In May 2006 British investigative reporter Andrew Jennings' book Foul! The Secret World of FIFA: Bribes, Vote-Rigging and Ticket Scandals (Harper Collins) caused controversy within the football world by detailing an alleged international cash-for-contracts scandal following the collapse of FIFA's marketing partner ISL, and revealed how some football officials have been urged to secretly repay the sweeteners they received. The book also alleged that vote-rigging had occurred in the fight for Sepp Blatter's continued control of FIFA.
Shortly after the release of Foul! a BBC television exposé by Jennings and BBC producer Roger Corke for the BBC news programme Panorama was broadcast. In this hour-long programme, screened on June 11, 2006, Jennings and the Panorama team agree that Sepp Blatter was being investigated by Swiss police over his role in a secret deal to repay more than £1m worth of bribes pocketed by football officials.
All testimonies offered in the Panorama expose were provided through a disguised voice, appearance, or both, save one; Mel Brennan, formerly a lecturer at Towson University in the United States (and from 2001–2003 Head of Special Projects for CONCACAF, a liaison to the e-FIFA project and a 2002 FIFA World Cup delegate), became the first high-level football insider to go public with substantial allegations of greed, corruption, nonfeasance and malfeasance by CONCACAF and FIFA leadership. During the Panorama exposé, Brennan—the highest-level African-American in the history of world football governance—Jennings and many others exposed allegedly inappropriate allocations of money at CONCACAF, and drew connections between ostensible CONCACAF criminality and similar behaviours at FIFA. Since then, and in the light of fresh allegations of bribery and corruption and opaque action by FIFA in late 2010 [4], both Jennings and Brennan remain highly critical of FIFA, with Brennan calling directly for an alternative to FIFA to be considered by the stakeholders of the sport throughout the world [5].
In a further Panorama documentary broadcast on BBC One on 29 November 2010, Jennings alleged that three senior FIFA officials, Nicolas Leoz, Issa Hayatou and Ricardo Teixeira, had been paid huge bribes by FIFA's marketing partner ISL between 1989 and 1999, which FIFA had failed to investigate. He claimed they appeared on a list of 175 bribes paid by ISL, totalling about $100 million. A former ISL executive said that there were suspicions within ISL that the company was only awarded the marketing contract for successive World Cups by paying bribes to FIFA officials. The programme also alleged that another current official has been repeatedly involved in reselling World Cup tickets to touts; Sepp Blatter said that FIFA had not investigated the allegation because it had not been told about it via 'official channels'. Jennings has been banned from attending any FIFA press conferences, but in the programme FIFA refused to say why.
British Prime Minister David Cameron and Andy Anson, head of the UK's World Cup bid, criticized the timing of the broadcast, three days before FIFA's decision on the host for the 2018 World Cup; the voters include officials accused by the programme.[6][7]
