Prince William and David Cameron "have become embroiled in a row over corruption in football", says the Daily Telegraph, after Fifa released the full report of its investigation into how the 2018 and 2022 World Cups came to be awarded to Russia and Qatar.
Details of England’s unsuccessful attempt to host the 2018 competition have been made public in the report, a condensed version of which was published in 2014. The Telegraph says the Duke of Cambridge and the former prime minister were present at a meeting where a "vote-swapping deal between England and South Korea was discussed".
On that occasion football officials raised "the possibility of arranging a meeting with the Queen for one Fifa representative whose vote could have helped England", adds the paper.
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The report says Cameron asked the South Korean delegation to support England's bid to stage the 2018 tournament but was informed that, in return, his country must pledge its support for South Korea's bid to host the 2022 tournament.
Such a deal was in "violation of the anti-collusion rules", states the report, written in 2014 by Michael Garcia, who was Fifa’s chief ethics investigator at the time.
Additionally, it describes how the FA was asked "to bestow an honorary knighthood and arrange an audience with the Queen for one South American official", while the “adopted son” of another high-ranking official was found work at Aston Villa and Tottenham Hotspur.
That official was Jack Warner, then Fifa vice president and president of Concacaf, the governing body for football in North America, Central America and the Caribbean, who is alleged to have demanded to have his home town in Trinidad twinned with an "English village".
Far from dismissing the suggestion, the FA reportedly suggested Burton upon Trent as a suitable twin, with Garcia's report describing English officials as displaying "an unfortunate willingness, time and again, to meet that expectation [of Warner]".
Warner was one of several Fifa officials arrested in 2015 at the request of the US on charges of "wire fraud, racketeering and money laundering" the Telegraph reports.
Another country courted by England was Thailand, ranked 120th in the world. The FA agreed to play an international friendly in the country in 2011, with the Thais receiving the money from the global broadcasting rights (bar the UK) to the game.
Geoff Thompson, former FA chairman and head of England’s 2018 bid, admitted to the Garcia inquiry that he "didn't think it was appropriate" for England to play the Thailand friendly "because I think it's a form of bribery".
When England lost out to Russia in the bidding process for the 2018 World Cup, the match against Thailand was cancelled.
While the report acknowledged the FA "provided full and valuable co-operation in establishing the facts and circumstances of this case", Garcia offers a damning assessment of the behaviour of certain individuals within the English bid, concluding: "In many cases England 2018 accommodated or at least attempted to satisfy, the improper requests made by these Executive Committee members.
"While the bidding process itself, and the attitude of entitlement and expectation demonstrated by certain Executive Committee members in the exchanges discussed in detail above, place the bid team in a difficult position that fact does not excuse all of the conduct."
