Desperately trying to get a grip on the present to structure a future on the home front, the past has come back to haunt the FFA. As it was always likely to do.

The long-awaited release of American lawyer Michael Garcia's report into the bidding processes for the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bids has not let Australia off lightly.

But references to "corruption" and "explosive revelations" remain matters of interpretation. As it stands, there's no smoking gun, although there yet could be.

Franz Beckenbauer remains under investigation, and it is not beyond the realms of possibility that something of genuine substance could yet turn up.

Frank Lowy's decision to allow Hungarian fixer Peter Hargitay into the bid's inner sanctum was always risky, and ill-conceived.

A cursory Google search turns up Hargitay's dodgy track record, and why Lowy ignored all the warning signs and signed him up as campaign manager only he knows.

Hargitay's perceived close friendships with Sepp Blatter and Beckenbauer was a supposed selling point, but came with strings attached.

It's no surprise they've unravelled. Blatter and Beckenbauer are now persona non grata at FIFA, and Hargitay's reward for producing a single vote in favour of Australia amounts to many millions of taxpayer funds.

That, as yet, remains Lowy's greatest mistake.

The payment of $500,000 into a bank account eventually raided by one of football's biggest crooks – the Trinidadian octopus Jack Warner – has already been well chronicled, and while the Garcia report makes it clear this payment was intended to influence Warner's vote, it also makes it clear FFA was not culpable for the fact Warner stole the money that was intended for a "Centre of Excellence" in Port Of Spain.

Warner made a habit of cleaning out CONCACAF bank accounts for many years. Lowy's decision to ignore advice from his own management to approve the payment was clearly a serious misjudgment.

Australia's other pork-barrelling exercises in Oceania and Africa – including the much-publicised donation of lapdesks to the townships of Cape Town – also fall into the category of influence, rather than criminality. In the end none of it mattered. Africa and Oceania didn't vote for Australia, and nobody really knows who did.

Other bids, including England's supposedly squeaky-clean campaign, clearly pressed the flesh harder and better than Australia, and Lowy's dream as well as $45 million of government money went up in smoke.

A leather-bound, gold-embossed bid "book", of which only a handful of copies were ever made, still looks bad and smells even worse. Officially it cost $5 million.

Unofficially, around $11 million went into the pockets of Hargitay's chosen consultants. Skeleton? A closet, at the very least.

Whether the crumbs off Beckenbauer's table eventually lead back to Whitlam Square remains to be seen, and we can't rule it out. If Swiss or American prosecutors ever get "der Kaiser" into a real court of law, anything could happen.

But on this evidence Australia's bid falls into the category of all the other bids, including the winners Russia and Qatar. Rules were bent, but not broken in any significant way.

Garcia didn't have the power to subpoena witnesses, so there's more supposition and conjecture than hard evidence of illegality in his 430-page report.

World football remains a toxic swamp – the greatest laundry machine of black money on the planet – but the amount of prosecutions remains pitifully small.

Which comes back to the central point. Definitions of corruption vary wildly from country to country, and culture to culture. As Garcia discovered, there's no black and white in the global game, only grey.

In the meantime, FFA needs to do something it doesn't make a habit of. Get on the front foot. Confront the allegations head-on.

Steven Lowy made it clear in a recent SBS interview that while he loves his father and respects his contribution to the game enormously, he's his own man and wants to be judged as such.

For many reasons – including the current civil war with A-League owners, various state federations and the players' union – Lowy jnr is needed as a calming, assured, voice of reason.

He says he's a leader, and now he really needs to be one. Be strong. Be honest. Be bold. He's got it in him, I reckon.