Il-Ġimgħa, Mejju 29, 2015

Football is the game, FIFA is the shame

Don’t you just love America for going after FIFA? Even if only for that.

Take the press conference given by the Department of Justice. Whereas I would usually cringe at the way they make a spectacle of what should be a bland presser announcing an indictment, this time I enjoyed every minute of it. To think that they actually prefer baseball.

Americans just have a knack for it. “The World Cup of fraud” – that is how the Head of the Investigation Division termed it. There, you have the headlines ready to go to print. 

Here they were trying to explain in the best of terms the picture that ensued following years of investigation. The people at FIFA, tasked with upholding the rules to protect and promote the game, have instead corrupted it to serve their interests, turning football (ok, Americans keep saying ‘soccer’, but we can turn a blind eye to that, just this time) into “a criminal enterprise”, as the US Attorney General described it. 

Earlier, as people in the US were still fast asleep, a solitary FIFA Director of Communications gave his own press conference. Conspicuously alone, sitting at a grand podium that usually accommodates a gang of self-important, vain officials, I almost felt a degree of empathy for him. Almost.

He had none of the flowery language that would be used across the ocean. His were mostly one-word answers. The ‘line-to-take’ was that FIFA is actually the damaged party in all this. He must have repeated it half a dozen times, almost as many times as the instances he stressed that Sepp Blatter is not involved in the investigation.

Good old Sepp has been working at FIFA since 1975, first as technical director, then general secretary 
 for seven years, until being elected president in 1998. Today he is vying for his fifth four-year term. That would take him to the grand total of more than four decades, half of which he spent actually heading the organisation.


But he’s “not involved”. Even though a host of his current and former Vice-Presidents and Executive Committee members are currently under investigation. Accountable? What’s that?

Few would have thought the 65th FIFA Congress would turn out to be this exciting. We all predicted another circus that would smoothly re-elect Blatter. Not that he is going to budge. His lame speech in the only public appearance he made in the past two days proves it. Welcoming the delegates to the Congress he refused – once more – to take the blame. “I cannot monitor everyone all of the time”, he 

told us. He did acknowledge, however, that “more bad news may follow”.

The buck must stop with Blatter. Something tells me it soon will.

His only way out is to stay in. Yet, even if today he scrapes another election victory, staying in might not be enough this time round.


Whether his replacement is the antidote for the game is another matter (on its own, it is definitely not), but until then we’ll continue to savour the moment.



1 comment:

  1. Hello to all my viewers my name is Katherine Cullen from Wisconsin USA I want to use this opportunity to thank Dr clement who help me to won sum of $1 million dollars for euro million lottery.thanks Dr clement for helping me to win the euro million.I have been playing the lottery for the past 5 years now and i have not be able to wining nay money,i was so upset and i need help desperate to win the lottery so i decided to go online and search for help then i saw so many good testimony about this man called Dr clement how he gave lucky wining number for many people with help of his spell,then i dis-said to contact him also and tell him i want to win a lottery too, he also cast wining lottery spell for me which i use too, then i play and won $1 million dollars.I m so grateful to you Dr clement,just in-case you also need him to help you wining any kind game he can help you is nice man,you can contact him through his allmightbazulartemple@gmail.com or whatsapp +2347051758952.and he also explain to me he can cure any kind of disease with herbal medicine? .God thank you for send Dr clement to me as a helper? {1}HIV/AIDS {2}DIABETES {3}EPILEPSY {4} BLOOD CANCER {5} HPV {6} ALS {7} HEPATITIS B OR A {8}LOVE SPELL {9} herpes simplex. (10) Ex back

    ReplyDelete