By the standards of its short and not-so-glorious history in FIFA, East Timor was having a golden run: scoring goals, winning matches, making it through the earliest phase of World Cup qualifications. But, as much as we would have loved this story to be a happy one, what it revealed was further corruption under world sport's dirtiest umbrella, FIFA.

As our multipronged investigations for The New York Times, and others, revealed, this newfound success was not the result of football development projects nurturing local talent, but was instead derived from bringing in ineligible players from Brazil, giving them passports and then, in many cases, selling them to clubs in Asia, as well as securing them for the Timorese national team.

Because the Timorese national team had been able to break FIFA's laws so openly, clubs themselves adapted the scam - and began securing lost and stolen passports, including from Syria, for their imported players, in order to give them local eligibility under the Asian Confederation's rules.

The initial phase of this project was focussed on the national team of East Timor, and the tools we built for this stage of the project harvested match report and player biography information from the Soccerway website and then looked for potential red flags: players not born in East Timor. Ascertaining the eligibility status of these flagged players then required manual intelligence gathering.

The tools were then put to use looking for red flags in other national teams in Asia, and across the globe, and were then adapted to look for foreign-born players making a living at clubs in Asia, where we had become aware that some clubs were acquiring lost of stolen passports for South American players, in order for them to take the 'designated Asian player' spot that each club is allowed to have (and thus freeing up space for their side to bring in another imported player).

As a result of this year-long investigation, which also featured in other publications, sanctions and bans were handed out at the national, club and individual level. Most importantly, it resulted in Timorese players again getting opportunities to play for their nation, albeit only in competitions outside the imposed sanction.

Read lead article in investigation

Exposing corruption in sport has been an ongoing theme of our work, including match-fixing on the international and local stage, and corruption and governance issues in world football.

Other stories in this area include a world exclusive for ABC News, which was followed internationally by the likes of The New York Times, where we revealed that two players were being investigated for match-fixing at tennis' most prestigious tournament, Wimbledon.

We also used open-source intelligence to lift the lid on a secretive new betting partner for Manchester City, the English Premier Club linked to the United Arab Emirates. While the bookmaker had many of the hallmarks of a fake: from stolen online avatars to seemingly non-existent owners, we were able to discover that the bookmaker was being run out of Dubai by a mysterious marketing company that seemed to exist for no other purpose but to look after the bookmaker. This story was subsequently followed up by UK papers Mail On Sunday and The Mirror.