NEW YORK — A federal judge in Brooklyn dismissed criminal charges in one of the most prominent cases to emerge from the decade-long investigation into corruption at the highest levels of world soccer, after the Trump Justice Department told the court that prosecuting soccer bribery no longer aligns with its priorities.
The ruling, handed down by U.S. District Judge Pamela Chen on Wednesday, erased the convictions of Hernan Lopez, the former chief executive of Fox International Channels, and Full Play Group S.A., an Argentine sports marketing company. Both had been found guilty in March 2023 of wire fraud and money laundering conspiracies tied to a scheme that bribed South American soccer officials for broadcasting rights to some of the sport’s most valuable tournaments, including World Cup qualifiers and the Copa América.
The timing was striking even by the standards of this long-tortured prosecution. The dismissal came on the eleven-year anniversary of the original 2015 Justice Department takedown that sent shockwaves through FIFA and international soccer, and it arrived 13 days before the opening whistle of the 2026 World Cup at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, a tournament the United States is co-hosting alongside Canada and Mexico.
Walking out of the courthouse, Lopez declared the matter closed on his own terms. “Six years later,” he told reporters, “a case they never should have started is finally over.”
In court filings, the Justice Department said the decision to dismiss the case against Lopez and Full Play was limited to this specific prosecution and did not amount to a wholesale retreat from the broader FIFA corruption investigation, in which dozens of defendants pleaded guilty or were convicted. Prosecutors said the move was made because the case was no longer consistent with current prosecutorial priorities, without elaborating on why a federal jury verdict and a reinstated appellate conviction no longer merited defending.
The collapse of the case is the second time under President Donald Trump’s second term that the Justice Department has walked away from a high-profile bribery prosecution. Last year, the department dropped charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams in a move that triggered an exodus of senior prosecutors from the department’s public integrity section in Washington.
The broader context of the dismissal has drawn considerable scrutiny. Trump has cultivated an unusually close relationship with FIFA President Gianni Infantino ahead of the World Cup on American soil. In December 2025, Infantino presented Trump with FIFA’s inaugural peace prize during the tournament’s official draw ceremony at the Kennedy Center in Washington. Within days of that ceremony, the Justice Department filed to drop the indictment at the Supreme Court level. The Eastern Herald covered the controversial peace prize ceremony in December.
There is no direct evidence of coordination between the FIFA relationship and the prosecutorial decision. A Justice Department spokesperson said the prosecutions in this case are not consistent with current priorities, framed around making America safe. But legal observers noted the sequence with undisguised unease. Former federal prosecutor Justin Weddle told Bloomberg Law the solicitor general’s decision to abandon the case should “have a meaningful effect on the entire Department of Justice’s view of the law.” According to early reporting, the solicitor general effectively ordered Brooklyn prosecutors to stand down over the objection of their Trump-appointed U.S. attorney.
The legal path to Wednesday’s dismissal was labyrinthine. After the 2023 jury convictions, Judge Chen had vacated both verdicts, citing a Supreme Court ruling in the unrelated Joseph Percoco case, which raised the bar for honest services wire fraud prosecutions and called into question whether the statute could reach foreign commercial bribery. The Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Chen’s decision last summer, reinstating the guilty verdicts. Lopez then petitioned the Supreme Court. It was at that stage, with a freshly reinstated conviction in hand, that the Trump administration abandoned it.
The original investigation became public in May 2015 when federal authorities arrested seven FIFA officials at a luxury hotel in Zurich. It ultimately named more than 40 defendants, produced at least 31 guilty pleas, and led to the downfall of then-FIFA president Sepp Blatter. The Eastern Herald has previously reported on the long history of corruption allegations tied to World Cup tournament awards.
In the Lopez prosecution specifically, witnesses at trial testified that he was among a group of Fox executives who orchestrated bribes to CONMEBOL officials in exchange for Copa Libertadores broadcasting rights. Prosecutors said those bribes also gave Fox access to confidential bidding information for the 2018 and 2022 World Cup television rights, a competitive edge worth potentially hundreds of millions of dollars. Lopez had been facing up to 40 years in prison.
Full Play Group, convicted alongside Lopez, was accused of separate bribery schemes involving Copa América and South American World Cup qualifying rights. Both convictions, reinstated by the Second Circuit last July, were wiped out Wednesday.
The broader implications for ongoing prosecutions remain unresolved. With World Cup matches beginning in two weeks across the United States, at least four other defendants in related cases had filed dismissal motions before the same Brooklyn court, as reported. The government’s willingness to abandon a conviction it had just successfully defended at the appellate level has raised questions about whether the Justice Department will continue pressing its remaining FIFA-linked cases.
Trump earlier this year paused enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the statute that for decades underpinned the government’s ability to prosecute American companies for paying bribes to foreign officials. The administration has also cut the Justice Department unit responsible for public corruption and fraud cases. The cumulative effect, legal analysts said, is a sharp reduction in federal appetite for the kind of transnational bribery prosecution that defined the FIFA investigation.
FIFA itself said nothing publicly about the Brooklyn ruling. Infantino did not address the dismissal. The tournament opens June 11 in Los Angeles, with the final set for July 19 at MetLife Stadium, where Trump is expected to present the World Cup trophy.
For Lopez, the resolution was personal as much as legal. Charged in 2020 and tried three years later, he spent five years in a prolonged public battle against convictions that were overturned, reinstated, and now dismissed entirely. “The charges were baseless from the start,” he said through his attorneys. “I have fought for five years to clear my name.”
