Earlier this week, FIFA dropped its drawers a bit to provide a glimpse at its motivation. Jerome Valcke, the organization’s secretary general, said the deal with Fox was made to avoid facing a lawsuit from the media giant over shifting the 2022 Cup from the heat of the Qatari summer to the late fall and winter. The admission was surprising, but it made sense.

The summer is a less competitive time for viewers and advertisers than the late fall and winter, so Fox was unhappy at the prospect of FIFA moving the World Cup from its traditional June-July time frame — a decision that is now a fait accompli. Fox might have been fighting a losing legal battle because FIFA contracts do not disclose the time of year that a World Cup is to be played, just the year, according to executives who have seen them. But a potential court fight raised the delicious possibility of deposing Sepp Blatter, FIFA’s president, and other executives, on American turf.

FIFA executives would prefer to keep their organizational secrets out of the American court system. The organization has done its best to quash the full disclosure of a 430-page report by its chief investigator, Michael Garcia, into allegations of corruption in the bidding for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. Garcia had dug into those allegations for more than a year but resigned after only a summary of his report — one that he said had distorted his findings — was released. A fuller but redacted version, which FIFA said last December was forthcoming, has yet to come forth.

Having fostered such opacity to maintain its self-preservation, FIFA must have calculated it was best to mollify Fox, not fight it.

What has financial hardball yielded for Fox? An apparently sweet deal. According to an executive made aware of the terms of the contract, Fox will pay about 10 percent more than in its current contracts for 2018 and 2022, which are worth a total of $425 million. In Canada, CTV and TSN, networks owned by Bell Media, will pay about 4 percent more than the $40 million they are scheduled to pay in 2022, and will pay an extra 10 percent if the United States hosts the 2026 tournament.