The man who warned FIFA about the risks of giving the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar respectively goes to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) next week to clear his name.
Former Chilean Football Federation president Harold Mayne-Nicholls led the FIFA inspection team which prepared a report in 2010 on each of the nine bidding nations for the two World Cups.
The former journalist rated Russia and Qatar, in particular, as the riskiest options, but his report was ignored by the 22 voters on the FIFA executive committee.
Five years later, Mayne-Nicholls was suspended from all football activity by FIFA's ethics committee for writing to the Aspire Academy, a state-of-the-art sports centre in Qatar, to ask about unpaid internships for three relatives.
Despite this inquiry going no further, Mayne-Nicholls was given a seven-year ban for breaching FIFA's ethics code. He had previously been considering taking on incumbent Sepp Blatter in the 2015 FIFA presidential election.
Mayne-Nicholls immediately appealed against this and a FIFA panel reduced the ban to three years in 2016.
He then said he would go to CAS, sport's highest court, but had to wait 10 months for the FIFA appeal committee to release its written reasons. Having received those, Mayne-Nicholls filed his CAS appeal in March and will have his hearing on Wednesday, June 14.
In an email to Press Association Sport, he said he hoped the hearing would "finish this nightmare".
The original investigation into his alleged wrongdoing was led by FIFA's ex-chief investigator Michael J Garcia, the American lawyer who quit world football's governing body in December 2015, claiming his own report into the 2018/2022 bidding process was being suppressed.
The 55-year-old Mayne-Nicholls, who currently runs a foundation in Chile that tries to get children more involved in sport, is seeking complete exoneration.
He was reluctant, however, to comment on what Qatar's current diplomatic crisis means for its ability to host the World Cup in five years' time, but did make one keen observation.
He wrote: "In 2010, all the Arab countries were good friends and some of them even suggested they might organise the World Cup together with Qatar. But, as you know, life changes."
Source: PA
