Mel Brennan has occupied a rare vantage point in world football. He has watched the game from the gleaming heights of Trump Tower and from the dusty fields of Trinidad, where maintenance funds intended for youth soccer vanished into the pockets of officials. His new book, Fixing Football, draws on his years as an executive at Concacaf during the organization's most corrupt period, and his subsequent role as a confidential source for investigators pursuing one of sports' biggest scandals.
Brennan's central thesis about football's future is deceptively simple: the institution survives its monsters. "Football survived Sepp Blatter," he writes. "It survived Jack Warner. It survived Chuck Blazer. And it will survive Gianni Infantino."
When FBI agents raided a Zurich hotel and Concacaf's Miami headquarters in 2015, arresting dozens of football officials, Brennan was not shocked. He had been meeting with investigators beforehand, preparing them for what they would find. "On two separate occasions I was on my way to New York to meet with them and they said 'Wait, we're not quite ready.' I literally turned my car around," he recalls. "So I knew something was percolating."
What did surprise him less was that anything would actually change. Brennan had watched Chuck Blazer, the Concacaf general secretary, operate from an apartment on Trump Tower's 10th floor, across from Donald Trump himself. Blazer and his counterpart Jack Warner, a former history teacher who rose to become Concacaf president, were so embedded in the corridors of power that Brennan thought accountability was impossible. "These were not gangsters. These were opportunistic cockroaches. They were not tough guys. They would run with any real sustained sunlight," he says.
The corruption that festered at Concacaf for decades reflected the confederation's fundamental weakness compared to other continental bodies. Unlike confederations led by European business elites with legitimate corporate backgrounds, Concacaf operated under men who were pure opportunists with little to show for their tenure besides stolen money.
But Brennan places responsibility more widely. The U.S. media landscape of the 1990s and early 2000s treated football as a minor sport. Major outlets failed to conduct serious investigative journalism into Concacaf's affairs, instead mimicking state propaganda rather than challenging power. Sunil Gulati, the former U.S. Soccer president who was present during much of the corruption, acted like a World Bank economist admiring from a distance rather than deploying U.S. Soccer's influence to expose wrongdoing.
The cost of this silence was borne by children and young athletes. Opportunities that should have gone to aspiring players and leaders were instead diverted into the criminal enrichment schemes of Warner and Blazer. "If you are a girl and you play sport, you have only a small chance to go pro," Brennan says, "but if you play sport and you stay in sport you are more likely to lead an organization as an adult. Those opportunities were lost for so many because Jack and Chuck were too busy stealing."
Since 2015, little has truly changed. Victor Montagliani replaced Warner as Concacaf leader, and while he was plainly not Jack Warner, that alone was not enough. "There was a moment where Concacaf could have gone in a different direction: democratic, transparent, inclusive, diverse," Brennan says. Instead, Concacaf cloaked itself in the myth of reform while maintaining opacity about financial distributions. Transparency International has outlined how Fifa could broadcast Council meetings live and publish real-time bank account information, yet none of this has happened.
Recent decisions underscore the point. Concacaf's pursuit of sponsorship deals with Saudi Arabia, a nation state that murders journalists, demonstrates that human rights considerations remain absent from partnership decisions. There is no mechanism to evaluate whether partners' treatment of women and vulnerable populations should factor into business arrangements.
As North America prepares to host this year's World Cup, an opportunity exists to reshape how football is accessed and who benefits from its growth. Yet in Brennan's own Maryland town, organized youth soccer remains almost entirely white, while Latino communities play in parks a few minutes' walk away, unconnected and unequal. Without pressure from leaders to answer harder questions about inclusion and equity, the tournament will pass with those disparities intact.
Brennan's assessment is clear: Fifa's institutional structure and incentives remain unchanged. "Some cockroaches have scattered and other cockroaches came in," he says, "but the overall smell remains the same."
Author James Rodriguez: "Brennan's insider account is a sharp reminder that agency investigations and criminal convictions solve half the problem at best, the structure and culture that enabled the theft in the first place remains waiting for the next opportunist."
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