FIFA World Cup Rigged? Plus, the Mitch McConnell and Matt Miller Mysteries With Anthony Dabbundo

July 9, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

The year is 1995. Your name is Sonia Esomba, a student at American University in Washington, D.C. You major in communications, get average grades, and keep to yourself. The only remarkable thing about you is your father, Renee, the Secretary General of the National Olympic Committees of Africa. There is a second remarkable thing: the Salt Lake City Olympic Organizing Committee is paying your college tuition. The story begins in 1991, when Salt Lake City had just lost its fourth Olympic bid in a row. The business leaders and lawyers on the bid committee learned how decisions really moved inside the IOC, so they changed their approach. A scholarship fund quietly opened. On paper, it existed to bring promising young people from the developing world to American universities. In practice, those promising young people turned out to be the children and friends of IOC members. Between 1993 and 1997, the fund spent more than $200,000 on Sonia and the son of another committee member, part of over a million dollars that Salt Lake spread among the Olympic family in gifts, cash, and free medical care. In June 1995 in Budapest, the IOC awarded Salt Lake City the 2002 Winter Games. The two men who built the fund were indicted on fifteen federal counts, but in December 2003 a judge acquitted them of everything, ruling that the government never proved its case. The gifts were real, the felonies

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What you'll learn

1 (00:06) **The Salt Lake City Bribery Scandal** - The episode opens by narrating the 1995 story of Sonia Esomba, a student whose tuition was secretly paid by the Salt Lake City Olympic bid committee because her father was an IOC official.
2 (05:17) **The Trump-Infantino Call and Balogun's Suspension** - The hosts introduce the core mystery: after US forward Folarin Balogun got a red card, President Trump called FIFA president Gianni Infantino to intervene, leading to a suspension being overturned for the first time since 1962.
3 (09:57) **Could Barron Trump Have Driven the Intervention?** - The hosts spin a conspiracy theory that Barron Trump, a DC United Academy product, likely told his father about Balogun's suspension, making the call a family favor rather than a political move.
4 (14:48) **Does FIFA's Corruption Infect the Actual Matches?** - The conversation pivots to whether the culture of political influence seeps onto the pitch, using a controversial VAR call in Argentina vs. Egypt as evidence.
5 (19:55) **VAR's Structural Flaw: Disincentivizing On-Field Refs** - The hosts argue that VAR actually makes refereeing worse by giving officials an excuse to let play run, relying on video review to clean up mistakes.
6 (27:28) **Confirmed Rigged Matches in World Cup History** - The hosts run through a tiered list of proven match-fixing, starting with pre-2010 World Cup friendlies fixed by a Singaporean syndicate.
7 (35:56) **Argentina 6–0 Peru (1978): The Greatest Suspected Fix** - The hosts explore the most famous alleged rigged match in World Cup history, where Argentina needed to beat Peru by four goals to reach the final.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Guests on this episode

Anthony Dabbundo

Show Notes

Jason and Tyler welcome Anthony Dabbundo, cohost of The Ringer Gambling Show, to discuss the latest in a long string of controversies involving the governing body of football.

In this episode:

(00:00) Intro

(4:19) Is the World Cup rigged?

(13:49) Is corruption affecting the matches?

(23:30) What’s the answer?

(29:55) Famous “rumored to be rigged” matches

(50:10) The Doomscroll: ESPN analyst investigated

(56:33) The Mitch McConnell mystery

(58:41) Donald Trump’s meme coin

(1:02:52) Explosive diarrhea!

Hosts: Jason Concepcion and Tyler Parker

Guest: Anthony Dabbundo

Producers: Donnie Beacham and Justin Sayles

Art direction: David Shoemaker

Motion graphics and animations: Chris Calleton

Engineering: Sarah Reddy

Set design: Hannah Leiken and Jonathan Ratliff

Additional support: Dae Shik Kim

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