According to a new Spiegel report, the German Football Association offered former CONCACAF president Jack Warner, who was indicted by U.S. officials in May, a lucrative package worth millions to secure his vote for the hosting rights to the 2006 World Cup. The proposed deal included 1,000 of the best World Cup tickets, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars upon resale, as well as a multimillion dollar merchandise deal for the Caribbean.
These allegations are becoming all too common as investigations into FIFA continue, but what’s notable about this new report is that Bundesliga champions Bayern Munich are also implicated. Bayern’s president at the time, Franz Beckenbauer, who has already been implicated in the corruption scandal, supposedly agreed to a contract obligating Bayern to train with a CONCACAF team for three weeks each year. Europe’s top clubs have so far stayed above the fray—the World Cup is a national tournament after all—but these allegations show that the two are not as separate as we might like to think.