Well, that escalated quickly. Midway through Tuesday afternoon Fifa’s sudden decision to publish the whole of the Garcia report into the conduct of the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bids felt like a momentous, possibly vital moment of outage. Here it was at last, the chance to digest Garcia’s toxic innards; to find, perhaps, the smoking machine gun at the heart of this entire epic saga of human folly and greed.

An hour or so later, as the pages flickered past, Full Garcia already felt like something else, perhaps the great unreadable post-modern football novel we’ve been waiting for all these years, an account so veiled and tangled and semi-anecdotal the instant response is a kind of sickly laughter in the dark.

Fifa’s reaction to the first leaked extracts in the German newspaper Bild had been suspiciously obliging, accompanied by some wretchedly self-serving cant about its own unexpected conversion to the principles of openness and transparency. Fifa insisted it had been planning to publish the whole thing anyway. And why not. There is basically not much here. Or rather there is only what we knew already, what we suspected, what has already been drip-fed in startling little chunks of double-take.

To read those 400 pages is to subject yourself to a strangely vague and rambling version of the most gripping story of modern day sporting chicanery ever told, and to do so already reduced to a state of desiccated cynicism, desensitised to the skankings and rippings-off.

“I am in blood stepped in so far that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er,” Macbeth says at one point, and this is pretty much where we are with Fifa and World Cups. More than half of the 2018 and 2022 Fifa ExCo members who voted in this sorry process have been banned or indicted.

Just thumbing through the index captures a series of half-glimpsed, oddly familiar tableaux: “The U-20 Trinidad and Tobago Team’s visits to Cyprus … Michel Platini’s Meeting with Nicolas Sarkozy and the Qatari Emir … Ricardo Teixeira’s Accommodations … Painting from Vyacheslav Koloskov … Business Opportunity in Qatar for a Friend’s Son.” Before long you find yourself simply nodding along as Garcia tells us about Japan’s bid team distributing valuable wooden balls, pendants, bags and a digital camera worth $1,200, most of which no one seems to remember ever getting.

Through all this Garcia wanders, looking baffled and angsty, worrying away at the edge of things. It isn’t hard to see why he stormed off the set in December 2014, annoyed at Fifa’s “incomplete and erroneous” 42-page summary of his report. Garcia must have been driven to distraction by the sheer impotence of the process, the sense of another world out of reach, doors behind doors, the basic impossibility of getting anywhere in a compress with no legal force to seize or subpoena. Instead he relies on honesty and cooperation from a group of people you would probably assemble en masse on a podium simply to demonstrate exactly what the polar opposite of all these qualities looks like in the flesh.

Watching the FA do Fifa politics is like witnessing your dad attempt to disco dance

The best bits involve our own FA, whose failed bid is revealed as a tale of bafflingly inept and callow attempts at exerting soft power. As Garcia notes “[Jack] Warner sought to exploit the perception of his power, showering England’s bid team with inappropriate requests … England 2018’s response shows an unfortunate willingness, time and again, to meet that expectation.”

Or in other words welcome to Getting Richard Sebro A Job, a section that could perhaps be expanded into its own TV mini-series or a meandering romantic comedy. In 2009 and 2010 Warner repeatedly pressed the English FA to Get Richard Sebro A Job, Sebro being a young man Warner describes as “close to my adopted son”.

The FA duly scurries around trying to get him a job. Eventually Sebro, a 20-something graduate with little in the way of prospects, gets a job at Tottenham Hotspur, and then at Aston Villa, a career progression mirrored by Tim Sherwood’s equally mercurial managerial path. LinkedIn suggests Sebro is now working as an “environmental analyst at the Ministry of Energy and Energy Affairs in Trinidad and Tobago”, which just goes to show things can work out if you stick at it.

At the end of which what leaps out is the abject quality of the FA’s toadying. Watching the FA do Fifa politics is like witnessing your dad attempt to disco dance. You keep wanting to shout ‘no, not the shiny handbags, the dinner in a mid-range hotel’. Broker a gas pipe deal. Seal a trade pact. Or at least try to be a bit more like Russia, who are the real winners here, who stood aloof from the Garcia report from the start, and whose World Cup bid emerges basically untouched from these 400 pages.

Russian contempt for the process shines through. We learn Vladimir Putin held meetings in Russia with six men who voted in the World Cup bidding process, and you think, yeah, only six. The terrible bad luck of the destroyed correspondence, the mysterious leased computers, the total lack of evidence of anything rears its head again.

This is the main problem for Garcia. He could only investigate what people were prepared to tell him. What emerges is at worst a culture of murk and greed, grasping mandarins who really should be nowhere near sport, all of it enacted with a kind of pantomime sneer behind the hand.

It is towards the start of Garcia that we get the authentic Fifa voice, a note of cold hard real-talk that clangs through the chaff and the blather. Garcia goes to interview Ángel María Villar Llona and is assailed with what sounds like genuine anger. “Who started this investigation,” Villar Llona demands 'Was it you, Mr. Garcia? Was it Fifa? Was it the President? General Secretary? Executive Committee? Congress? The media? I want to know who gave order to whoever staff member handed you the documents. I need to know who’s behind all this.”

The sheer affront at being investigated by his own organisation’s ethics committee tells its own story. Garcia concludes: “Only by listening to the audio record of the interview can the truly disturbing nature of Mr Villar Llona’s conduct be fully appreciated,” but he’s wrong there. Don’t worry Mike. For all the blanks, the dead ends, the stubbed toes, the picture is pretty clear.