Turning and turning in the widening gyre 
The falcon cannot hear the falconer; 
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. 

Yeats was contemplating the chaotic state of postwar Europe when he wrote The Second Coming, rather than a gang of superannuated Fifa executives fiddling while world football’s governing body burned a century later.

But surveying the scene in the cavernous conference hall on the outskirts of Zurich on 2 December 2010 as heads of state, celebrities, Fifa officials, the entourages of nine bidding countries and hordes of media collided in an intoxicating, tawdry brew of money, power and dealmaking, the sentiment felt apt.

It is hard to overemphasise the extent to which the corrupted, chaotic and controversial dual bidding race for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups both epitomised all that was wrong with the bloated beast Fifa had become and sowed the seeds for the slow-motion collapse that played out over the next five years. Chasing one last big payday, the biggest beasts in the Fifa jungle finally over-reached themselves.

Even as bidding teams trooped home dejectedly, leaving behind piles of pointless, unread bid books, there were dark rumours of secret meetings in the five star hotels in the hills above Zurich, of trade pacts and done deals.

Yet scanning the press the day after the decision, it is striking just how much space is devoted to the naive outrage of the England bid team who had just squandered £21m – “They looked us in the eye and lied!” – and how little to the jaw-dropping decision to take the World Cup to Qatar.

That would all change. First came confirmation of the sheer scale of the machine that secured Qatar’s victory – the millions lavished upon ambassadors like Zinedine Zidane and Pep Guardiola, the high-level trade talks, the low-level land deals, the network of Aspire Academies, the construction contracts.

Then came the rumours, hotly denied, of bribery and corruption. Then the focus on the extreme heat in which the tournament was scheduled to be played and the machinations over moving the tournament to December. Finally, shamefully, the outrage and pressure over the hundreds of migrant workers dying in the desert to build the infrastructure to host a World Cup.

It was the vote for Qatar that emboldened Mohamed bin Hammam, the Qatari Fifa executive committee member who helped deliver victory, to launch a tilt at Blatter’s presidency after being frustrated by the incumbent’s failure to keep his promise to step aside in 2011.

Blatter, by then used to thinking two or three steps ahead and using the machinery of the Fifa presidential office to extinguish threats to his power, moved to see off Bin Hammam.

Chuck Blazer, the American exco member who we now know would shortly turn FBI informant after being pursued by tax authorities over huge debts relating to the sums he had extracted from TV and marketing deals, turned on his Concacaf colleague Jack Warner and brought down the Qatari. But in the process, he would eventually spark an existential crisis for Fifa.

The FBI indictment laid bare the extent to which two generations of football officials in the US and South America skimmed up to $150m from marketing and television deals over 25 years in what amounted to a “World Cup of fraud”. In the fallout, practically every presidential race and World Cup bidding scramble during that period has come under scrutiny.

Qatar’s triumph was also a victory for Michel Platini, who helped orchestrate its success and was open about his own vote, and a boost to his own clout within the Tudor star chamber of Fifa’s executive committee.

Less than a month later, he was to be found holding court with reporters at Uefa’s lakeside HQ, pondering whether the tournament should be moved to winter and shared with the rest of the Gulf.

And three months later still, before Uefa’s congress in Paris, an emboldened Platini would agree the fateful deal with Blatter that would see him claim the £1.3m he believed he was owed under the terms of an earlier agreement and sow the seeds of their potential mutual demise.

And as the US delegation, including Bill Clinton, trooped home in disappointment their sense of burning injustice also played into the establishment support for an FBI investigation that would follow in short order and ultimately led to the dramatic arrests in the very same Baur au Lac hotel where bid teams had frantically, pointlessly tried to woo voters on the night before the vote.

Frank Lowy, the chairman of Football Federation Australia, was furious at Australia’s single vote garnered following a campaign that cost AUS$46m (£22.3m) of public money, and would spend much of the next few years furiously instructing private investigators.

And the vote would also signal a turning point in public perception, in which a shrug of the shoulders started to be replaced by anger. Even those of us who agree that there is a compelling case for a World Cup in the Middle East are equally convinced this was the wrong way to get there.

There are just as many question marks over Russia’s victory – the rented computers, later destroyed, that were dismissively offered up to investigator Michael Garcia to answer allegations of impropriety as exhibit A – but it was the fateful decision to strike out for Qatar that sent things spinning out of control.

Perhaps Blatter, who insists he voted for the USA, knew it and that is why he wears a grimace more than a grin as he opens Qatar’s envelope.

He now says there was broad agreement between Fifa’s senior powerbrokers to take the World Cup to Russia then the USA, but that Platini upset their plans. Almost immediately, Blatter was on a private plane to visit the Emir to try and smooth things over. But he knew it was a decision that would come back to bite him and Fifa.

Before 2 December 2010, much of the evidence against Fifa’s mafia-like structure was hiding in plain sight thanks to the diligence of a handful of investigative journalists and the odd chink of light such as the $100m ISL bribery affair. But the omertà stayed strong.

Such were the forces unleashed by the ill starred dual bidding race that it would not hold another five years, as the once all-powerful masters of Fifa’s universe were targeted from without, as an emboldened FBI set about its work, and within, as they began to bring one another crashing down.

Now Blatter and Platini stand on the brink of lifetime bans and the majority of those 22 voters who made the decision are either disgraced, deposed or dead. Fifa’s downfall is complete, and the diligent administrators who work there must hope that something new can emerge from the burning wreckage.

And yet scanning the list of candidates to replace Blatter at February’s special congress – to be discussed at Wednesday’s executive committee meeting along with the two upcoming World Cups and reform plans put forward by a committee populated by its own executives – it is hard to be too optimistic about what comes next.