Former English Football Association chairman Geoff Thompson told Fifa ethics investigators that a plan for England to play a friendly in Thailand in order to secure a vote in the bidding race for the 2018 World Cup was "a form of bribery".
Thompson's frank admission was made in 2014 to an investigation - led by American lawyer Michael Garcia - into the notorious December 2010 vote to decide the hosts for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.
Before this week, only a 42-page summary of Garcia's work by Fifa ethics judge Hans-Joachim Eckert released in November 2014 had been made available. Garcia disowned this summary at the time and quit his role with world football's governing body.
But on Monday, German newspaper Bild announced it had obtained a copy of Garcia's full report and started releasing extracts, only for Fifa to surprise everybody by publishing the entire, 422-page dossier on its website on Tuesday.
While the successful bids of Russia 2018 and Qatar 2022, in particular, have attracted the most interest from anti-corruption campaigners, investigative journalists and, more recently, law enforcement agencies, arguably the most embarrassing criticisms in Garcia's report are reserved for the two biggest losers: Australia and England.
Both bids are strongly criticised for breaching bidding rules and Fifa's ethics code in their attempts to "curry favour" with the 24 voters on the Fifa executive committee (ExCo).
This, however, is a result of both these bids giving Garcia their full co-operation and answering his team's questions honestly, as he acknowledges.
This is in stark contrast to the likes of the bids from Spain/Portugal and Russia, which claimed to have destroyed or lost most of the relevant evidence, and the vast majority of ExCo members, who either ignored or tried to mislead Garcia.
None of this, though, excuses the clumsy and misguided attempts of the England 2018 bid committee to influence ExCo voters.
For example, in a clear breach of bidding rules, eight days before the 2018/2022 vote, the FA agreed to a request from ExCo member Worawi Makudi for England to visit his country for a friendly in June 2011.
Makudi, a former Thai FA president, was also granted his request for the TV rights to the game everywhere except the UK, with the FA also agreeing to pay a larger chunk of the match expenses than was usual.
But several senior FA officials were deeply uneasy about this idea, not least because there was no footballing justification for a match between the then sixth-ranked England and 129th-ranked Thailand.
Speaking to Garcia in 2014, Thompson, who also chaired the bid from May 2010, said he "didn't think it was appropriate" to organise friendlies with countries represented on the ExCo "because ... it's a form of bribery".
This view was supported by the FA's acting chairman at the time, Roger Burden, who told Garcia he was against the friendly because "there was an argument [England 2018] might not have been a clean bid".
Like so many of the English bid's rather amateurish schemes, Makudi voted for Spain/Portugal, as widely predicted, England lost in the first round and the match was cancelled three weeks later. As a postscript, Fifa banned Makudi in 2016 from all football activities for five years.
* Press Association
