THE FBI'S GREATEST SOURCE EVER:

Mr. Steele had been hired, in large part, because of his expertise in Russia, one of six countries vying for the right to host the tournament. In the early 1990s, he had worked undercover in Moscow, and he maintained extensive contacts in Russian government and business circles. His mandate in the spring of 2010 was to find out anything he could about the competing bid. He was no stranger to Russia's playbook. When it came to pursuing national objectives, the country had few if any compunctions about employing whatever means -- collusive, corrupting, scandalous -- might be necessary. And on its face, it was clear the Russian bid was going to need a lot of help.

In stark contrast to England, Russia appeared profoundly unqualified to host a monthlong tournament expected to draw well over three million spectators. For starters, Russia didn't have a great soccer tradition; its team hadn't even qualified to play in the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, thanks to an embarrassing loss to Slovenia. More important, it didn't have adequate stadiums or other infrastructure, and since it was already going to host the 2014 Winter Olympics, there were serious questions about how it could afford to build what was required.  The International Federation of Association Football, or FIFA, the Swiss-based nonprofit that runs the World Cup and oversees world soccer, ultimately rated Russia's bid riskiest for operational considerations among other contestants for the 2018 tournament.

To most observers, Russia didn't seem like a serious threat to England's hopes, but Mr. Steele's confidential sources told a very different story. Mr. Putin, then serving a four-year term as prime minister, saw hosting the World Cup as a vital way to project his country's power, and his own, around the world. He was determined, sources said, to win the bid at any cost.

Over the next few months, Mr. Steele collected a growing pile of intelligence suggesting that Russian government officials and oligarchs close to Mr. Putin had been enlisted to push the effort, cutting shadowy gas deals with other countries in exchange for votes, offering expensive gifts of art to FIFA voters and even dispatching Roman Abramovich, the billionaire who owns the London-based Chelsea Football Club, to South Africa to pressure Sepp Blatter, FIFA's president. (A spokesman for Mr. Abramovich told The Sunday Times that there was nothing "untoward" in his involvement in the Russian bid.)

The retired spy handed his findings to his clients supporting the English bid, who had been swaggering through the campaign with blithe optimism and self-confidence. But in July 2010, five months before FIFA would hold its vote on where to host the 2018 World Cup, Mr. Steele also passed the information on to another party he thought might be interested in learning what Russia was up to: an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The F.B.I. didn't much care whether England got the tournament, of course, but the agent, who supervised the F.B.I.'s Eurasian Organized Crime squad, had been looking for opportunities to chase down conspiracies emanating from Russia. After breaking the back of the Russian mob in New York, the squad had set its sights on border-crossing financial crimes involving oligarchs and mafia kingpins. Mr. Steele's intelligence about Russian attempts to corrupt FIFA seemed to check all the boxes.

Thus began one of the largest and most ambitious investigations of international graft and money laundering in American history, one that would expose decades of deep-seated rot and corruption in global soccer. Over five years, a team of I.R.S. and F.B.I. agents, working under the direction of several ambitious young prosecutors, secretly dug into international soccer's darkest corners, flipping officials and mining millions of financial records to build a convincing case that the beautiful game had become little more than a source of vast profits for an international organized crime syndicate.

The investigation finally broke into public view on May 27, 2015, with the sensational early morning arrests of seven soccer officials in Zurich. The world's most popular game was shaken to its core: Multiple generations of FIFA administrators were brought down, accused of collectively taking hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes. In a matter of days, FIFA's once -untouchable president, Mr. Blatter, announced that he would  resign, and soon he was under criminal investigation as well. (Mr. Blatter was not among those indicted but he was ultimately banned from all soccer-related activities for six years.) To date, more than two dozen people and entities have been convicted of, or pleaded guilty to, racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering in the case, which continues.

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