Fifa’s brazen effort to tick its 2018 and 2022 World Cup bidding process with a spick and span bill of health was plunged immediately into further discredit when its own investigator, the former US prosecutor Michael Garcia, protested that its portrayal of his report was “erroneous and incomplete” and he himself will appeal.

That was dramatic, edging again into Zurich farce, but no great surprise, because while Fifa had congratulated itself with characteristic smugness, saying Garcia’s report cleared its integrity and should constitute closure, even the 42-page summary of the report screams the opposite. Garcia’s report was only commissioned in response to huge concerns over Fifa’s integrity and that of its executive committee members, who in December 2010 sent the 2018 World Cup to Russia and 2022 to Qatar, in that closed, claustrophobic process.

Several appalling instances of apparent corruption, collusion and vote-buying are identified even in this summary, spun by Hans-Joachim Eckert, the chair of Fifa’s ethics committee’s adjudicatory chamber, of an investigation for which Garcia did not have full cooperation, particularly from Russia. Yet complacency, in the face of dreadful, apparently institutionalised graft, seeps from every paragraph of Eckert’s statement, in which he repeatedly concludes that Garcia’s findings, even on limited evidence, “do not compromise the integrity of the Fifa World Cup 2018/22 bidding process as a whole”.

In reaching that conclusion, which was depressingly expected, Fifa has again damaged its own integrity, because it cannot seem to recognise the gravity and unacceptability of corruption within its moneyed walls. This summary report is of a piece with the attitude of Fifa’s president, Sepp Blatter, who has served football’s world governing body at the highest level during a time of proven bribe-taking, cash presidential vote-buying and other corruption by several of its executive committee members, but kept calm and sailed on, mostly reserving anger for the media which has exposed it.

Eckert recites some of the dire facts already known: that even before the vote in 2010 – for a tournament Fifa’s own report states now to be worth $4bn – two of the 24-member exco, Amos Adamu and Reynald Temarii, were suspended after a Sunday Times sting found them receptive to vote-buying in return for “financial investments”.

Fifa merely proceeded with 22 voting members in that trademarked way of Blatter’s – the captain of Fifa’s little bateau, as he put it when he was re-voted in as president five months later, in June 2011, on a one-man ballot paper.

Of the other 2010 exco members, Mohamed bin Hammam, Blatter’s challenger until he was suspended for handing out cash in brown envelopes to Caribbean football delegates whose presidential votes he was courting, was finally banned for life in December 2012 on other corruption allegations.

Jack Warner, a very senior exco baron at the time of the World Cup votes; the president, no less, of the Confederation of North, Central and Caribbean football associations (Concacaf), and a Fifa vice-president, resigned in June 2011 corruption allegations. Eckert’s summary report highlights “personal benefits” Warner sought while dangling his World Cup vote, including from the English Football Association, which is horribly tainted by its “willingness, time and again” to “curry favour” and meet Warner’s expectations.

Blatter has long clung to the comforting falsehood that the English media only reports all this because England lost out, but he should realise there is outrage here that the FA spent £21m of football money, and £3m public money from 12 hard-up local authorities, courting a corrupt Fifa. If it is true they bent over to comply with improper requests for favours, that – and those who did it – should be fully exposed.

Chuck Blazer, long Warner’s executive at Concacaf and another exco voter for 2018 and 2022, has also now been the subject of corruption findings by an internal investigation, although he continues to deny wrongdoing.

Three other voting members of the exco who sent that great and most lucrative of sporting showpieces to Russia and Qatar, Nicolás Leoz of Paraguay, Ricardo Teixeira of Brazil itself, and Issa Hayatou of Cameroon, were exposed afterwards for having received cash, described as bribes, from Fifa’s appointed marketing company, ISL, years earlier. Blatter was found in a court settlement to have known of the bribes but Fifa said he committed no wrongdoing because such commercial payments were not a crime in Swiss law at the time. That in itself sums up Fifa’s attitude to integrity.

Just one of those incidences ought to be enough for most modern organisations – let alone the one entrusted with the world’s most beloved sport and the tournament which transfixes children – to express disgust and cancel decisions taken by these men. But Blatter and Fifa have always just seemed indignant about thedoubts cast on the vote.

Fifa’s statement, calling for closure, would suggest that Garcia found nothing, but he has identified a lot, even without the Russian bid’s cooperation – their computers were only leased and have now been destroyed, Russia apparently said, while Google US “would not cooperate” with their requests to recover emails.

Of Qatar, the tiny gulf autocracy which – without question – bid for and won the World Cup due to its natural gas cash billions, there are several questions. The activities of two individual advisers are said to have raised concerns, as did a Brazil v Argentina friendly in Doha in November 2010, and money which then found its way to the Argentinian FA – whose president, Julio Grondona, had a World Cup vote.

The sponsoring of the Confederation of African football associations’ congress in Angola in January 2010, in return for Qatar’s exclusive access to it, may have cost the $1.8m stated, the summary report says, but that is unclear. No rules outlawed a bidding country lavishing such expensive benefits on a voting confederation, Fifa says – without much sense that the organisation recognises how awful this is in itself – and while the lack of transparency creates “a negative impression”, Eckert decided it was “not relevant to affect the 2018/22 World Cup bidding process as a whole”.

Even more outlandish is its shortsection on Hammam. He is a Qatari, and was a longstanding, rich and powerful member of the exco, who in 1998 masterminded Blatter’s presidential election over the Uefa challenger, Lennart Johansson. Hammam decided to challenge Blatter for the presidency. The report confirms the Sunday Times stories, based on internal leaked emails, that he made cash payments to senior figures of Caf associations. Yet Eckert concludes that this was to influence votes for his presidency, not World Cup votes, which those particular Caf members, Eckert says, could not influence. So that was all right then, and does not at all sully the integrity of the World Cup vote.

Most blatant, the report finds another Sunday Times story correct, that Hammam offered to pay the legal costs for Temarii to appeal against his suspension, because for convoluted reasons, this favoured Qatar’s position in the World Cup vote. Yet still, Fifa can see no evil even there, and Eckert says that as Hammam did not have a formal, documented connection to the official Qatar World Cup bid, helmed by the professional and apparently decent young executive Hassan al-Thawadi, even this “did not affect the outcome of the Fifa 2018/22 World Cup bidding process as a whole”.

And there lurks a significant little difference. Where elsewhere in his summary Eckert concludes that “problems” do not affect the integrity of the process, with Hammam’s actual manipulation of the vote itself, Eckert conclusion is that it did not affect the outcome.

Therein lies the truth of this hideous saga, the whitewash of a necessarily incomplete investigation into a blatantly unsatisfactory voting process by an exco which was endemically corrupt at the time. Fifa does not want the headache of cancelling the votes and re-running the bids. Rather than admit to their faults, it would prefer the World Cup to go to Russia in 2018, where the bid team gave incomplete cooperation with this investigation, and 2022 to Qatar, moved from the summer, necessitating a massive construction programme in a place where migrant workers are treated appallingly.

In this, Fifa fails heartbreakingly fails again to give a semblance of the leadership which its privileged position ought to necessitate as the governing body of the great game, whose simple beauty is so continually betrayed by the people in charge of it.