Ethics complaint puts CONMEBOL president Alejandro Domínguez under pressure ahead of World Cup

Alejandro Domínguez is facing fresh pressure over money recovered from soccer’s FIFAgate scandal, with an ethics complaint raising a hard question that still haunts South American football: whether anti-corruption reform was a real break with the past or mostly a new layer of control over the same old funds.

The complaint lands at a sensitive moment for CONMEBOL, which says it recovered about $130 million from corruption schemes and has tied part of that money to projects meant to show the spoils of reform in public view. Those efforts include CONMEBOL SUMA, the confederation’s social responsibility program focused on development, health, recycling and education through football, and a community center in Luque, Paraguay, financed with recovered FIFA Gate funds.

Domínguez, who has led CONMEBOL since 2016, is now under pressure to explain not just how the money was recovered, but who controlled it and how it was used. CONMEBOL has said it is the only football confederation in the world to conduct a forensic audit into the scandal, and that audit identified at least four suspected patterns of conduct that caused financial harm between 2000 and 2015. One of the most serious findings cited by the confederation was the direct transfer of nearly $28 million from CONMEBOL accounts to personal accounts of former president Nicolás Leoz at Banco do Brasil.

The wider corruption case that brought those transfers to light led to charges against more than 50 individual and corporate defendants from more than 20 countries. The U.S. Department of Justice approved remission of more than $201 million in losses to FIFA, CONCACAF, CONMEBOL and member federations, including an initial $32.3 million distribution in August 2021 and a later distribution of about $92 million in June 2022. The remission framework was meant to compensate the victims of the scheme, but it also exposed how much of soccer’s financial system depended on weak oversight for years.

CONMEBOL has said it filed a criminal complaint in Paraguay in June 2017 and that it will go “to the end” in its efforts to recover diverted funds and pursue accountability, including in cases involving Banco Atlas and alleged money laundering tied to Leoz. Its 80th Ordinary Congress in April 2025 urged faster judicial action. As the World Cup approaches, the new ethics complaint suggests the post-FIFAgate cleanup remains unfinished, and that trust in soccer governance is once again on trial.