The 2015 FIFA indictments ended in almost nothing

In short: in May 2015 US prosecutors charged fourteen people over more than USD 150 million in bribes, and eventually charged forty-one individuals and entities. Eleven years later the Swiss case against Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini has ended in two acquittals, and the last contested American convictions were dismissed at the Justice Department’s own request. Very little of it changed anything, and the reason is not that the facts fell apart.

The pictures from 27 May 2015 are the most famous images in football governance: Swiss police at the Baur au Lac hotel in Zurich, officials led out behind bedsheets held up by hotel staff.

Almost nobody knows how the case finished. It finished in May 2026, quietly, with a judge dismissing the last of it after the Justice Department said prosecuting it was no longer a priority.

What was actually charged

The initial indictment named fourteen defendants — nine football officials and five sports marketing executives — in a 47-count indictment covering racketeering, wire fraud, money laundering and obstruction. The alleged bribes, paid to secure media and marketing rights to tournaments, exceeded USD 150 million.

In December 2015 a superseding indictment added sixteen more officials, taking the total charged to forty-one individuals and entities. Defendants who were convicted or pleaded guilty agreed to forfeit more than USD 190 million.

Sepp Blatter announced he would stand down days after the first arrests.

Two features of that structure matter for what came later.

First, the charges were brought under RICO — the racketeering statute written for organised crime. Prosecutors were treating the confederations as a criminal enterprise rather than charging individual bribes one at a time.

Second, the American hook was the wire. Most of the alleged conduct happened in South America, Switzerland and the Caribbean. Jurisdiction rested on payments clearing through US banks and communications crossing US wires. That reach is what made the case possible, and it is also what left it exposed when American courts began narrowing exactly those statutes.

The Swiss case: acquitted, then acquitted again

The Swiss proceedings were narrower, and are routinely confused with the American ones. They concerned a single payment: 2 million Swiss francs authorised by Blatter to Platini in 2011, described by both men as deferred consultancy fees for work done between 1998 and 2002 that FIFA could not afford to pay in full at the time. It surfaced in the wreckage of 2015.

Blatter and Platini were acquitted in July 2022. Swiss federal prosecutors appealed, asking for twenty-month sentences suspended for two years. On 25 March 2025 the Extraordinary Appeals Chamber of the Swiss Federal Criminal Court upheld the acquittals.

Ten years, two trials, no conviction. The court found the evidence insufficient to establish the prosecution’s case.

The American case: the law moved underneath it

The most consequential thread runs through one prosecution: Hernán López, a former 21st Century Fox executive, and Full Play Group, an Argentine sports marketing company. Both were convicted in March 2023 over schemes to bribe CONMEBOL officials for broadcasting rights.

Then the ground shifted four times.

September 2023 — vacated. Judge Pamela K. Chen granted acquittal, relying on Supreme Court decisions handed down in May 2023 that narrowed the federal fraud statutes. The convictions rested on honest services wire fraud, and she held that the statute did not reach foreign commercial bribery of this kind.

2 July 2025 — reinstated. The Second Circuit disagreed, holding that the conduct did fall within honest services fraud because bribery is the statute’s core application. It vacated the acquittals and returned the case.

9 December 2025 — dropped. With the defendants seeking Supreme Court review, prosecutors moved to dismiss the charges, with prejudice, in the interests of justice, citing a shift in enforcement priorities. The government abandoned a case it had just won on appeal.

27 May 2026 — dismissed. The judge granted the dismissal.

The part that was reported, and should be stated carefully

Two dated facts sit next to each other, and both are on the record.

On 5 December 2025, FIFA awarded its newly created FIFA Peace Prize to US President Donald Trump, at the World Cup draw in Washington. FIFA president Gianni Infantino presented it.

On 9 December 2025, four days later, the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Joseph Nocella, filed to dismiss the FIFA bribery charges.

Bloomberg Law subsequently reported that the dismissal had been directed by Solicitor General John Sauer, and that Nocella filed it over his own objections.

That is the sequence, and it is as far as the public record goes. The reporting establishes who gave the instruction. It does not establish a motive, and neither event has been shown to have caused the other. What can be said without inference is narrower and still notable: the decision to abandon the case was taken above the prosecutors handling it, against their objection, four days after the sport’s governing body honoured the head of the government prosecuting it.

Why this belongs in a money publication

The 2015 case was never really about football’s rules. It was about who gets paid for broadcasting rights, which is the question underneath almost everything else on this site.

The bribes bought media and marketing contracts. The money in dispute was television money — the largest single revenue line in the sport, and the input to every spending rule built on top of it. Officials were selling access to a revenue stream that clubs depend on, and taking a cut of it.

It also demonstrates something structural. Football’s own governance did not produce this case. No confederation, no federation and no sporting tribunal exposed it. It took the US Department of Justice, using a statute written for the Mafia, on the basis that some of the money had touched American banks.

And when the American appetite for that enforcement changed, the case ended — not because a court found the conduct lawful, but because the prosecutor stopped. Football’s accountability turned out to be borrowed from a foreign legal system, and it was recalled.

That is the Super League settlement conclusion reached by a different route, and it is why the question of who governs European football is not academic.

What actually changed

Not nothing. FIFA reformed its governance after 2015: term limits, a separation of the ethics committee’s investigatory and adjudicatory chambers, published compensation for senior officials. Dozens of individuals did plead guilty, and more than USD 190 million was forfeited.

But the deterrent that mattered was the credible threat of American prosecution, and that threat has now been withdrawn in the most public way available: after winning.