In light of Wednesday morning's news that Swiss authorities have arrested nine former and current FIFA officials and plan to extradite them to the United States, where they will face federal corruption charges, here is a timeline of the scandal that has engulfed FIFA over the past few years.
December 2010: Russia is awarded the 2018 World Cup and Qatar gets the 2022 hosting rights. It comes days after the BBC broadcast a Panorama expose of FIFA, claiming senior FIFA officials Nicolas Leoz, Issa Hayatou and Ricardo Teixeira, who went on to vote on the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bids, took bribes in the 1990s.
February 2011: FIFA's ethics committee upheld three-year and one-year bans imposed respectively upon executive committee members Amos Adamu and Reynald Temarii for breaches of FIFA's code of ethics following a Sunday Times investigation into wrongdoing during the World Cup 2018 and 2022 bidding campaigns.
May 2011: FIFA suspends presidential candidate Mohamed Bin Hammam and vice-president Jack Warner pending an investigation into claims they had offered financial incentives to members of the Caribbean Football Union. It drops a complaint against president Sepp Blatter.
May 2011: The successful Qatar 2022 team denied any wrongdoing with their winning bid, saying their name had been ''dragged through the mud for no reason''.
May 2011: FIFA sponsors Coca-Cola, Adidas, Emirates and Visa raise concerns about the ongoing corruption claims surrounding officials.
June 2011: Hammam is found guilty of bribery and banned from all international and national football activity for life. Warner escapes investigation after resigning from his position.
July 2012: Unable to ignore growing criticism any longer, FIFA commissions a report in to allegations of corruption in world football that is led by former U.S. attorney Michael Garcia and newly appointed head of FIFA'S ethics committee.
June 2014: The Sunday Times reports it has received ''hundreds of millions'' of documents that it claims reveal that disgraced former FIFA executive committee member Hammam had made payments to football officials in return for votes for Qatar.
September 2014: Garcia completes his 430-page report into corruption allegations and sends it to FIFA.
November 2014: Hans-Joachim Eckert, chairman of the adjudicatory chamber of FIFA's independent ethics committee, publishes a 42-page summary of Garcia's investigation, effectively confirming Russia and Qatar as World Cup hosts after finding breaches by them were "of very limited scope."
November 2014: FIFA lodges a criminal complaint with the Swiss attorney general over ''possible misconduct'' by individuals in connection with the awarding of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups but insists the investigation into the bidding process for the two World Cups is concluded. Garcia calls the summary "incomplete and erroneous'' and launches an appeal against it.
December 2014: Garcia loses his appeal against Eckert's review of his report and resigns as FIFA's independent ethics investigator. The U.S. lawyer issues a statement criticising FIFA's "lack of leadership," saying he cannot change the culture of the world governing body.
December 2014: FIFA executives agree to publish a "legally appropriate version" of the report, but this has yet to happen.
May 2015: Seven FIFA officials are arrested in dawn raids at a hotel in Zurich. They are later charged by U.S. authorities along with two other FIFA officials and five over allegations of racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering conspiracies spanning 24 years. They are accused of breeding decades of "rampant, systemic and deep-rooted" corruption within FIFA by the U.S. justice department. FIFA says the upcoming presidential elections will go ahead on May 29.
Meanwhile, the Swiss authorities raid FIFA headquarters, gathering data and documents for their separate investigation into allegations of criminal mismanagement and money laundering in connection with the allocation of the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bids. FIFA says there will be no revisiting of the World Cup bids and the tournaments will go ahead in Russia and Qatar.