fifthcolumnblue
Vital Football Legend
Sepp Blatter is like a Mafia Don, and it's about time someone took him down.
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FIFA: Somebody please, please do something
Fifa, I’m afraid, behaves like a mafia family. It has decades-long traditions of bribes, bungs and corruption.
About half of its executive committee who voted on the last World Cup have had to go.
Systematic corruption, underpinned by non-existent investigations where most of the accused are exempt from the investigation, make it impossible to proceed.”
Those are the words of Lord Triesman, the former chairman of The FA, spoken in parliament.
I agree with him as, I suspect, do the vast majority of football fans – but FIFA has stopped making me angry now, and whatever ire it used to provoke has been replaced by almost a depressed indifference.
The battle against Sepp Blatter, Qatar, and the corruption that exists at the top of the game feels completely futile, because neither the organisation’s president or anyone associated with him has any willingness to create a genuinely transparent bureaucracy and any attempt to force reform is just beaten off with empty rhetoric.
Blatter is essentially a criminal; he is the protector of an organisation which flaunts its impurity in the world’s face and he’s the guardian of an ethic-less legislature which has, and continues to, rape football of its dignity. This isn’t just a bumbling old man who makes foolish comments in front of the press, no, this is a viper, a real snake, a blood-sucker who has used his power to gorge himself for as long as anyone can remember.
And you know what the worst aspect of this is?
FIFA’s reaction has always been the same. Their default response to any allegation or even to the mere suggestion that ‘their way’ might not be morally digestible is always just to lie – there are variations to that lie, sure, but it’s always delivered in the same half-hearted, insulting way: empty words in a press-conference, contradictory assertions about their morality, creating the illusion of self-investigation or simply – and with a straight-face – claiming that the newspaper reports and the proven transgressions are really just fiction or the work of agenda-based journalism.
Somewhere in Brazil right now, FIFA are meeting and Blatter is presumably talking in that nauseating way about football’s power or its ability to bring people together. He reads the papers, he hears the world’s discontent, and yet he is completely indifferent to it – because he can afford to be.
It’s infuriating.
I don’t know what and I don’t know how, but somebody do something about this. FIFA should be an unseen legislature that is only visible at competition draws, but yet it has managed to cast a shadow over the entire game. In football terms, Blatter and his aged army now loom so large that they’re blocking out the sun.
How is it that on the eve of a World Cup excitement is playing second-fiddle to resentment? Why, even in Brazil, are there so many people who are disenfranchised from and disillusioned with the game? It can’t be right.
If FIFA is the senate and Blatter is Julius Caesar, then we really are desperately in need of a Brutus. Blatter has to fall before the damage being done becomes irreparable.
http://thepremierleagueowl.com/fifa-somebody-please-please-do-something/
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FIFA: Somebody please, please do something
Fifa, I’m afraid, behaves like a mafia family. It has decades-long traditions of bribes, bungs and corruption.
About half of its executive committee who voted on the last World Cup have had to go.
Systematic corruption, underpinned by non-existent investigations where most of the accused are exempt from the investigation, make it impossible to proceed.”
Those are the words of Lord Triesman, the former chairman of The FA, spoken in parliament.
I agree with him as, I suspect, do the vast majority of football fans – but FIFA has stopped making me angry now, and whatever ire it used to provoke has been replaced by almost a depressed indifference.
The battle against Sepp Blatter, Qatar, and the corruption that exists at the top of the game feels completely futile, because neither the organisation’s president or anyone associated with him has any willingness to create a genuinely transparent bureaucracy and any attempt to force reform is just beaten off with empty rhetoric.
Blatter is essentially a criminal; he is the protector of an organisation which flaunts its impurity in the world’s face and he’s the guardian of an ethic-less legislature which has, and continues to, rape football of its dignity. This isn’t just a bumbling old man who makes foolish comments in front of the press, no, this is a viper, a real snake, a blood-sucker who has used his power to gorge himself for as long as anyone can remember.
And you know what the worst aspect of this is?
FIFA’s reaction has always been the same. Their default response to any allegation or even to the mere suggestion that ‘their way’ might not be morally digestible is always just to lie – there are variations to that lie, sure, but it’s always delivered in the same half-hearted, insulting way: empty words in a press-conference, contradictory assertions about their morality, creating the illusion of self-investigation or simply – and with a straight-face – claiming that the newspaper reports and the proven transgressions are really just fiction or the work of agenda-based journalism.
Somewhere in Brazil right now, FIFA are meeting and Blatter is presumably talking in that nauseating way about football’s power or its ability to bring people together. He reads the papers, he hears the world’s discontent, and yet he is completely indifferent to it – because he can afford to be.
It’s infuriating.
I don’t know what and I don’t know how, but somebody do something about this. FIFA should be an unseen legislature that is only visible at competition draws, but yet it has managed to cast a shadow over the entire game. In football terms, Blatter and his aged army now loom so large that they’re blocking out the sun.
How is it that on the eve of a World Cup excitement is playing second-fiddle to resentment? Why, even in Brazil, are there so many people who are disenfranchised from and disillusioned with the game? It can’t be right.
If FIFA is the senate and Blatter is Julius Caesar, then we really are desperately in need of a Brutus. Blatter has to fall before the damage being done becomes irreparable.
http://thepremierleagueowl.com/fifa-somebody-please-please-do-something/
