It took an American, from a land where football is called soccer, to expose what is not surprising to those who rather think "why it took so long".
If anything, it was a surprise move by FIFA to appoint Michael Garcia as the investigator-in-chief for the World Cup bidding process - a man who is an expert with corruption probes, and the football's governing body, led by Sepp Blatter seeking his fifth term as president, is neck deep in it.
The former US Attorney for the Southern District of New York put together a 350-page report on the findings of the investigation, and it was only expected that FIFA stifled it, coming from a man who once arrived uninformed to question some of FIFA's senior executive committee members who voted at the corruption-ridden World Cup bids.
After two years of investigation, Garcia's report unearthed the corruption that led to Russia and Qatar bagging World Cup hosting rights for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, respectively.
What led to the corruption charges falling under the US jurisdiction was the mention in Garcia's report that many bribery transactions during the bidding process were done in America.
The report eventually led to the most astonishing day in FIFA's history. On May 27, Swiss police in Zurich, dressed in plain clothes, arrested top FIFA officials from the plush Baur au Lac Hotel. All this just a couple of days before FIFA is due to go to polls at its 2015 Congress. Those arrested will be extradited to the US on charges of racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering.
Garcia's claim to fame started in 1992 at NY, where he served as a federal prosecutor with the Southern District of New York until 2001. His stint involved handing several high-profile cases, including the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.
In 2003, Garcia was in charge of over 20,000 staff as an Assistant Secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the George W Bush government. In 2005, he returned to New York as US attorney - a profile he continued with until 2008.
FIFA appointed him as its investigator in 2012, by when Garcia was running a private law firm in the name of Kirkland and Ellis.
Husband to an FBI Agent, Garcia is among the 18 Americans who can't enter Russia after the country barred him in Moscow's response to the Magnitsky Act.
To put Garcia in one line, he is believed to have once told his daughter that he wants "to punish people who do bad things and break the law". And FIFA invited him to do so.
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