ESPN’s former president, John Skipper, told a federal court in New York that ESPN and Univision had jointly bid $900 million - evenly split between the two TV behemoths - for broadcasting rights to the two most recent World Cups, including the recently completed one in Qatar.
Prosecutors allege the payoffs enabled the former Fox executives - Heran Lopez and Carlos Martinez - to get confidential information from high-ranking soccer officials, including those at FIFA. The information helped Fox secure the U.S. English-language rights with a $425 million bid. Telemundo, a division of NBCUniversal’s Comcast Corp., won U.S. Spanish-language rights for about $600 million.
New York-based Fox Corp., which split from a subsidiary of international channels during a restructuring in 2019, has denied any involvement in the bribery scandal and is not a defendant in the case.The trial is the latest development in a tangled corruption scandal that dates back nearly a decade and has ensnared more than three dozen media and soccer executives as well as associates.
Burzaco is a former business partner of Lopez and Martinez, and headed an Argentinian marketing firm. He has cooperated in previous soccer corruption investigations since being arrested in 2015 in a bribery case. Critics contend he’s cooperating to avoid prison. As a courtesy for helping FIFA develop a rise in soccer viewership, Skipper had hoped soccer officials would allow ESPN to match or beat competitors’ proposals but was not approached to do so.