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CHRISTINE BRENNAN
World Cup

Brennan: Sepp Blatter's FIFA finally starts to face accountability

Christine Brennan
USA TODAY Sports
In 2010, Qatar was awarded the 2022 World Cup.

We call it soccer. They call it football. It's the most beloved sport in the world; not here, of course, but almost everywhere else. The sweep and power and depth of soccer, and its leaders, has always been unmatched. FIFA, the sport's international federation, could allegedly take bribes and launder money and wheel and deal and plunder the sports landscape at will. There was no one with the fortitude to stop it.

Until Wednesday morning.

In a raid on a five-star hotel in Zurich that led to the arrest of seven world-wide soccer executives who meekly hid behind white hotel bedsheets as they were being taken away, their comeuppance complete, we realized there is something even more powerful than the world's favorite sport.

It's the U.S. Department of Justice, working in concert with the FBI.

Finally, FIFA has met its match. Sepp Blatter, meet Loretta Lynch, the new U.S. attorney general. She's the person who announced the biggest corruption bust in the history of sports — allegedly more than $150 million in bribes and kickbacks over two decades — in New York hours after the raid in Switzerland.

So far Blatter, FIFA's longtime president, has been neither indicted nor arrested. But the investigation is young. Lynch and her colleagues made a point to say, several times, that their work is not over, that "this is the beginning, not the end."

It is both fascinating and fitting that it would be the United States, a nation that doesn't care as much about soccer as so many others, to be the one to take on the task of bringing down what Lynch and other top U.S. law enforcement officials described as international sport's version of organized crime, mob bosses and all.

Not only did the illegal and unethical activities — the money laundering and bribery and fraud and whatnot — go on through U.S. financial institutions, it's also true that the United States is not beholden to soccer the way so many other countries are. A show of hands, please, if you've ever even heard of Blatter. Most soccer-loving nations probably know him better than their own president or prime minister. Here, almost no one knows him at all.

True soccer nations live in awe, and fear, of the power of Blatter and FIFA to control their national sport, and all the companies and livelihoods linked to it. Not Americans. We have far too many other sports we care about, several that are far more interesting to us than soccer, chief among them our football.

Would Brazil investigate FIFA? Germany? Italy? Argentina? Of course not.

So it's left to the relative newcomers to the game to try to clean it up for the rest of the world. If Americans have thought about the leadership of international soccer at all in this country, we've most likely pictured it in these terms: Big egos, big money, big corruption.

We were not wrong.

For those who recall the Salt Lake City Olympic bribery scandal from the late 1990s, here's a way to gauge the scope of this new scandal:

Salt Lake City is a kindergarten class. FIFA is an Ivy League PhD program.

VIDEO: WHAT'S NEXT FOR FIFA?

This couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch than Blatter and his soccer boys. And I do mean boys. International football is a sport that has always considered women to be second-class citizens, to the point that FIFA refused to install real grass in the stadiums of Canada for next month's Women's World Cup, making the women play on artificial turf — something it never would have forced on the men.

So now here's that sport, taken apart piece by corrupt piece, by a U.S. team led by a woman. Oh, the irony. Move over, Mia Hamm, Abby Wambach, Marta. Lynch has become the most important woman in soccer.

The most important man is still Blatter, who was planning to be re-elected to a fifth term as FIFA's big cheese on Friday, at meetings in the hotel that all of a sudden turned into CSI: Zurich. The certainty of these FIFA elections would make Stalin proud, but now it's difficult to imagine the election going forward as planned.

Then again, Blatter would be the first to tell us that he is innocent, at least for now, unlike quite a few of the sycophants and cronies in his inner circle. Based on what we now know from the authorities, he apparently had no idea what had been going on for decades in his organization.

"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."

The great Oz has spoken.

Happy election week, Sepp.

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