Finally, after 10 months of exhaustive research, the report FIFA had commissioned on the involvement of funds in the transfer market landed on the desk of president Sepp Blatter. The 136-page report, signed off by six authors, found that almost 10% of global transfer fees were now distributed to investors. The report did not make a specific recommendation on whether to ban the practice, but made it clear that football had to do something urgently because the practice was becoming difficult to control. The hands-off approach FIFA had adopted wouldn't be feasible anymore.

The following month, FIFA held its annual congress in São Paulo on the eve of the 2014 World Cup. Coverage of the event was dominated by Blatter's suggestion that he would be standing for a fifth term, even though he'd promised delegates when he was re-elected in 2011 that he wouldn't. Few in the conference room paid as much attention when the soft-spoken Englishman Geoff Thompson, a former FIFA vice-president, provided an update on what was called third-party ownership of transfer rights. Thompson, sometimes unflatteringly referred to as “Silent Geoff” in the British media, said that FIFA would set up an advisory panel that might lead to new global regulations. Given the influence of South Americans in FIFA's all-powerful executive committee, few at that point could have considered the possibility of an outright ban. Indeed, FIFA legal director Marco Villiger was briefing reporters that a cap on the number of players clubs could sell the transfer rights to was more likely than prohibition.

The 68-year-old Thompson, who lived in a modest suburban home in the northern English town of Chesterfield, would lead the 20-man panel on behalf of FIFA. The other members were representatives of national leagues, clubs and player unions. The panellists in favour of banning investment funds included Arsenal CEO Ivan Gazidis and Theo van Seggelen, general secretary of international players union FIFPro. Those who wanted to regulate the arrangements were in a vocal but noisy minority, and included Spanish league president Javier Tebas, Costa Rican football federation president Eduardo Li and FC Porto lawyer Daniel Lorenz. The group converged on FIFA's $250 million headquarters with its five underground levels and walls made of grey and black granite imported from Brazil. They walked through the sliding doors past a meditation room made of brown onyx that contained a single bench and, according to FIFA staff, was barely used. On level-3, the group of 20 men strolled into the executive committee meeting room. It was here that FIFA's “Exco” members – like Blatter, Julio Grondona and Michel Platini – met after sweeping into the underground car park through a tunnel without having to face the waiting TV crews and journalists.

The invited group of what FIFA called “football stakeholders” filled most of the 24 brown leather chairs positioned under an enormous chandelier shaped like the bowl of a football stadium and exchanged greetings across a stone floor made of deep-blue “lapis lazuli.” In the middle of the blue was a gold-plated stone that contained earth from each of FIFA's 207 member federations. With FIFA and UEFA lawyers watching from the sidelines, both sides got down to business and presented their arguments.

At times Thompson struggled to keep order as the delegates strained to make their points clear, with translators babbling into their headsets. Speaking in Spanish, Tebas said that investors were needed to provide finance to medium-sized clubs such as Atlético Madrid. Banning funds from football would be like banning sports betting because of a few cases of fraudsters fixing match results. The only measure that football authorities needed to take was to start a register of the funds and their stakes.

Gazidis, following the line of Premier League chief Richard Scudamore, calmly but thoroughly ripped into the dangers of outside interference in the transfer market. Gazidis said that the report suggested there was evidence that the practice pushed clubs into a cycle of debt and dependency. Furthermore, it was almost impossible to regulate the practice. There was even a danger, he said, that investment funds could become more powerful than clubs and dominate the $5 billion market. He said that FIFA should ban investors and introduce heavy sanctions for clubs who continued to do deals with them.

Van Seggelen, the FIFPro president who had travelled from the organization's headquarters in Amsterdam, had an even more radical view. He wanted to see the downfall of the transfer system altogether, removing the price tags associated with players once and for all. In the opinion of FIFPro, the transfer system had become a multi-billion-euro “monster” in which players were treated as commodities. Privately, union officials were holding talks with the European Commission with a view to ending the horse trading because football authorities had shown no appetite for overhauling the system themselves. FIFPro, which had helped fund Jean-Marc Bosman's successful challenge of the transfer system 20 years earlier, now wanted a wider reform of the transfer system to give footballers the same freedom of movement as other workers and not intertwine their careers with the financial outlook of club executives and investors.

But after months of trying, Van Seggelen had made no progress in negotiations with FIFA, UEFA and leading European clubs. The big clubs said they could see no better alternative to the transfer system and relations between FIFPro and the clubs had become tense. Across the lapis lazuli, the Dutchman clashed with FC Porto's lawyer over the way the market operated.

The sometimes acrimonious meeting lasted several hours before the stakeholders went their separate ways. Even though there was no consensus, as La Liga boss Tebas caught a flight back to Madrid he thought that he had made his point and expected there would be a compromise to satisfy everyone. After all, Gazidis said, he did not want clubs partnering with investors to “be thrown under a bus”.

Three weeks later, a separate 24-man FIFA committee led by German football executive Theo Zwanziger that didn't include Tebas held another meeting about the issue at the ruling body's headquarters. The group was handed a surprise last-minute mandate: they must vote that same day on whether to ban investment funds, according to one of the members, Rinaldo Martorelli, the Brazilian players' union chief, who had flown in from São Paulo. Behind the scenes, Platini and other European football officials were pushing FIFA to kick out investors. “I would have liked more time to reflect, but there was a lot of pressure from Europe to make a decision,” Martorelli said. “They wanted to make a decision in one day.” For the Brazilian, the issue was complex and deep-rooted in his home country, and he needed to think it over. The panel voted 22-2 in favour of a ban. Its decision would be presented to FIFA's executive committee the following day.

The next morning FIFA's 24 executives, including Platini, filed into the soundproof basement of its glass-fronted headquarters where they held meetings every few months. Three floors underground, they were out of range of a mobile phone signal. No longer among them was vice-president Julio Grondona, who had been Blatter's unerring ally during his presidency. Grondona had died weeks after watching Argentina lose the World Cup final 1-0 to Germany on a heart-breaking goal deep in extra time. Blatter flew to his old friend's wake and funeral in Buenos Aires, which was attended by Argentina's president Cristina Kirchner and four-time world player of the year Lionel Messi. Standing over his dead body, Blatter shared a final moment with his old friend. “Julio, how can this be?” Blatter said, softly, as curious bystanders looked on. “You said you would always be there for us and now you have gone without telling us.”

In Zurich, the FIFA executives took their usual seats with their minds made up about the issue in question. When Blatter stood up and asked if there was a consensus for a ban, the executives nodded and agreed there was. As was often the case, no vote was necessary, according to Michel d'Hooghe, a retired Belgian surgeon who had been an executive since 1988. He said executives had voted no more than five times in a quarter of a century. “The problem with voting is that you end up with the majority who are happy and the minority who are unhappy,” he said.

Shortly afterwards, FIFA general secretary Jérôme Valcke briefed reporters upstairs about the decision. He said the prohibition would probably come into force in three or four years. “The ban cannot be implemented immediately,” Valcke explained.

The 20 members of the working group returned to Zurich for another meeting, with the supporters of investment funds angry that their advice had been overlooked. La Liga president Tebas was particularly incensed. He felt their previous discussion had been a charade. Although there was no evidence of Platini leaning on FIFA president Blatter personally to speed up the process, there appeared to have been some bargaining between UEFA and FIFA officials. Platini had recently decided not to stand against his former running mate in the 2015 presidential election.

UEFA lawyer Alasdair Bell said there was overwhelming support for a ban in football. “The majority view was it was a practice that should be outlawed and this was a big majority view,” Bell said. “It wasn't even a close call.” Brendan Schwab, an Australian representing FIFPro on the working group, said he would not have been surprised if the ban was motivated by political machinations. Less than two months later, FIFA released a statement saying the prohibition would be on 1 May 2015. The six-line announcement was buried under the latest developments in an internal ethics investigation into voting on the 2018 and 2022 World Cups in Russia and Qatar. It looked like the end of the road for the 40-year-old secondary market.

Tebas decided to fight back. He was determined to defend the business model and said it was essential to provide some competitive balance as he feared the Premier League's soaring television revenue would eventually give its clubs an unfair advantage in the Champions League. Some of Spain's biggest teams – like Atlético Madrid, Valencia and Sevilla – already generated less television revenue than Premier League back-markers and the financial gulf between the two leagues continued to widen. “If we can't use this in five years' time the Premier League will be like the NBA and none of the other championships will be relevant anymore,” Tebas said. His counterpart in Portugal, Luis Duque, agreed. Both men travelled to Brussels to file a complaint to the European Commission's competition department. They said that FIFA's ban would contravene rules on the free movement of capital in the European Union.

Doyen Sports, which had invested $100 million in the previous three years, filed a lawsuit against the ban to a court in Paris. The complaint said the fund would have to shut down its business within months. Platini's lieutenant Gianni Infantino said he was prepared for the backlash. “Some people see that they are going to lose money, they start hiring lawyers, they defend their position,” Infantino said. “They will try to find ways around it. These guys are clever people but we are more clever.” UEFA filed its own complaint to the European Commission, saying investors were undermining the integrity of the game.

Less than a month after FIFA's ban came into force, one of the members of the working group, Eduardo Li – president of the Costa Rican football federation who had opposed the ban on investment funds – returned to Zurich and checked into the Baur au Lac hotel. Li was staying on the fourth floor, his room just off the hotel's central spiral staircase. Discrete and palatial with suites costing as much as $4,000 per night, the hotel offered sweeping views of the cobalt waters of Lake Zurich and had become the resting place of choice for FIFA executives when they came to town for meetings.

While Platini was still in Warsaw for the Europa League final, other FIFA executives strolled about the hotel contentedly. Outside, black Mercedes-Benz limousines awaited them and their partners should they want to visit designer stores or swing by high-end restaurants. Some of the executives gathered in little groups, chatting over tea in the hotel's main lounge. There was a lot to discuss. In three days there would be a presidential election. Sepp Blatter was up against a Jordanian prince – Ali bin al Hussein – even if the Swiss incumbent was expected to coast to victory. One of the executives, Jeffrey Webb, a burly Cayman Islander, took his leave. With his arms draped over the shoulder of his doctor wife, Webb strolled across the hotel's marble floor and made for the grand staircase and for bed.

As the FIFA executives enjoyed themselves, excitable journalists from the New York Times, Bloomberg News and a few other American media organizations had gathered at the bar of the hotel. They had been tipped off that something important was going to happen. The tip-off from the US authorities a couple of days earlier was cloaked in secrecy, in case news filtered through to the FIFA men, but the reporters felt they were about to witness history. Just a few hours later, as the sun was beginning to rise, more than a dozen plainclothes police officers streamed into the hotel. Some were bearing green folders, which contained a list of names.

Webb and Li were among six people on the list. Handed key cards, the officers woke the unsuspecting FIFA officials. Two officers knocked on Li's door. He was allowed to bring a bag of belongings with a FIFA logo before they escorted him to the elevator and through a side door to a waiting car. Hotel staff held up crisp white linen to hide him and Webb from the view of the media.

The Swiss police were carrying out raids on behalf of the US Department of Justice. Led by the diminutive Loretta Lynch, a formidable lawyer who'd recently risen to the office of Attorney General of the United States, the Americans laid out a stunning array of charges, alleging that some of football's most senior men had been involved in corruption dating back more than two decades. The accused executives included elderly FIFA officials from Uruguay and Brazil who had recently attended Grondona's funeral.

Most of the charges concerned officials from the Americas who were accused of receiving millions in kickbacks in return for media and sponsorship rights, but details of suspected vote rigging in FIFA elections and bids to host the World Cup were also revealed. Blatter's name was not on the list of those people charged. FIFA's spokesman, Walter de Gregorio, made a point of saying as much when he convened an impromptu press conference. “The president is not involved,” de Gregorio said. “It's not good in terms of image, in terms of reputation, but in terms of cleaning up everything we did in the last four years, this is good.”

On the other side of the Atlantic, oblivious to events in Zurich, Jochen Lösch touched down at John F. Kennedy airport in New York on a flight from São Paulo. Lösch, a German sports executive, had come for a friend's wedding. As he turned off flight-mode to activate his mobile phone, he found he had received 50 WhatsApp messages from family, friends and colleagues during the 10-hour flight. Lösch, the head of international business at Traffic Sports, who had lived in Brazil for 15 years, had heard rumours in recent weeks at work that something “heavy” would happen. The company he worked for sold television rights to football tournaments, ran investment funds and owned small teams in Portugal and Brazil that aimed to profit from the player transfer market. Scanning his messages and eyeing rolling CNN updates on a TV monitor as he waited to pick up his suitcase on the baggage carousel, he quickly found out why he'd suddenly become so popular.

As part of the 236-page US indictment leading to the arrests at the Zurich hotel, it emerged that his boss, José Hawilla, had five months earlier secretly pleaded guilty in a New York court to racketeering conspiracy, wire fraud and money laundering in connection with the awarding of TV rights contracts since the 1990s. As a result of this and the evidence of other cooperating witnesses, police had charged one of Lösch's colleagues, a 44-year-old American called Aaron Davidson. Stunned by the news and a little nervous, Lösch hauled his suitcase off the conveyor belt and walked towards passport control. “I said to myself, today is D-Day,” Lösch recalls.

Lösch had arrived in Rio de Janeiro to start a new unit for sports marketing agency Sportfive. Other European agencies would follow as Brazil won the rights to host the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games. But Hawilla, the son of a dairy plant owner from São Paulo's farming belt, already dominated the market. He had turned a company that sold bus stop advertising – Traffic – into the biggest sports marketing company in Brazil. For the Brazilian football federation, he secured $1 million sponsorship deals with Pepsi and Umbro. When Nike bought out Umbro's deal and Coca-Cola gazumped Pepsi as Brazil's sponsor, Hawilla was rewarded with $2 million in annual fees over several years.

As a sideline, Hawilla also started two $20 million investment funds that bought transfer rights from clubs on behalf of investors, but he also took another direction: between 2005 and 2011 he set up or acquired three football teams – Desportivo Brasil, Estoril Praia in Portugal and Miami FC in the North American Soccer League – to make money from transfers. In 2007, Hawilla hired Lösch to oversee their management.

The beauty of owning the teams for Hawilla was that there was no interference in player trading from team executives, agents or anyone else, because Hawilla controlled the clubs and Traffic represented the players. “This is the future,” Hawilla said in 2010. “There is nothing more obvious and clean than this.”

Nor was there pressure from fans: the teams hardly had any. Based a three-hour drive from São Paulo, the lush green pitches on which Desportivo trained welcomed only a few dozen friends and family of players to matches. Across the Atlantic, in a suburb a 30-minute drive from Lisbon, Estoril Praia's stadium was hemmed in by apartment blocks and terraced houses and only a few hundred people turned up to watch games. Miami FC welcomed barely 1,000 fans to its games at a former high-school stadium in Fort Lauderdale.

It was a fresh approach to making money on the transfer market that, Lösch said, for investors was less troublesome and more profitable than the investment funds. But would Lösch and these clubs be hauled into the sprawling American investigation into football? Lösch held his head up and looked straight at the American immigration official examining his passport. When he was waved through to the other side, Lösch breathed a sigh of relief and the tension in his body subsided. “No-one wanted to talk to me, which proved I'm a clean guy,” he said.