NEW YORK (AP) — A former ESPN executive underscored how much money corrupts football, testifying in U.S. District Court Tuesday that his company’s attempt to televise the World Cup may have been orchestrated by two former Fox managers accused of bribing officials to undermine competing bids.
Former ESPN President John Skipper told a federal court in New York that ESPN and Univision had jointly bid $900 million – split evenly between the two TV giants – for broadcasting rights to the two most recent World Cups, including those recently concluded in Qatar .
Despite ESPN’s hefty bid for the 2018 and 2022 tournaments, FIFA awarded US English-language rights to Fox, which bid less.
Government lawyers say millions of dollars in bribes were fed into a system of clandestine no-tender contracts that allowed corrupt football executives to profit from the plan and eventually allowed Fox to broadcast the games.
Prosecutors claim the payouts allowed former Fox executives – Heran Lopez and Carlos Martinez – to obtain confidential information from senior football officials, including those at FIFA. The information helped Fox secure the US English-language rights with a $425 million bid. Telemundo, a division of Comcast Corp.’s NBCUniversal, won US Spanish-language rights for approximately $600 million.
“I was disappointed,” said Skipper. “In fact, I was angry.”
Skipper said he assumed the highest bidder would win, but the process became increasingly complicated when the bid was rejected by ESPN and football officials opened a second round of bidding.
When asked by a defense attorney, Skipper admitted he didn’t know if anything illegal was going on behind the scenes.
New York-based Fox Corp., which divested itself of an international broadcaster subsidiary during a reorganization in 2019, has denied any involvement in the bribery scandal and has not been charged in the case.
The company said in a statement that it had fully cooperated.
The trial is the latest development in a tangled corruption scandal that stretched back nearly a decade and ensnared more than three dozen media and football executives and staff.
Skipper’s testimony was intended to corroborate government key witness Alejandro Burzaco, who testified over 11 days that he and former Fox executives were conspiring to hire South American football officials for television rights to the Southern Hemisphere’s biggest annual tournament, the Copa Libertadores. to bribe and help earn the broadcast rights to the World Cup, sport’s most lucrative competition.
Lawyers for Lopez and Martinez have claimed the former executives are being framed, with a defense attorney accusing Burzaco of orchestrating the bribes.
Burzaco is a former business partner of Lopez and Martinez and ran an Argentine marketing firm. He has been involved in previous investigations into corruption in football since his arrest in 2015 in a bribery case. Critics claim he is cooperating to avoid jail.
Burzaco has pleaded guilty to racketeering, conspiracy and other charges. He testified in 2017 that all three South Americans on the FIFA Executive Board accepted millions of dollars in bribes to support Qatar’s bid to host the 2022 World Cup.
Skipper said ESPN initially bid $250 million in 2011 for US English-language rights to the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. The company upped that to $450 million in a second round. With Univision’s proposed contribution, the total was $900 million.
“We wanted to blow the bid away,” he said.
ESPN has held the US broadcast rights to the World Cup since 1994, first broadcasting football’s premier sporting event before it caught on with US audiences. FIFA had to buy airtime to be able to broadcast the tournament in the country.
As the sport’s audience grew, so did the financial cachet of the World Cup.
ESPN paid $100 million for the rights to broadcast the sporting event in 2010 and 2014.
The dramatic hike spoke to the increasing importance of the sporting event, Skipper said.
December’s World Cup final in Qatar, in which Argentina defeated France in a dramatic penalty shoot-out, was the most-watched football match in the United States by TV viewers’ estimates.
As a courtesy to helping FIFA increase football viewership, Skipper had hoped football officials would allow ESPN to meet or exceed competitors’ proposals, but was not encouraged.
So far, more than two dozen people have pleaded guilty and two people have been convicted in court in connection with a US-led investigation into tens of millions of dollars in bribes and kickbacks at the highest level of football. Four companies have also pleaded guilty. Four other companies were charged but made arrangements with the government to avoid prosecution.
Football’s governing body FIFA has said it was not involved in any fraud or conspiracy and was just a bystander as the scandal unfolded.
Still, the scandal has put the organization under global scrutiny. Since then she has been trying to polish her tarnished image.