Swiss prosecutors opened criminal proceedings into FIFA's awarding of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, after seven soccer officials were arrested pending extradition to the U.S. in a separate probe of "rampant, systemic, and deep-rooted"corruption. (AP) 
 
 The international investigation into bribery, fraud and corruption at FIFA involved some surprising American names: The Miami chairman of a popular nationwide soccer league, and a major U.S. sportswear firm some believe could be Nike. 
 
 For more than two decades, the Justice Department said Wednesday, five "unscrupulous" U.S. and South American sports and banking executives helped funnel more than $150 million in bribes to officials atop FIFA, the multibillion-dollar goliath governing the world's most popular sport. 
 
 The indictment also alleges bribes were paid and pocketed in connection with the sponsorship of the Brazilian national soccer team by "a major U.S. sportswear company." Although investigators will not name the company, the indictment says the sportswear firm signed a 10-year, $160 million sponsorship deal with the Brazilian team in 1996, closely matching Nike’s clothes, shoes and equipment deal with the team that year. 
 
 The indictment alleges a sportswear-company official agreed three days later to allow Traffic Brazil, a sports marketing company, to charge additional "marketing fees." Traffic then invoiced the company for tens of millions of dollars more in payments over the next three years that investigators say were bribes. 
 
 [U.S.: Indictments are just the start of FIFA scrutiny] 
 
 Nike's current contract, which expires in 2018, includes $34 million a year in payments to the team, the fourth-largest uniform deal in international soccer, and the Oregon-based mega-firm's Swoosh logo sits on every Brazilian player's outfit. 
 
 The Brazilian sponsorship deal helped transform Nike from a brand mostly known for running and basketball shoes into a global sports giant. Nike’s soccer revenue surpassed $2.2 billion in fiscal year 2014, up from $40 million in 1994. 
 
 A Nike representative said in a statement that the firm is "concerned by the very serious allegations ... and strongly opposes any form of manipulation or bribery," adding that the company is cooperating with the authorities. 
 
 Nike investors seemed to shrug off the issue, sending the $88 billion giant's stock falling less than 1 percent. Even if Nike was implicated, analysts expected it would have minimal impact on the Big Swoosh. 
 
 "What fans or consumers are going to be much more concerned about is doping of athletes, fixing of matches, that kind of thing," said Matt Powell, a sports industry analyst for NPD Group. “I think they couldn’t care less who paid whom for what marketing deal.” 
 
 [The human toll of FIFA’s corruption] 
 
 The broader corruption charges allege the five U.S. and South American businessmen pocketed kickbacks in exchange for media rights and marketing deals tied to some of soccer's most profitable games. 
 
 Investigators said they acted secretly, hatching intricate money laundering schemes, smuggling cash and wiring tens of millions of dollars through offshore accounts from the Cayman Islands to Hong Kong. 
 
 Besides the nine FIFA officials, sports-marketing executives Alejandro Burzaco, Aaron Davidson, Hugo Jinkis and Mariano Jinkis were indicted on charges of racketeering, wire fraud, money laundering conspiracy and a host of other charges tied to years of “rampant, systemic and deep-rooted" corruption, as Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch called them. 
 
 The Post's Marissa Payne details the charges facing nine FIFA officials in a round of indictments from the U.S., and delves into why FIFA's president Sepp Blatter is not facing charges. (Editor's note: This video reports that Jeffrey Webb is FIFA's vice president. FIFA has more than one vice president.) (Nicki DeMarco and Marissa Payne/The Washington Post) 
 
 The executives are accused of serving as middlemen between FIFA and its six continental confederations, who make most of their money selling media and marketing rights to popular matches, and the legion of TV and radio networks, corporate sponsors and other licensees, who want to broadcast the games or promote their brands. 
 
 By bribing corrupt FIFA officials with more than $150 million since 1991, the Justice Department said, the marketing executives secured themselves lucrative multiyear contracts. 
 
 [How FIFA became the world’s most powerful and loathed sports organization] 
 
 About $4 billion of FIFA's $5.7 billion in revenue between 2011 and 2014 came from contracts for TV and marketing rights for the 2014 World Cup, the Justice Department said. 
 
 Several prominent South American business leaders were charged in the investigation of what Internal Revenue Service criminal investigation chief Richard Weber called "the World Cup of fraud." 
 
 Burzaco, 50, is the chief executive of Torneos y Competencias S.A. (Tournaments and Competitions), an Argentinean sports broadcast firm that runs pay-TV channels, such as TyC Sports, and owns the rights to air key soccer matches, including World Cup qualifiers. 
 
 Hugo Jinkis, 70, and his son Mariano Jinkis, 40, were the president and vice president of Full Play Group S.A., an Argentinean sports-marketing agency that holds the TV rights to many South American games. 
 
 [Graphic: Charges in the FIFA corruption case] 
 
 José Margulies, 75, the controlling principal of Valente Corp. and Somerton Ltd., was also accused of helping coordinate the illegal payments between the executives and officials. 
 
 The lone American executive charged so far is Aaron Davidson, 44, the president of Traffic Sports USA, a Miami-based arm of the Traffic Group, a Brazilian sports marketing conglomerate. 
 
 Davidson is chairman of the board of the North American Soccer League (NASL), and Traffic Sports USA owns stakes in several of its regional soccer franchises, including the Atlanta Silverbacks and the Carolina RailHawks, and a former stake in the Fort Lauderdale Strikers. 
 
 Davidson spoke for the company in media interviews as recently as last week's Sport Innovation Summit in Mexico City. 
 
 Registered in Miami since 1990, Traffic Sports USA is headquartered in a glitzy office tower, Courvoisier Centre, on the gated island of Brickell Key, state business records show. The firm's office line in Miami gave no answer Wednesday. 
 
 In 2012, the company won a massive marketing contract with FIFA to manage two mega-popular soccer tournaments for the U.S.-based soccer confederation, CONCACAF: the 2013 Gold Cup and 2015 Champions League. 
 
 Davidson said at the time that the company was "honored to have been selected by CONCACAF to represent these prestigious competitions,” and added that “being based in South Florida over the past 21 years has been very strategic and advantageous for us." 
 
 How firms like the Traffic Group allegedly kept bribes pumping play out over the court records of José Hawilla, the firm's 71-year-old Brazilian founder. In December, Hawilla pleaded guilty to charges including racketeering conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy and obstruction of justice, agreeing to forfeit more than $151 million, including $25 million on the spot. 
 
 [FIFA indictments: Questions and answers] 
 
 Founded in Sao Paulo in 1980, the privately held Traffic Group focused on the "commercialization of soccer" through buying and selling media rights such as field branding, sponsorship deals and licensed merchandise. In a 2011 lawsuit, Traffic Sports International described itself as "one of the leading sports event and management companies in the world." 
 
 Traffic International funneled bribes extensively, investigators said: In five payments starting in 2010, for rights tied to the 2011 Copa America, the firm wired $22 million that bounced between a Miami bank, a Banco de Brasil in New York, and an account in Asuncion, Paraguay. 
 
 Federal investigators said Hawilla and his co-conspirators did nearly everything to conceal their scheme, including tapping a Swiss bank account, trusted financial advisers and currency dealers to help hide illegal payments. They also created shell companies and bank accounts in tax havens and secretive jurisdictions, evaded income taxes and resorted to bulk cash smuggling. 
 
 Both Traffic Sports International and Traffic Sports USA pleaded guilty to wire fraud conspiracy this month. 
 
 [FIFA’s ugly stains on the beautiful game] 
 
 The executives found a profitable playground in FIFA, which holds more than $1.5 billion in cash reserves. The organization pockets about $1.4 billion from its six official corporate sponsors every four years, with Adidas, Coca-Cola, Hyundai/Kia Motors, Emirates, Sony and Visa pledged as partners for the most recent World Cup. 
 
 Made up of 209 regional member associations that represent organized soccer, FIFA is both financially opaque, cloaking much of its spending and executive salaries, and tremendously profitable. 
 
 Between 2007 and 2010, when FIFA made 83 percent of its more than $4 billion in revenues off selling TV and marketing rights to the 2010 World Cup, its profits totaled about $631 million, income statements show. 
 
 FIFA, or the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, called itself the “injured party” in the investigation and said it "welcomes actions that can help contribute to rooting out any wrongdoing in football,” a statement released Wednesday said. 
 
 Jack Warner, a former FIFA vice president and soccer official from Trinidad and Tobago charged in the U.S. case, said in a statement to the Daily Mail in London that the investigation hid economic motives. 
 
 “The large world powers typically take actions to affect world football,'' Warner said. " World football is an enormous international business.” 
 
 Post researcher Alice Crites contributed to this report. ||||| Nike may not be an official FIFA sponsor. But that hasn't stopped the company from being caught up in the scandal involving allegations of tens of millions of dollars worth of bribes paid to FIFA officials. 
 
 Nike rival Adidas is one of the top FIFA sponsors, paying the body that oversees the World Cup an estimated $31.6 million a year. But Nike has its own separate deals with national teams and soccer organizations, including Brazil. And that contract puts NIke squarely in the middle of the FIFA criminal case. 
 
 The indictments unsealed Wednesday don't name Nike by name. Instead they refer to "sportswear company E" in one indictment and "sportswear company A" in another indictment as having gotten the Brazilian team sponsorship deal in 1996. And Nike is the company that got the deal in 1996 to sponsor the team and supply it with soccer shoes and uniforms. 
 
 Related: How FIFA makes its billions 
 
 Nike (NKE) issued a statement Wednesday saying it is very concerned about the allegations of corruption against FIFA officials and that it strongly opposes any form of manipulation or bribery. 
 
 "We have been cooperating, and will continue to cooperate, with the authorities," it said. 
 
 The company pointed out Thursday that the indictments "do not allege that Nike engaged in criminal conduct" or that "any Nike employee was aware of or knowingly participated in any bribery or kickback scheme." 
 
 Related: A look inside FIFA's bribe machine 
 
 To get the deal with the Brazilian national team, the unnamed sportswear company had to deal with the Traffic Group, a sports marketing firm whose founder Jose Hawilla has plead guilty to bribing FIFA officials in order to become the middleman between the organization and various broadcasters and sponsors who wanted to strike deals with the soccer organizations. 
 
 And the sportswear company agreed to pay the Traffic Group extra to get the Brazilian sponsorship deal done, according one of the indictments unsealed yesterday. 
 
 The indictment said that contract called for the company to pay $160 million to the Brazilian team over 10 years. 
 
 "Sportswear Company A agreed to pay a Traffic affiliate with a Swiss bank account an additional $40 million in base compensation on top of the $160 million it was obligated to pay," according to the indictment. " It said Traffic also billed the company for an additional $30 million in fees between 1996 and 1999. 
 
 Related: Visa warns FIFA - Clean up your act or else 
 
 The sponsorship deal is relatively small change to Nike, which has $27.8 billion in annual sales and has agreed to endorsement deals with athletes worth $4.7 billion. 
 
 Nike is correct that the indictment does not say that those payments by the sportswear company to the Traffic Group were illegal or were a bribe. But it does accuse Traffic Group and Hawilla of using the money to make illegal bribes to top FIFA officials. 
 
 Soccer is the world's most popular sport and has become an increasingly important part of Nike's business, since it sells more of its products outside the United States than it does in domestic sales. It did $2.3 billion in sale of soccer shoes and gear in its most recent fiscal year, which was its second fastest growing segment behind only basketball. ||||| These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites.
– In the US' indictment of FIFA officials is an allegation that an unnamed sportswear company bribed a Brazilian soccer official to get a sponsorship agreement with the Brazilian federation. Bloomberg thinks that company is Nike—the deal outlined in the documents, it notes, "mirrors" the decade-long deal Nike made with Brazil in 1996, a move that "put Nike on the global soccer map." The sportswear giant responded that it "strongly opposes any form of manipulation or bribery" and that it "[has] been cooperating, and will continue to cooperate" in the FIFA investigation. Nike did not, however, specifically comment on the bribery allegation. Since getting the Brazilian sponsorship, Nike's total sales from soccer have skyrocketed from $40 million (in 1994) to $2.27 billion last year. The company referred to in the indictment agreed to pay $160 million over the following decade for the exclusive selling rights to Brazilian national team gear (and the right to outfit the team in its gear, CNNMoney notes), and in a separate agreement, allegedly also paid $40 million—via Swiss bank account—to "an official at a firm that buys and sells marketing rights in Brazil," Bloomberg reports. A "high-ranking" FIFA and Brazilian soccer official received some of that $40 million. CNNMoney says the aforementioned "official" and "firm" are Jose Hawila and his Traffic Group; Hawila has pleaded guilty to bribing FIFA officials in order to make deals between FIFA and would-be sponsors. Though Bloomberg and outlets including the Washington Post frame the $40 million as a bribe, CNNMoney notes that the indictment does not specifically frame that payment, or an additional $30 million in fees the unnamed company paid Traffic Group between 1996 and 1999, as illegal. The documents do, however, say Hawila and his company used that money to bribe FIFA officials. (Click for a meaty FIFA corruption guide.)