Rich, you ask why it fell to the United States to clean up FIFA. Good question.

In a more sensible world, those who are the most invested in FIFA would have gone after the corruption long before it reached these shores. But, for whatever reason, they didn’t. And so, by the time that the scandals began to touch the United States, the indignities had racked up and the web of deceit was complex. Unfortunately for FIFA, it just so happened that the right people were in the right place at the right time. CNN explains how a routine investigation into the United States’s failed World Cup bid led inexorably to a vast takedown operation that came to involve the head of the FBI and the U.S. Attorney General.

The United States has much stricter and more far-reaching anti-corruption laws than almost every other country. Many of the accused are suspected of having planned their crimes on American soil and of using the U.S. banking system to transfer their illegal payments. Others have links to the United States in some way. One of the key witnesses, Chuck Blazer, is an American. One of the key targets, Jeffrey Webb, was the president of the Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football. Per the BBC, that’s enough to justify the crackdown:

Speaking to reporters just hours after the arrests in Switzerland, FBI Director James Comey set out why the US was able to act.
“If you touch our shores with your corrupt enterprise, whether that is through meetings or through using our world class financial system, you will be held accountable for that corruption,” he said.
As it turns out, the US charges accuse many of those football officials of doing both.
To prosecute cases that involve foreign nationals, US authorities need only prove a minor connection to the United States.

Per Loretta Lynch, these plots threatened to undermine and to corrupt the ”growing U.S. market for soccer.” And so the government moved.

If my English friends are any indication, they haven’t been this grateful to see the yanks getting involved since 1941.