Multiple FIFA officials arrested in Switzerland..

As leaders of FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, gathered for their annual meeting, more than a dozen plain-clothed Swiss law enforcement officials arrived unannounced at the Baur au Lac hotel, an elegant five-star property with views of the Alps and Lake Zurich. They went to the front desk to get keys and proceeded upstairs to the rooms.

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The charges allege widespread corruption in FIFA over the past two decades, involving bids for World Cups as well as marketing and broadcast deals, according to three law enforcement officials with direct knowledge of the case. The charges include wire fraud, racketeering and money laundering, and officials said they targeted members of FIFA’s powerful executive committee, which wields enormous power and does its business largely in secret.

This can’t come as too much of a surprise to anyone who follows international football (soccer, to us American plebes). There have been rumors of bribes paid by potential World Cup host countries to members of FIFA for years and years. They became louder when the Cup hosting duties were awarded to Russia for 2018 and especially Qatar for 2022.

The selection of Qatar was widely questioned because of the tiny emirate’s blistering heat, human rights record and lack of history in the sport, along with the close ties of its ruling family to FIFA President Sepp Blatter, who is expected to win re-election this week.

Blatter has not yet been charged and may not be. If not, a lot of people in the football world will be disappointed, as he’s been fighting corruption charges for years. One of the reasons for those charges is FIFA’s behavior after it did an internal investigation of the Cup awards for those years.

Last year, FIFA closed its own internal investigation, saying there was no corruption in the World Cup bidding in a 42-page summary of a report by Michael J. Garcia, a former U.S. attorney for Manhattan.

Garcia resigned in protest over FIFA’s refusal to release his full 430-page report, which he filed in September, and he has expressed deep frustration that a nondisclosure agreement bars him from publicizing his own findings.

I don’t know, but if an organization’s chief investigator is angry that his full report has been withheld from public view, my suspicion is that it’s got less-than-complimentary things to say about the people who commissioned the investigation.