ONE of the most closely-guarded documents in world sport, an internal report on the process that awarded soccer World Cup hosting rights to Russia and Qatar, was released Tuesday after nearly three years of secrecy.

While it showed no explicit ethical wrongdoing by the Russian and Qatari bid teams, the report shed new light on the 2010 decision by FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, to award them the 2018 and 2022 tournaments. The report, produced by former U.S. federal prosecutor Michael J. Garcia, also provided a number of previously undisclosed examples showing rampant favor-mongering among members of FIFA’s ruling executive committee and the culture of entitlement that led to the demise of the body’s top officials.

Garcia described a “culture of expectation and entitlement” on the committee, adding that “a number of Executive Committee members displayed a disregard for ethical guidelines and an attitude that the rules do not apply to them.”

FIFA made the sudden decision to publish the report on its website despite its years under wraps after a German newspaper said Monday that it had obtained a copy. In a statement, the organization said the newly appointed leaders of its Ethics Committee had planned to discuss publishing the report at meeting next week, a move their predecessors had opposed.

The Garcia report, when it was first delivered in the late summer of 2014, in many respects marked the beginning of FIFA’s modern turmoil.

That December, Garcia resigned in protest from his role as FIFA’s independent investigator, claiming FIFA’s leaders had made “numerous materially incomplete and erroneous representations of facts and conclusions” in their summary of his report.

The following May, Swiss police descended on FIFA’s favorite hotel in Zurich to arrest several FIFA executive committee members as part of a U.S. Department of Justice investigation.

More than half of the 22 sitting executive committee members at the time of the Russia and Qatar awards have since been dismissed amid allegations of ethical wrongdoing. Many of the individuals in the report have also left FIFA or been disciplined by the organization since Garcia delivered it in the late summer of 2014.

Former president Sepp Blatter, meanwhile, was not accused of any ethical wrongdoing by Garcia. (SD-Agencies)