Exactly 5 years ago at this exact moment, plainclothes Swiss police entered the Baur Au Lac hotel in Zurich & began arresting high-ranking international officials.

The raid marked the unveiling of the FIFA case, among the most ambitious investigations in US history.

It was an otherwise unremarkable Wednesday, coming two days before FIFA’s presidential election. But the carefully choreographed raids changed everything.

May 27, 2015, stands as a signal moment in the history of the beautiful game, as important a date as any in the sport.

Hours after the arrests, the first in a series of indictments in the case was unsealed in Brooklyn federal court and the entire world soon became aware of the previously untold depths of corruption in a sport beloved by billions of people.

Of course, many knew the game wasn’t pure. But the allegations in the case ripped any illusions asunder. Television rights to tournaments, sponsorships, presidential campaigns, World Cup hosting — anything that could be sold for a bribe had in fact been sold.

Many times over.

The case has begun in total secrecy in the summer of 2010, and it built slowly, as a team of prosecutors and IRS & FBI agents flipped a series of soccer officials and sports marketing execs and used their knowledge to build a decades-long narrative of greed and betrayal.

What started as a tip about possible foul play by Russia in its bid to win rights to host the 2018 World Cup (a tip that eventually was borne out) expanded to entangle nearly two dozen countries, from the US to Argentina and especially the greatest football nation of all: Brazil

Some two dozen people have pleaded guilty in the case, and two were convicted after a trial in late 2017. Sepp Blatter, the longtime FIFA President, was forced to resign and then banned from the sport for six years. Countless millions were spent defending corrupt officials.

Many millions more were turned over to the Justice Dept. Careers were made in legal circles even as the defendants in the case were destroyed by it. Successive generations of officials were pushed out of soccer, making way for other officials who decried corruption.

But they, too, often proved deeply corrupt - the culture of the sport was so profoundly rotten that it was hard to find any officials who didn’t have a hand in the filth. Taking bribes was akin to a birthright for the men who ran the game.

This thread is too long already. But now is a good time to reflect on the legacy of this case, which it should be noted is still ongoing. Just last month three more people were indicted and charged with paying bribes for the TV rights to tournaments in Latin America.

Was the case successful? Has the sport been cleaned up? A little or a lot? What is the legacy of the FIFA case?

And now a shameless plug: if you want to know how all this happened, how the dominoes fell, who turned on whom, and which big fish got away, may I be so bold as to suggest you pick up a copy of this humble volume? This reporter would be ever so grateful. https://www.amazon.com/Red-Card-Whistle-Biggest-Scandal/dp/150113390X