Chapter One:Team America If you were going to turn the Fifa corruption scandal into a movie, where would you start? Perhaps you'd begin with a long, epic pan over the snow-capped Alps, skimming across the lapping waters of Lake Zurich. Then, as the string section kicks in, a slow, luxurious zoom into the five-star splendour of Baur au Lac, where the double rooms start at £611 (about R11500) a night and they have their own in-house chocolatier, where Richard Wagner used to sing and where his father-in-law Franz Liszt used to accompany him on the piano.The camera would hover over the hotel facade, a scrubbed-white frontage with 1920s-style awnings and three silver flagpoles glinting in the pale morning light. And then, at the bottom of the screen, we would see the FBI moving in on Fifa's not-so-secret lairOne of the reasons the events of the last two weeks have struck such a chord is that they name-checked so many of the same tropes as the classic Hollywood crime escapade. The villains are proper villains, with cartoon haircuts and silly foreign accents.The money actually was handed over in briefcases containing bundles of $10000 bills. And America actually did save the day.Obviously, in real life the FBI weren't at the Baur au Lac at all, just some plain-clothes Swiss police. But, for the film version, you'd definitely have the real FBI there, under the command of a world-weary Edward Norton who would count the disgraced officials out through the lobby before ordering a very large sandwich.If we were shocked by any of this, perhaps we shouldn't have been. After all, the allegations of bung-taking, bribe-giving, vote-swapping and evil cackling have been floating around the world of football for years like a used plaster on the surface of a municipal swimming pool.If there was any element of surprise at all, it was that somebody had finally mustered the courage to do something about it. Fans celebrated. I mean, who knew you could actually get arrested for this stuff?"This really is the World Cup of fraud and today we are giving Fifa a red card," said Richard Weber, of the US Internal Revenue Service, with the sort of rapier wit that has characterised his long and glittering career in tax law.It was immediately and quite charmingly evident that the Americans were pretty excited about all of this, and for more than one reason. As a nation, the US is pretty used to getting its own way a lot of the time and yet for most of the last couple of decades its blossoming flirtation with football has been met with a certain scepticism at home and a certain ridicule abroad.But now, finally, they had managed to repackage the world game into a more familiar format: the big-budget cop thriller. At one stage you half-expected to see Sepp Blatter escaping to safety on a giant zip-wire.Chapter Two: The Medal Thief and the March Hare In a way, this is one of the key questions football needs to ask itself: How bad are these guys really? Are they really as venal and immoral, as rotten to the core, as their supposed crimes and our instincts would dictate? Or are they simply cogs in a rotten system, infected by a raging contagion, reacting much as any reasonable human being would to being placed in a giant gilded playground where money was plentiful and oversight virtually non-existent?Could we all take a bribe, in the right circumstances?Well, you have Jack Warner. Warner resigned from all his positions after the first wave of corruption allegations surfaced in 2011, although not before he had forced several generations of football administrators to limbo dance in his living room.Perhaps the most charitable reading you could make of Warner is that he is either incredibly unfortunate or incredibly forgetful. For some reason, money just seems to disappear around him, such as the $10-million payment reputedly made by South Africa into something called the Diaspora Legacy Programme Fund.Chapter Three: Cave-in For three days the world of football watched agape. Fifa secretary-general Jerome Valcke was implicated in a $10-million bung to Warner. Valcke denied any knowledge of it, so someone leaked a copy of the letter authorising the payment, with his name at the top. Fifa's walls appeared to be coming down and yet somehow the roof was still standing.Then the roof finally caved in."I am a mountain goat that keeps going and going and going," Blatter had said in advance of his re-election. "I cannot be stopped."On June 2, he called a press conference and stopped. He claimed that he was resigning for the good of the game.You had to credit Blatter's brass neck. Here he was casting himself as the thwarted agent of reform, which is a little bit like Colonel Sanders casting himself as the thwarted saviour of the world's chicken population.Naturally, most of us saw straight through Blatter's spirited Oskar Schindler charade but the suspicion remains: nobody tells a lie unless they think someone, somewhere might believe it.And in any case, had he even actually resigned? Blatter announced his intention to carry on working until a new president could be elected in six to nine months.Chapter Four: Feeding Time The resignation of Blatter was the tipping point. Over the following days we reached a sort of terminal velocity of corruption in which virtually no misdemeanour was too outlandish to have been contemplated by somebody at some point.Scores were settled. Mud was flung. Everybody had a piece of the action: journalists, columnists, Twitter comedians, TV satirists, fans of other sports, America-haters, Europe-haters, politicians. UK Prime Minister David Cameron weighed in, putting the Fifa scandal on the G7 agenda and insisting that the world "learn a broader lesson about tackling corruption".Meanwhile, the revelations carried on surfacing. A transcript emerged of the FBI's interrogation of Chuck Blazer, the initial Fifa whistle-blower, and another totally ridiculous fellow, who used to have a parrot on his shoulder.We even saw a photocopy of the $250000 cheque he was allegedly given to vote for South Africa to host the 2010 World Cup.Suddenly, everything we thought we knew was up in the air again.Had South Africa won the 2010 bid or had Morocco been cheated out of it? Had the 2002 World Cup really been fixed to get South Korea into the latter stages? Had Blatter really had an affair with Irina Shayk, Cristiano Ronaldo's ex-girl? (Answers: maybe; probably; who knows; definitely not.)Chapter Five: The Good Guys. If you were going to turn the Fifa corruption scandal into a movie, where would you start? You might start far, far away: wide shot of a nameless, unloved hunk of turf in some small, insignificant town.Close-up of a ball caked in mud; a goal without nets. Action shot of eager kids in oversized jerseys hacking messily at each other, playing for nothing but their love of the game - the spirit of football in its most innocent form; a form no corrupt Zurich mandarin can ever truly extinguish.This actually is the opening scene of United Passions , the Fifa-funded vanity movie that recently opened in the U S and took just $600 on its opening weekend. You couldn't get a room at the Baur au Lac for that.The bad guys in this picture are obvious enough, but who are the good guys?The altruistic US and its heroic police force? The courageous, selfless whistle-blower Chuck Blazer? Man-of-the-people Prince Ali bin Hussein of Jordan? Or is it the underdog English, generously stepping in to offer free use of the Stadium of Light at short notice?In many ways, this is the scariest, craziest thing about this whole affair. The idea that in football, as in life, there might be no good guys at all...