In 2017, the crusading undercover Ghanaian journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas undertook his most controversial investigation yet: using secret cameras, disguise, and elaborate subterfuge, he documented illegal payments to more than 100 soccer officials at all levels of the game, from lowly club referees to a member of the FIFA Council and a World Cup official.

With a dedicated team of undercover filmmakers, Anas set out to see how far and deep soccer corruption in Ghana and West Africa had spread under FIFA’s nose amidst the body’s public pronouncements of a commitment to root out corruption in the sport. Anas presented his investigation to his fellow Ghanaians in the blockbuster documentary “Number 12.” Meanwhile, Insight TWI presented his investigation (and interrogated its ethics) in "Betraying the Game", produced for and aired globally by the BBC.

Anas’ investigation was unveiled days before the World Cup opened in Russia, and it shook international soccer to its core. A World Cup official hastily resigned. Ghana's Football Association, a storied national governing body for the sport, was dissolved outright and summarily. A member of the powerful FIFA Council, the sport’s supreme governing body, was banned for life from international soccer. When all was said and done, the famously anonymous journalist — he never shows his face in public — would come under vicious political attack in his home country, and he would evacuate several colleagues and his family from Ghana amidst threats against their lives and efforts to expose his hidden identity.