In an exclusive article by Rob Draper and Nick Harris in the 'Daily Mail', the host nation has reportedly doped all its international football teams and were planning to swap urine samples at this year's World Cup.
According to a whistleblower who has already exposed the scale of some of the corruption in Russian sport, the World Cup hosts wanted to create a carbon copy of their operation at the Sochi Winter Olympics by swapping urine samples at the tournament later this year, so that its footballers could take drugs without punishment.
Bryan Fogel, director of Icarus - a documentary film about Russian doping in sport - believes this current football scandal will be just as damning as those for winter sports and athletics.
The American also alleges that Vitaly Mutko, Deputy Prime Minister of Russia and head of Russia 2018 until last month, orchestrated the whole programme, telling his staff that "there should never be positives reported in football, even though all the footballers were on the state-sponsored doping programme."
Pressure is now on FIFA to get to the bottom of these allegations with the possibility of having to discipline the host nation in what looks like football's biggest doping scandal. Many are calling for Russia to be banned from their own World Cup which could set unprecedented reprecussions around the footballing world with the competition only 6 months away.