ESPN: Will FIFA's World Cup bidding crisis lead to meaningful change?
You can walk from the lakeside five-star Baur Au Lac hotel to FIFA headquarters in Zurich in around 45 minutes. By cab or unmarked police vehicle, it's around 15 minutes. Wednesday morning, FIFA executives and law enforcement officials were pinballing between the two trying to make sense of a day that would shake the football world.
Was this it? Was it the beginning of the end for a generation of football administrators and, perhaps, a way of doing business in the highest echelons of the game? Or was it merely another serious earthquake rippling through the ivory towers, taking down many of them but leaving the biggest and most powerfully built intact?
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That won't be clear until later. But by Wednesday in Zurich what was becoming abundantly clear was that now there was a new actor in the FIFA soap opera: law enforcement, both from the United States and Switzerland. The result was a pincer movement, with two entirely separate, but coordinated, investigations, whose timing, 48 hours before the FIFA election, seemed far from coincidental.
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Longer term, the issue of whether there will be a revote on 2018 and 2022 World Cups comes into play. De Gregorio was initially pretty categorical in that regard, saying that both tournaments would go ahead as planned. When challenged on whether this would still be the case if the Swiss enquiry found serious wrongdoing, he added: "Today, this is fact [that Russia and Qatar will go ahead]. I won't go into speculation about what will happen."
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He likely also didn't expect that the long arm of the U.S. Department of Justice would reach right into his backyard, the Baur Au Lac, let alone two days before his FIFA future would be decided. (De Gregorio said they had no warning about the dawn raid, adding he was "fast asleep" as FIFA officials were being ushered out of the hotel.)
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http://www.espnfc.com/fifa-world-cup/4/blog/post/2468548/world-cup-2018-and-2022-criminal-investigations-fifa