For several days in September in a conference room at a Munich law office, two men discussed an investigation into potential corruption at the highest level of soccer.

One of the men was Michael J. Garcia, a former United States attorney who had spent the better part of the previous 11 months examining the circumstances surrounding the winning bids by Russia and Qatar for the right to host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. As head of the investigatory branch of the ethics committee for FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, he had written a report that he expected would eventually be made public, in the spirit of transparency.

The other important man at the table for those discussions was Hans-Joachim Eckert, a German judge who heads the adjudicatory arm of the ethics committee and who was charged with reading Garcia’s report and making recommendations to FIFA.

As the meetings went on, it became clear that the two men at the center of an investigation that could shake the sport were not in agreement over how, or even whether, their work should be made public.