Three cheers for the FBI.

Such elites have enough self-awareness, Mr. Portnikov says, that “they understand that in the contemporary world, they are not masters but petty thieves… and if in politics they can show their weight with the help of death, then in ordinary life they have nothing to oppose criminal prosecution in the West, except perhaps for war.”



Mr. Putin has particular reason to understand this equation, the Ukrainian commentator says, as he rose to power because he, unlike others in Boris Yeltsin’s circle, showed himself able to prevent the first Russian president from having to face the criminal charges that he himself feared most.

“Now a similar danger threatens Putin himself or those closest to him,” and that is why he and his regime are reacting so sharply to the FIFA arrests, Mr. Portnikov says, adding that the whole case shows something else as well: “In the West, they understand where his button is” and how to push it.

Unless there is evidence of bribery there's not much that can be done.

Garcia was hampered by missing emails, and there has been cases of money in brown envelopes changing hands. It's not all down to a lack of will, there are lots of decent hard working people in Fifa sick of the corruption.

If Blatter’s downfall can be traced to a single moment, it is probably the one that came next. When the FIFA president finished his speech, Jennings grabbed the microphone and blurted out a deliberately outrageous question.

“I’m surrounded by all these terribly posh reporters in suits and silk ties and buttoned up shirts for God’s sake,” he remembered. “And here’s me in me hiking gear. I get the mike and I said, ‘Herr Blatter, have you ever taken a bribe?'”

“Talk about crashing the party,” Jennings recalled Tuesday. “Reporters are moving away from me as if I’ve just let out the biggest smell since bad food. Well, that’s what I wanted? Thank you, idiot reporters. The radar dish on top of my head is spinning around to all these blazers against the wall, saying, ‘Here I am. I’m your boy. I’m not impressed by these tossers. I know what they are. I’ve done it to the IOC, and I’ll do it to them.'”

The outcome was doubly golden. Blatter denied ever taking a bribe, which gave Jennings a great headline. But he also got the goods. “Six weeks later I’m in the dark at about midnight down where the river in Zurich widens out into the lake, standing by a very impressive looking 19th-century office block, wondering why I’ve been asked to go there by somebody I don’t know when the door opens and I’m dragged in,” Jennings recalls. “I’m taken into a very posh set of offices … and within half an hour a senior FIFA official arrived carrying a wonderful armful of documents. And it ran from there. And it still does.”

The New York Times calls it "one of the most unwatchable films in recent memory, a dishonest bit of corporate-suite sanitizing that's not good even for laughs."

I feel sorry for Tim Roth. What made him do it?

"The BBC can reveal that the former FIFA Vice President Jack Warner has been investigated by US prosecutors over the disappearance of money meant for victims of the Haiti earthquake.