was waiting by the car, his press staffer also nearby. Inside the cafe, staff who opened early for Blatter were still moving about. Each one had been greeted with a handshake as Blatter walked in a small procession of recognition, a familiarity of a man who for a long time was used to being at the center of things. Toward the end of their conversation, Simon asks Blatter one more question. How does he want to be remembered by this point? Blatter is tired, Simon tells me, so he switches to German and he says one correct meaning proper or accurate. If the judgment of him was truly correct, he tells Simon, then, quote, you should say he's the man who brought international football into the world. 2 billion followers. In his telling Soccer's global rise this massive shared thing wasn't driven by television or history or the millions of people who played was him. Many thanks to Simon Cooper, author of World Cup A Soccer Journey in nine Tournaments, for joining us in today's episode. And thanks to all of you for listening to 1440 explores. I'm Sony Kassam. Make sure to follow the show and leave a review on Spotify, Apple or wherever you listen to your podcasts and let us know what you thought of this episode at podcastsoin140.com 1440 explores is a production of Frime Media for 1440 Media. This episode was produced by Nicolo Minoni and edited by Dan Bobkoff. Our fact checker is Alice Jones and our sound designer is Jake Howitt. The executive producer at Rhyme is Dan Bobkoff and the executive producers at 1440 are me and Drew Steigerwald.