Earlier today, John Delaney announced that the FAI will not vote for Sepp Blatter in the upcoming FIFA presidential elections which more than hints at the esteem with which football's world governing body is held.

The controversy over the Qatari bid for the 2022 tournament was one of the things which hammered FIFA's reputation with allegations of corruption made in recent years.

Tonight on Off The Ball, we were joined by Jonathan Calvert of The Sunday Times Insight team, who is the winner of Investigation of the Year and Paul Foot Award and is the co-author of The Ugly Game - The Qatari Plot to buy the World Cup with colleague Heidi Blake.

"We were picking up all sorts of information about the other bidders - and in particular Qatar. We went to a number of ex-FIFA executive committee members, who were offering their services as consultants. Two or three of them were saying to us that they'd heard that Qatar were offering money for certain FIFA executive committee members' votes. This is something that we would later submit to parliament under parliamentary privilege and it was published the following year after the vote. But what we gave FIFA, at the time around Autumn 2010, was all the tapes containing all of that information. And FIFA, rather than investigating the allegations that were in there, decided to just suspend all the people who'd said these things," said Calvert, who discussed a few of the allegations and stories.   

Mohammed bin Hammam (Photo by Robert Cianflone/Getty Images)

Calvert discussed the intricacy of his and Blake's investigation, before getting to the part of the tale concerning Qatari former Asian Football Confederation president Mohammed bin Hammam, who has since been punished with a life ban.

"We gave it 11 pages of The Sunday Times, which is unheard of in peace time, in the first week and the story went around the world and the next day we expected that FIFA would say 'we desperately want to see your evidence' but the next day (former FIFA independent investigator) Michael Garcia stood up and told the world that, in fact, he was ending the evidence collecting aspect of his investigation and he wouldn't be taking any more evidence and that he was going to sit down and write his report. We were astonished. We couldn't believe it."