by Paul Brammer (Contributer)
Email: alex at ufvcascade dot ca
Last month, the 2018 and 2022 football World Cups (sorry, Brett Favre, we got here first) were awarded to Russia and Qatar, respectively.
The award of the World Cups to Qatar reveals to an unprecedented degree the level of official and unofficial corruption that has rotted world football’s regulatory body to its very core.
Let’s start with Russia. Now, there can be some argument made for Russia’s successful bid – Russia is undoubtedly a football country that has produced some cracking players (Igor Akinfeev, Andrei Arshavin and Diniyar Bilalyetdinov are three of their leading lights currently), and every Manchester United fan can tell you that Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium was the scene of one of their greatest triumphs – in 2008, United beat Chelsea in a penalty shoot-out to win the European Cup for the third time.
So, the footballing pedigree and the world-class stadiums are most definitely in place for Russia’s moment in 2018 – the country also has an excellent national rail service which will serve football pilgrims from around the world well in seven years’ time.
My major bone of contention with Russia’s successful bid is the fact that with the World Cup comes the world’s journalists from every country and continent. Contrast this with the fact that Russia is known to not be the safest place in the world for a journalist. However, I’m willing to accept Russia as a host of the World Cup – in all truth, it should be a great occasion.
The biggest disgrace is the awarding of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar. That is, Qatar, a country of 1.7 million people. To put that into context, 3.2 million people travelled to South Africa this summer to attend the World Cup. It’s like the U.S. hosting 2022 and having 600 million people turn up at Staten Island the day of the opening game.
Qatar also has next to no public transport system. However, this should be no problem for the Qataris, who are per-capita some of the super-richest people in the world – they’re just going to dip in their pocket and build all the infrastructure from scratch, including a link to the island neighbour Bahrain. Why not? They’re rich enough.
Here’s the piss de resistance: the World Cup is held in the summer, and guess what? Qatar reaches heats of 50 degrees Celsius in the summer, which is 132 degrees. So what the flip are Fifa going to do? Oh, well, Sepp Blatter, the crooked lizard scum who’s been the President of Fifa for what feels like a million years, proposed that they’ll just host the World Cup in winter.
In case you don’t know, all of the major domestic European leagues run through this time. Now, Spain, Italy, and Germany, three of the four biggest leagues in the world, all have a winter break over Christmas, which means they wouldn’t be as affected as the English Premier League – the English play right through Christmas with no break (breaks are for Continental bottlers who can’t handle the bloody winter). Any follower of the Premier League will tell you that this is the most exciting time of the season; titles are won and lost over Christmas.
Sepp Blatter, Michel Platini, and the rest of the scum bureaucrats are destroying the last piece of soul that football had. Qatar has no relation to football whatsoever. They have given nothing to football ever. So, how did they get the World Cup? Money. No other answer need apply. Money. Five or six Qatari men who are richer than God wanted to buy the World Cup, so they bought the World Cup. Never mind any of its legacy, history, importance, or passion. Cash the cheque.
Qatar is not San Francisco or Davie Street. Acts of homosexuality are outlawed in Qatar. When asked about this Draconian law, Fifa President Sepp Blatter (surprise surprise, an old, fat, white guy) said that gay people who travel to the World Cup in Qatar should refrain from being publicly gay during the tournament. After Blatter and the fawning journalists in attendance stopped laughing, Blatter got serious and said that Fifa will deal with the law, and that there will be no discrimination against homosexuals in Qatar in 2022, and that events such as the World Cup help to modernise and liberalise countries.
I believe that sport and football do help to make changes to the world for the good, but to see Blatter making that glib remark and chuckling along with his cronies is enough to make a passionate football fan such as myself want to boycott the 2022 World Cup. The scum at the highest levels at the most powerful sporting body in the world poison the game and its importance to billions of people. Football, loved by the whole world, has the power to change the world for the better, but all it is right now is a pawn for old, rich, fat men to feed on.
And I’m pissed off that England lost their bid for 2018. But that’s another story.
