Two scandals engulfing world soccer are threatening to split the sport in half, claim the scalps of its top administrators, derail the 2018 and 2022 World cups and show that Australian taxpayers were scammed out of millions of dollars.

In the past 24 hours, Mohamed bin Hammam, one of two candidates vying for football’s top job at the world governing body FIFA, withdrew his candidacy for this Wednesday’s FIFA presidential election. This occurred just hours before he was due to appear before a FIFA ethics committee.

Shortly after his withdrawal, the committee placed a “temporary exclusion” on bin Hamman for “alleged violations of the FIFA Code of Ethics linked to the upcoming FIFA presidential election”.

Then earlier this morning the same committee also suspended vice-president Jack Warner, who stands accused of massive vote buying. After receiving his suspension, the long-serving vice-president has threatened to go public with more damaging revelations about FIFA, stating “I tell you something, in the next couple days you will see a football tsunami that will hit FIFA and the world that will shock you.”

The committee was hastily convened for Sunday after a fellow FIFA executive committee member, Chuck Blazer from the US, went public with allegations that bin Hamman had attempted to bribe a bloc of 25 of the 208 eligible voters in Wednesday’s election. The vote is held each year after a World Cup, and each member association of FIFA, including Australia, is entitled to vote. Bin Hamman denied the bribery claim, writing on his blog it was part of a conspiracy “to discredit [me] as a candidate in the imminent election for the FIFA presidency”.
The Qatari’s withdrawal and suspension to stop “the degradation of FIFA’s reputation” has left the incumbent president, Sepp Blatter, in a position to be re-elected unopposed. However, Blatter is no cleanskin, he was also under investigation by the same ethics body and face allegations of impropriety dating back almost non-stop for 20 years.

With new allegations against Blatter on Friday, it brings to nine the number of members of the 22 body FIFA executive committee who have specific instances of corruption leveled against them.

The six other executive members are involved in a bigger scandal. They are under investigation for allegedly selling their votes for hosting the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bids. Those bids were won by Russia and Qatar respectively and lost by a number of other countries, including hapless one-vote Australia. The 2022 Qatar vote in particular seems vulnerable to investigation, given that bin Hammad was its main supporter.

Despite rumours that make-or-break powerhouse associations England, Spain and Germany are holding discussions about forming a breakaway association, FIFA is taking the “fiddling while Rome burns” approach to managing football.

Earlier this month, Blatter wrote about the issue, seeming to downplay the severity of the current crisis by stating, “it sells to shriek about corruption at FIFA and I am not saying that there are no corrupt elements inside the FIFA family: it is a large family of more than 300 million people”.

At some point in the near future, if FIFA’s bidding process is proven to have been corrupt, Australia must have a very unpleasant conversation about the episode. We spent $45.6 million of taxpayers money on a World Cup bid that, if we did follow the rules, was money basically stolen by FIFA and if we were not following the rules then it saw us engaged in corruption of the highest order.

We were either scammed or we were scamming. Considering the dubious consultants the Australian bid committee hired and the one solitary vote we received, there is a high probability we were the worst of both worlds: dishonest rubes who got scammed while trying to scam.

Based in untouchable Switzerland means FIFA writes its own rules, but it seems the rest of the football world may finally be tiring of following them.