What the Garcia report did not have, in the end, was any hard evidence that the committees for Russia and Qatar had used bribes to secure the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, any smoking gun that might have compelled FIFA to consider moving either of the events, or reopening the bidding for them.
Still, the dossier provided a troubling view of a deeply flawed voting process; confirmed various news media reports from around the world in the years since the vote was taken about inappropriate and unethical behavior by people close to the bids and voters they sought to influence; and painted a broad portrait conveying a general “appearance of impropriety,” to borrow an oft-used phrase from Mr. Garcia, its author.
Among his findings:
■ While there was no direct evidence of the buying of votes directed by Qatar’s official bid committee, Mr. Garcia documented in dozens and dozens of pages his concerns about the troubling closeness of Qatar’s government and the country’s bid committee, and of improper conduct by consultants hoping to advance the bid.
■ Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, who was then the country’s prime minister, met with a half-dozen FIFA voters in the months before the 2010 vote. But Russia’s bid committee was cleared of any wrongdoing, with the report finding no evidence of collusion with other bids, no violations of rules on gifts, and no signs that the Russians had tried to exert influence on any voters.
■ Mr. Garcia recounted in detail the ways in which executive committee members and other people of interest ignored, or lashed out at, his questions, professed ignorance on simple matters, or otherwise failed to cooperate with his investigation. His general frustrations revealed the limits of his powers in the investigation, in which he did not have subpoena power, even though it did reveal direct or indirect favors done for votes: a soccer field constructed in a voter’s country, trans-Atlantic flights on private jets, and — in one memorable example — a $2 million payment deposited into the account of a FIFA voter’s 10-year-old daughter.
The investigation also revealed, through minutes of FIFA meetings, that the governing body’s executive committee had not even discussed the issue of the searing summer heat in Qatar before awarding the country a tournament traditionally played in June and July — even though FIFA’s own inspectors had flagged the issue as a major concern. And through those same minutes, Mr. Garcia found that when it later became clear that moving the World Cup to the comparatively milder Persian Gulf winter was the only option, FIFA secretly extricated itself from a potential legal fight by awarding Fox Sports the television rights to the 2026 cycle at what was clear, even then, to be an enormously discounted fee that most likely cost FIFA hundreds of millions of dollars.
