PASP representatives met yesterday with Justice minister Ionas Nicolaou
to hand over their findings and discuss the broader issue of corruption in
Cypriot football................
However it also emerged that the vast majority of football players – 75
per cent – are disinclined to report such goings-on. The chief reason they
cited for their reluctance was ‘insecurity’ – they fear repercussions and do
not believe their whistle-blowing would achieve results. The players believe that club officials and board members engage in
match-fixing, but also coaches and athletes....... On the involvement of players, Neofytides said that in the past they were
coaxed into throwing games with the promise of getting paid their full
salary.......... Currently, he added, club debt is the main reason why teams agree to fix
matches.......... In its 2015 report, the watchdog lists Cyprus, along with Albania, Malta,
Montenegro, Bulgaria, Canada and Indonesia as ‘countries where it is
impossible to bet’.
“The Asian betting market, which is completely unregulated and which it
would be impossible to establish any kind of control measures for, moves –
albeit these are indicative figures – around $80bn every week.”
UNQUOTE
You might think that the players would know. Having to cheat in order to get
paid is a bad state of affairs but tells us something about financial
management among Greek Cypriots. With Asians betting circa $80 billion a week
the opportunities for fraud are there. Federbet explains all at
http://cyprus-mail.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Federbetinforme_v12.pdf
Football Industry Is Deeply Corrupt [ 29 September 2016
]
QUOTE
Undercover reporters from the paper met Allardyce in a London hotel and
filmed him agreeing to make four trips to Singapore to speak to investors at
£100,000 per trip. He offered advice about how to circumvent the banned
practice of third parties “owning” players. Announcing the departure of
Allardyce, after 67 days in the £3m-a-year England job, the FA said his
conduct was “inappropriate of the England manager”.
Allardyce said: “Although it was made clear
during the recorded conversations that any proposed arrangements would need
the FA’s full approval, I recognise I made some comments which have caused
embarrassment.”...........
It said that it has evidence from meetings
between undercover reporters and agents, managers and club officials which
suggest corruption is a “major problem” in English football. The Telegraph has filmed football agents
naming five current or recent Premier League football managers they said
they had paid bungs to..............
It added that the loyalty of fans “may not
survive the idea that the game is largely a racket run for the benefit of
fixers and middlemen”.
UNQUOTE
People pay seriously silly money to watch Football.
Crooks are happy to abuse them.
English Football's Financial Challenge [ 19 March
2019
]
QUOTE
LONDON - On the face of it, the
English
Premier League is on a high. Millions of fans
worldwide watch its matches every weekend, and its 20 member
clubs generate as much revenue as their Spanish and Italian
rivals combined. Half of the eight quarter finalists in this
year’s UEFA Champions League are from England.
It may therefore sound alarmist to say the Premier League is financially
precarious. Yet for club owners who shell out most of their turnover on
player fees and wages, even the slightest sign of a slowdown causes heart
palpitations. Add to that a vacant position as the league’s chief executive,
and English soccer’s current predicament comes close to crisis territory.
Readers of “The Club”, Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg’s new history
of the competition, will notice the current predicament is eerily similar to
the conditions that led to the league’s birth in the early 1990s. Another
breakaway by top sides seems possible.
EARLY LEAD
Today the league is by far the world’s most popular, reaching a potential
television audience of 4.7 billion people in 185 countries. Yet as recently
as the start of the 1985-1986 season, even domestic fans couldn’t watch
top-flight English soccer on TV. The sport was mired [ sic ] by fan violence, a
bureaucracy which bound top clubs to the lower divisions, and incompetent
owners unaware they were sitting on a goldmine.
Three visionary chairmen, the heroes of Robinson and Clegg’s book, were
the exceptions. David
Dein at Arsenal,
Martin Edwards
at Manchester United
and Tottenham Hotspur’s
Irving Scholar noticed that rights to show American
football games sold for many multiples of English soccer matches. Cash-rich
cable TV channels such as ESPN lured subscribers by promoting matches. Big
teams shared the TV money, rather than spreading it across a vast sporting
bureaucracy.
Dein and his peers refitted their stadia with bigger stands and
U.S.-style executive boxes. Some dreamt up club mascots. By the early 1990s,
they had formed a coalition willing to break away from the lower leagues and
sell their games directly to TV. They found a sugar daddy in
Rupert Murdoch,
who needed exclusive content for his fledgling satellite operator, BSkyB. He
agreed to pay 60 million pounds per season - almost six times the previous
deal with broadcaster ITV.
SQUEAKY BUM TIME
Rights values soared as Sky’s subscribers grew and rivals joined the
fray. By 2015, Murdoch and telecom operator BT agreed to pay a combined 1.7
billion pounds a season for the domestic TV rights. The bonanza made clubs
multibillion-dollar enterprises: the equity value of the top 20 clubs rose
by about 10,000 percent to 10 billion pounds between 1992 and 2018, on Clegg
and Robinson’s figures, helped by free-spending owners like Chelsea’s
Roman Abramovich. Player wages rocketed: Tottenham forward Harry Kane’s annual
salary would have bought a controlling stake in his club in the 1980s.
The glory days came to an abrupt halt last year, when Sky reduced its
annual outlay by 16 percent. Financially-motivated team owners can’t abide
such stasis, since they make little profit from day-to-day operations. The
Big Six - Manchester United, Manchester City, Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool
and Tottenham - on average produced an annualised return on invested
capital of just 6 percent over the last three years, according to a
Breakingviews analysis of club filings.
Owners therefore depend on rising equity values. Publicly-listed
Manchester United trades on a multiple of about four times forward sales. To
live up to such a lofty valuation, it must boost revenue at a much quicker
rate than the humdrum 1.5 percent rise in 2018.
That means looking to China and America. The Big Six have hired scores of
commercial managers and marketers to promote their brands and strike
sponsorship deals overseas. Manchester United now has an official “mattress
and pillow partner” and an “official global oil lubricant partner”, neither
of which are based in Europe.
This raises a couple of problems. First, no one seems to want the tough
job of negotiating the next round of TV rights in 2021: three TV executives
have declined the vacant role of Premier League chief executive, according
to news reports.
Second, the globalisation of soccer widens imbalances within the league.
While fans from Vietnam to Canada happily watch Manchester City and
Liverpool, they’re less interested in Burnley or Huddersfield Town. Yet the
Premier League’s relatively egalitarian funding formula means no team can
receive more than 1.8 times the amount of TV revenue received by the lowest
earner. Spanish giants Barcelona last year took home 3.6 times more than La
Liga’s bottom side.
The Big Six routinely raise the prospect of a breakaway to increase their
bargaining power, Robinson and Clegg write. A modest option would be playing
a few games in China each year. Alternatively, the top sides could join
forces with the biggest European clubs to form their own super league. That
might seem too dramatic. But as the history of the Premier League’s early
years shows, English soccer tends to follow the money.
UNQUOTE
The Football Industry is about using and abusing
greed. Of the four big names mentioned three are Jews, while none are
players:-
David Dein
[ Jew ]
Martin Edwards
[ fornicator ]
Irving Scholar
[ Jew ]
Roman Abramovich
[ Jew ]
Football Banned In Cyprus
[ 20 January 2020 ]
QUOTE
All Cyprus league matches have been cancelled indefinitely the referees’
association said on Friday, following a bomb attack against one of their own
in Larnaca earlier in the day. “Our abstention is not just for the weekend, it is indefinite. We want to
talk, meet with the Cyprus Football Association (CFA), a representative of
the government,” said the secretary general of the referees’ association,
Vasilis Demetriou.
A CFA announcement said it was postponing all scheduled fixtures in all
leagues after referees protest over the car bomb placed on a car belonging
to 33-year-old referee Andreas Constantinou...............
Commenting on the ‘red notices’ received by Cyprus football, Savvides
said they all agreed at the meeting to ask for help to deal with match
fixing from European football association Uefa..............
The cancellation came amid yet another turbulent time for Cypriot football,
which is once again engulfed in match-fixing and corruption allegations. This
was not the first time a referee’s car had been targeted. There have been more
than a dozen bomb and arson attacks against referees’ property over the past
decade amid public claims of corruption............
Police have yet to clear any of the 84 match-fixing notices sent by Uefa
since 2011 or the attacks.
UNQUOTE
The Football industry is corrupt. Is this news?
Not really but it confirms suspicions. Civilization ends at Dover albeit
English football has its moments.
Qatar denies U.S allegations of World Cup bribes [ 15 April 2020 ]
QUOTE
(Reuters) - The organisers of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar have strongly
denied allegations from the U.S. Department of Justice that bribes were paid
to secure votes for the hosting rights to the tournament.
Suspicion and rumours have long surrounded both the 2010 vote by FIFA’s
executive to hand the 2018 World Cup to Russia and the 2022 tournament to
Qatar. Yet on Monday, for the first time, prosecutors set direct, formal
allegations regarding both tournaments down in an
indictment.......................
The indictment states that the three South American members of FIFA’s
2010 executive - Brazil’s Ricardo Teixeira, the late Nicolas Leoz of
Paraguay and an unnamed co-conspirator - took bribes to vote for Qatar to
host the 2022 tournament...............
The DOJ also alleges that then FIFA vice-president Jack Warner was paid
$5 million through various shell companies to vote for Russia to host the
2018 World Cup...........
In 2014, FIFA, then under the control of former President Sepp Blatter,
cleared Russia and Qatar of wrongdoing in their bids to host the World Cup
after an investigation. Blatter was banned from football by FIFA along with
scores of other officials following internal ethics investigations, promoted
by the arrests of seven FIFA officials on U.S corruption charges in Zurich
in May 2015.
Warner and Teixeira have been banned for life from football by FIFA while
Leoz died last year under house arrest in his native Paraguay where he had
been fighting extradition to the United States to face corruption charges.
UNQUOTE
Are they all bent? Football is a game for
gentlemen played by ruffians. Rugby is a game for ruffians played by
gentlemen.
Football Industry Is A Corrupt
Money Machine Run By Anti-White Racists
[ 3 May 2021 ]
QUOTE
“I had strong suspicions America was finished when I realized legions
of white sports fans were fawning over imbecilic Negroes fondling their
balls – then they allowed one to serve as President.” – Arch Stanton
That’s why professional sport is important. In itself of course it
has lost whatever significance it might have had but as a tool for White
destruction it has few parallels. For a start it’s the only arena where
blacks can equal or beat Whites, at least in those sports where brute
strength and fast-twitch muscles are pivotal. But even in those sports
positions requiring brains such as out-half in rugby and quarter-back in
American football are almost the exclusive preserve of Whites [ e.g.
Stanley Matthews ].
Nonetheless open borders have resulted in most European football teams
today, especially the top ones, being made up primarily of blacks and
other foreigners.
This applies not only at club level but also with “national” teams,
such as the “French” football team pictured here. Factoring in their
massive salaries with idolatry from mainstream and social media
non-Whites have been transformed into much desired mating material for
White shiksas. This stardust trickles down to ordinary non-Whites whose
mating status has risen by osmosis. The corollary of course being that
White males endure a corresponding lowering of their mating status. And
we can see the results every time we pass a welfare office..........................
And now we have the recent move by Europe’s top football clubs to
create a new Super League which was met with such a ferocious response
from the clubs’ supporters that the project was humiliatingly abandoned
within days. The reaction was particularly vociferous in England where
no fewer than three and possibly four of the six clubs involved are
owned by foreign Jews. This has not gone unnoticed and despite draconian
censorship various anti-Semitic dog-whistles have appeared throughout
social media and supporters forums. ‘Rootless international
speculators’, ‘globalists’, ‘parasites’, ‘money-grubbing’……..oh dear.
Even the Happy Merchant meme has made a few heartening appearances.
The
Glazer brothers became the focal point for this anger. These
‘American’ Jews (who look like something from
Der
Stürmer)
bought the iconic Manchester United (possibly the world’s most valuable
sports “franchise”) about fifteen years ago with a bid almost entirely
financed by borrowing. They’ve been draining the club in the meantime to
pay back the loans, a practice which predictably has lead to a major
decline in the club’s on field achievements. Stunned by the reaction to
their Super League wheeze the Glazers promised to stop the looting and
plough profits back into the club. But thankfully the fans were not and
are not buying it. Today’s vital match against Liverpool had to be
abandoned after United fans invaded the pitch. “Manchester United
supporters have stormed Old Trafford, some getting into the stadium
and onto the pitch, postponing the Premier League match against
Liverpool as thousands of other fans gathered outside the famous ground,
demanding the Glazer family sell the club. Long-running anger against
the American owners has boiled over.”
Meanwhile at least one good development has arisen from the Covid
plandemic in that it has had a catastrophic financial impact on all
professional sports. So chin up and hope that more disasters quickly
come down the line. Things aren’t always as bad as they seem.
UNQUOTE
The Irish Savant is
spot on again. Why do men care so much about
Football? Because they are tribal by instinct. They prove it by
paying over the odds to see Third World
aliens play. But enlightenment is coming - in spite of the
Mainstream Media.
Football As An Anti-White
Propaganda Tool [ 12 August 2021 ]
QUOTE
Professional sports – let’s focus on football – are totally unimportant. And
extremely important.
Professional sports – let’s focus on football – are totally unimportant.
And extremely important. Unimportant in that teams are made up of
interchangeable multi-millionaire negroes with no connection or loyalty to
the clubs they represent. Same goes for managers who without hesitation will
move to a hated rival if the price is right. Increasingly clubs are owned by
foreign billionaires, usually Jews or Arab potentates. Often, as in the case
of the iconic Manchester United, clubs are bought on borrowed money and then
bled dry to pay back the loans.
Then there’s the issue of sponsorship. The days when a wealthy benefactor
might discreetly use his money to support his local club are long gone. Now
clubs – sorry, ‘franchises’ – are beginning to embody their owner’s name. So
you have Red Bull Salzburg and Toyota Cheetahs. Competitions have come to be
known by the sponsor’s name, as in the Barclays Premiership or the Heineken
Cup. So we’re not far from the stage where Basildon & Bellericay Mutual
Building Society Athletic clash with Yummy-Yummy Beefburger Corporation
Rovers in the final of the Swinbourne & Patterson Reflective Armband
Corporation Cup. If that doesn’t set the pulse racing, what will?
In reality the results of such encounters should be of no more interest
to ordinary fans than the respective sales figures for Pepsi and Coke. But
they are. Tens of millions of fans pay serious money every week to support
their ‘franchise’ while hundreds of millions more pay for cable TV coverage
of the ‘product’. And boy does that product push wokeness, and do it more
effectively than anything else apart from Hollywood. For a start football is
probably the only arena where blacks can equal or surpass Whites. And
PULEEZE – do not say ‘music’. That would make me very angry. And every
vector of the football poz is saturated with wokeness. Blacks and women
replacing White men at a dizzying pace in the media while the ‘Respect’ meme
is ubiquitous. Even Celtic Park, once a hotbed of Irish republicanism in
Scotland, has gone over to the Dark Side. That venue marked the last time I
attended a football match. That was about ten years ago and even then the
poz was rampant. To the point where I vowed I’d never attend another match.
Valuable advertising space was taken up by various forms of multicultural,
globohomo propaganda. Who paid for that, I wonder? During the half-time
interval we were subjected to more appeals for ‘Respect’ and a
mini-documentary on a poor African migrant’s escape to freedom. What the
hell has that got to do with a football match? And that’s mild compared to
what’s going on today, what with taking the knee and lachrymose silences to
commemorate drug-addicted armed robber George Floyd.
And diversity has taken firm hold at international level as well. Many
so-called national teams are made up of the same interchangeable Africans we
see at ‘franchise’ level. (That’s the Belgian squad on the left at a
training session.) Which explains why I had very little interest in this
year’s European Championship. Until the final between England and Italy
which I must admit was a good game. All apart from our American readers will
know that the Championship was decided in Italy’s favour by way of a penalty
kick shootout.
The same people will know that England lost because their three black
penalty-takers missed when their turn came. The miss by the fine young
Anglo-Saxon pictured here actually gave the Championship to Italy. In
fairness to them they have the skill to score 99% of the time. But taking a
Championship-deciding kick while hundreds of millions hold their breath is
much more a matter of nerve and experience than of skill. And these two subs
lacked both.
Given my growing lack of interest I didn’t reflect too much on this
although something kept nagging at the back of my mind ever since. Something
wasn’t quite right. You see approximately 80% of penalty kicks are
converted. With Italy having missed first the odds on England winning
immediately soared. Convert the last two and the prize was theirs. And
that’s where things got strange because rather than use Henderson or a
specialist like Grealish (both White) their Manager Gareth Southgate chose
the two young blacks that he’d brought on late in the game. Self-evidently
that was why he brought them on as subs. On the face of it an
amazing decision, as almost everyone agreed.
So here’s my epiphany. As I said earlier sport in general (and soccer in
particular) has become a crucial vector for globohomo multiculturalism. The
Euros took it to new heights – depths, more accurately – with England
especially celebrating their diverse team and their promise the ‘bring
football home’. Southgate is very woke and played along with it all the way,
strongly backed ‘taking the knee’ and never missing an opportunity to
burnish his image by trumpeting his anti-racist credentials. The media and
the Football Association loved him for it. Now what better way to crown his
achievements than by having two black English players administer the
coup de grace to Italy and win the tournament for their grateful
fellow-countrymen?
Fanciful? I don’t think so. In fact it’s the only ‘rational’ explanation.
Once again public happiness has been sacrificed to the gods of diversity.
UNQUOTE
The Irish Savant asks
why the manager chose use a second rate player to take the penalty kick. Others will have
joined the dots differently. With megabucks riding on the answer, last minute betting gives
the answer. Alan Sugar, a loud mouthed little Jew
told us that the Football Industry is corrupt; he
fingers Terry Venables in particular. Is he wrong?
The World Cup Has Never Been Beautiful/ [ 11 November 2022 ]
QUOTE
James Maddison in. Ben White and Marcus Rashford restored. Kalvin Phillips
and Kyle Walker risked despite injury. As the England squad was announced
yesterday, the familiar excitement began to kindle. Even if
the reported viewing figure for the 2018 final of 3.572 billion appears
to have been
exaggerated, the World Cup is one of the few truly global events. The
opening game is Qatar against Ecuador, and their group is completed by
Senegal and the Netherlands: it’s hard to imagine many other spheres in
which four such disparate countries compete on such a stage.
And yet, it’s impossible not to approach Qatar with a sense of unease.
This is the first World Cup since 1934 to be hosted by a nation that has not
previously played in it; why is Qatar so keen to be involved that it has
spent
an estimated $220 billion on staging the event?
The answer is timeless: hosting the World Cup has always been a political
act. When Uruguay staged the first tournament in 1930, Juan Campisteguy’s
government underwrote the costs of travelling teams because it believed the
tournament would promote the country’s centenary of independence. The gamble
paid off; Uruguay went on to beat Argentina 4-2 in the final.
This was nothing compared to what happened in Italy four years later.
Mussolini was well-aware of the propagandistic potential of sport, often
being photographed riding a horse or skiing. In 1933, when he met Engelbert
Dollfuss at the beach resort of Riccione, he donned a pair of swimming
trunks while the diminutive Austrian Chancellor wore a sober suit. “When you
compete abroad,” Mussolini told Italian athletes, “the honour and sporting
principle of the nation is entrusted to your muscles and above all your
spirit.”
No doubt the Antwerp Olympics of 1920 were at the back of his mind, when
the Italian athletes who turned up were a dishevelled bunch who sang the
“Red Flag”. Twelve years later, they arrived in Los Angeles dressed in
matching black shirts and singing “Giovinezza”, the hymn of the Italian
Fascist Party. They went on to finish second in the medals table. Victories
abroad, as Il Littorale noted as early as 1928, “were clear signs
of racial superiority that are destined to reflect in many fields outside of
sport”.
Whether Italy’s football coach throughout the Thirties, Vittorio Pozzo,
was a Fascist remains contested, but he certainly benefited from the
regime’s focus on muscular leadership. “The norms that govern the game,” he
said, “impose the principles of authority, without which order cannot
exist.” His side at the 1934 World Cup was brisk and physical and found
referees benevolent. As the journalist
Gianni Brera observed in his great history of Italian football, Louis
Baert, the Belgian who oversaw the quarter-final against Spain, “behaved as
if he were well-aware where the game was taking place”, while there were
numerous rumours about meetings between Mussolini and the Swedish referee
Ivan Eklind, who unusually refereed both Italy’s semi-final and the final.
Not that anybody in Italy much cared about the controversies, as Simon
Martin’s
Football and Fascism makes clear. In La Gazzetta della Sport,
Bruno Roghi wrote of the national team as “little, gallant soldiers who
fight for an idea that is greater than them”, while the Florentine Fascist
weekly Il Bargello described the World Cup win as “the affirmation
of an entire people, an indication of its virile and moral strength”.
It wasn’t, though, just about winning the World Cup. It was also about
projecting the idea of Italy as a modern nation. There had been heavy
investment in stadiums for a decade before the tournament. Fans from France,
Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland were subsidised to come to Italy.
Tickets were printed on high-quality paper to encourage visitors to keep
them, and the Fascist insignia they bore, as souvenirs. The Futurist artist
Filippo Marinetti was commissioned to design a poster that focused on a
powerful, thrusting figure in Italian kit and bore the fasces in one corner.
Stamps produced for the tournament pursued a similar theme.
Foreign journalists were impressed, to the delight of the Italian media.
“The spontaneous and heartfelt statements of our foreign colleagues,” Roghi
wrote in La Gazzetta, “are more than sufficient to show Mussolini’s
Italy — that was once little Italy of all improvisations and apologies — has
organised the festival of football with the style, flexibility, precision,
even the courtesy and meticulousness that indicated an absolute maturity and
preparedness.” His response was extreme but not uncommon. It was a similar
eagerness to show off the Estado Novo that led the Getúlio Vargas regime to
bid for Brazil to host the 1942 World Cup — although by the time that
tournament was finally played, in 1950, Vargas had been deposed.
Argentina was chosen as host for the 1978 tournament in 1966, the bid of
one military junta ultimately inherited by another. This political chaos was
reflected in the official logo, which was based on the
arms-clasped-above-head
gesture of Juan Perón, who had briefly returned to power in 1973 before
dying and being succeeded by his wife, Isabel, who was ousted three years
later in a coup. Before the tournament was held, slums were destroyed or
hidden from view, dissidents rounded up, and around a tenth of the national
budget spent on constructing or redeveloping stadiums. Most important:
Argentina won.
Whether, as is widely believed, the success sustained the junta in power
is difficult to assess, but two details seem telling. First, about ten
minutes’ walk from El Monumental, the stadium where Argentina beat the
Netherlands in the final, is the ESMA (the Navy School of Mechanics) which,
under the junta, became a notorious torture centre. When the prisoners,
hearing the roars of the crowd, celebrated in the cells, General Jorge
Acosta, one of the most brutal torturers, took out three of them in his car
and wound down the windows so they could see the celebrations on the streets
— to show them that their protests against the regime meant nothing beside
the eruption of patriotic joy. Second, four years later, after the invasion
of the Falklands, Argentinian TV broadcasts were dominated by two things:
news from the war, and reruns of the glory of ‘78.
Qatar, then, is not unique. Every country to have hosted the World Cup
has done so with some sort of soft-power objective in mind. Even England, in
1966, saw their triumph blend with the idea of Swinging London: to project
an image of a vibrant, modern nation emerging from the gloom and stuffiness
of the Fifties and the loss of influence both politically and in football
(the 6-3 defeat to Hungary in 1953 was essentially football’s Suez).
But this World Cup does feel different. This is partly down to the
corruption that surrounded the award of hosting rights for 2018 and 2022.
There is no evidence Qatar did anything wrong, but 16 of the 22 delegates
who made the decision have either been
convicted or credibly accused of wrongdoing, while many have wondered
what
was discussed at the lunch, nine days before the vote, between Nicolas
Sarkozy, the then-French president, Tamim al-Thani, who has since succeeded
his father as Emir of Qatar, and the French then-Uefa president, Michel
Platini.
Then there are the well-reported
human rights issues, and the fact that, ever since the Gulf states
bought up major football clubs and the rights to stage major fights and
Formula One races, both the British media and fans are more aware than ever
about “sportswashing” — the way sport can be used to present a certain
picture of a nation and garner influence. The phenomenon of certain fans
backing the stance of the state that owns their club against its critics —
see Newcastle fans
criticising the fiancée of the murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi;
or
Manchester City fans insisting on the guilt of Matthew Hedges, who was
accused of spying in Abu Dhabi — was familiar even before news broke that
Qatar is actively paying fans from certain countries to sing on demand
and help police social media.
Meanwhile, for those fans who do stay home, there is a prospect of a
winter sitting huddled under blankets, struggling to afford rising energy
prices (caused by a war started by the last World Cup hosts), hoping
the power cut is over in time to watch the next game, beamed live from a
country that is only staging the tournament because of the profits it has
made from selling gas. Geopolitics has a sudden immediacy.
The Fifa president Gianni Infantino and secretary general Fatma Samoura
wrote this month to each of the 32 competing football federations, urging
them not to allow “football to be dragged into every ideological or
political battle that exists”. Which is not, on the face of it, unreasonable
— were it not for the fact that Qatar hosting a World Cup is itself part of
a political battle, and that certain issues cannot be casually dismissed as
differences of ideology. The letter speaks of the opportunity “to welcome
and embrace everyone, regardless of origin, background, religion, gender,
sexual orientation or nationality” — and yet homosexuality is outlawed in
Qatar. An existential threat to a group of people is not “an ideological or
political battle”; indeed, it runs directly contrary to
Article 3 of Fifa’s own statutes, the value of which is now exposed as
nil.
Finally, there is the decision not to hold the World Cup in June-July.
Perhaps there is a case to be made that the European off-season should not
dictate the timing of the World Cup. Why should a raft of countries be
disbarred from hosting just because their climate does not fit? But this
does not alter the realisation that the bidding process for 2022 was for a
tournament to be staged in June and July, and that the rules were changed
after Qatar had won when it was decided that maybe trying to play — or watch
— football in 40-plus degrees wasn’t a great idea, even with whatever
speculative cooling technology was being proposed.
Covid-related changes to the schedule also have not helped, but the rejig
to the Premier League calendar necessitated by the November start means
there are just seven days between the final domestic league game and the
opening match of the World Cup. There should have been eight, but three
months ago the start date was suddenly moved forward by a day, apparently so
Qatar could play Ecuador with the eyes of the world upon them, undistracted
by three other matches on the same day. The change was made just as a global
advertising campaign was launched marking 100 days till the start of the
World Cup and immediately rendered inaccurate — the problem perhaps of a
society in which royal whim can override years of diligent planning.
To put the lack of break in context, there has never previously been
fewer than 16 days between the Champions League final and the first game of
the World Cup, so most players have had three-to-four weeks beforehand. This
means not only a greater likelihood of fatigue and injury for players, but
also a lack of preparation time for national coaches; with the usual
two-to-three weeks of build-up reduced to three or four days, how can they
work on anything but the most basic planning?
There will be those who question how much this all matters. Football,
after all, is only a game. It is just 22 players chasing around an inflated
polyurethane sphere. Compared to persecuted minorities and workers toiling
in abject conditions, who cares about the football? But the World Cup
does matter. It matters to those who play it and those who watch it and
those who believe, along with Jules Rimet, that, despite it all, the
tournament can be an event that fosters understanding between peoples. And
yet, once again, perhaps more than ever, the World Cup finds itself a tool
of propaganda, with all that is good about it sublimated to the needs of an
authoritarian state. At its heart, the World Cup is an idealistic
phenomenon, and those ideals have rarely felt so threatened.
UNQUOTE
Football is a propaganda tool just like Sesame Street! You doubt it? Then
look at
Sesame Street Propaganda Level Stepped Up By Including Homosexuals
FIFA Bosses Took The Bribes From Qatar
QUOTE
Disgraced former
FIFA president Sepp Blatter has claimed it was a 'mistake' to hand the
World Cup to Qatar because it is 'too small' to stage the huge tournament.
Qatar's awarding of the prized competition
back in 2010 was met with huge controversy after allegations the country had
paid bribes in order to secure the right to host the tournament - while the
start date has been switched to the Winter to avoid players competing in
sweltering temperatures.
The hosts have also come under fire due to the
country's human rights record and its anti-LGBTQ laws, with many nations
planning to make a stance against discrimination when they arrive in Qatar
this November.
Blatter - who was in charge at the top of FIFA
from 1998 until 2015 before being banned from football for six years over a
corruption scandal - gave his first interview since being cleared of the
charges in July. He said it was a mistake to give Qatar the
honour of hosting due to its size and claimed that USA were FIFA's preferred
to stage the 2022 edition before they were given the 2026 format.
'The choice of Qatar was a mistake,' Blatter told
Swiss outlet Tages-Anzeiger.
'At the time, we actually agreed in the
executive committee that Russia should get the 2018 World Cup and the USA
that of 2022. It would have been a gesture of peace if the two long-standing
political opponents had hosted the World Cup one after the other.
UNQUOTE
Sepp Blatter is
bent but then the Football Industry is too. How
much did he walk away with? Pass but he stayed out of prison; it's water
under the bridge so he is talking.
