Charges of corruption, bribery, money laundering and influence peddling have recently made FIFA the object of criticism and the subject of investigations.

Reporters Heidi Blake and Jonathan Calvert, authors of "The Ugly Game: The Corruption of FIFA and the Qatari Plot To Buy the World Cup,” joined Bill Littlefield.

Highlights from Bill's Conversation With Jonathan Calvert And Heidi Blake

BL: Jonathan, the story of how Qatar won the opportunity to host the 2022 World Cup began with the desire of the country’s ruler to acquire that spectacle. But the point man for the effort was Mohamed bin Hammam. Tell us a little bit about him.

JC: Well, Mohamed bin Hammam was Qatar’s top football official. He was a big football fan who rose up the ranks and became one of the FIFA Executive Committee members. While he was there, he became quite instrumental in helping the FIFA President Sepp Blatter gain power. He had presidential ambitions himself. He was an extraordinarily wealthy man, and the reason that Qatar won the right to host the 2022 World Cup was all because of Mohamed bin Hammam.

BL: There were so many reasons why that country shouldn’t have won that right: temperatures during that time of the year when the World Cup has traditionally been played, the lack of soccer tradition, the lack of facilities in which to play soccer, FIFA’s own report singling out the country as having the highest risk of "operational failure." Why did that bid go forward at all?

HB: Well, that’s the big burning question, and I think that this was a decision which just on the face of it was totally inexplicable. And I think that when FIFA took the decision to name Qatar as the host of the 2022 tournament, the whole world kind of looked on in total disbelief. And it was apparent that there was no way that decision could have been taken for good reasons. It was clear that the process had been corrupted in some way. And what we saw in our documents was this campaign by Mohamed bin Hammam to buy up a worldwide groundswell of support for the Qatar World Cup bid.

JC: There’s lots of evidence that Qatar won that bid unfairly. It wasn’t just the bribes, it was some of the deals that were made. And one of the deals that we write about is how there was a vote-swap deal between countries — and Qatar, Thailand, Egypt, and they swapped votes with Spain and the three South American countries. And this was completely against the rules, and it was investigated summarily by FIFA before the competition.

HB: There is an overwhelming avalanche of incontrovertible evidence that the process was corrupted, that Qatar should not have won the rights to host the World Cup, and FIFA has just decided to staunchly ignore it. It has been that terrible, terrible decision that has brought about the crumbling of the edifice around Sepp Blatter and led up to this investigation by the FBI and the Swiss authorities.