The Corruption of Football

Although this is a cricket blog, as somebody who has an interest in several sports, I felt compelled to write something about the absolute disgrace that is FIFA. On the evening of Sepp Blatter being "re-elected" as President for another four year tenure as chief of a corrupt and disgraceful ship, most of European football hangs its head in shame and hopes that UEFA will make a stand and refuse to accept what is happening to the beautiful game.

The large majority of people with half a footballing brain cell are oblivious to understand how anybody, let alone people meant to run and advance the game of football, would vote to hold a World Cup in Qatar, a country where not only is football virtually non-existent, but the utterly blistering summer heat would surely affect the abilities of the players to play high quality football for 90 minutes. The whole process is an absolute shambles, with the original bid stating that the competition would still take place in its traditional summer slot, with air conditioned stadiums helping to cool the players and fans inside the oven. This turned out to not be true, with organisers now trying to get the World Cup moved to Winter, which not only will destroy the legacy of the tournament being held in Summer, but will severely disrupt leagues across Europe in particular.

Worse than any of this, is the horrendous death toll among workers attempting to build the stadiums in the blistering heat of Qatar. This image highlights the catastrophic loss of life, and with 7 years still to go until the tournament will actually go ahead, this begs the questions, "How many more will lose their lives?"

Ally to this, living conditions for workers are supposedly terrible. I say supposedly, as Qatar have not allowed reporters to investigate properly the conditions in which workers are forced to work in, with some crews even claiming that their filming equipment was taking away from them and their memories erased to ensure that they couldn't return home with any damning images. This makes FIFA's betrayal to football even more severe, meaning that the almost undoubtedly corrupt members who voted for Qatar not only should hang their heads in shame in terms of their dis-service to the game of football, but to the workers who have lost their lives trying to put together the grounds that will house some of the best footballing talent worldwide. All in all, it can be seen that the arguments against holding the World Cup in Qatar severely out-weigh any counter arguments (I am yet to hear one of credible value).

Despite all this, and the seven officials which have been arrested just this week (with surely many more to come, we can hope), Sepp Blatter has appeared defiant to carry on his reign as President. As a football fan as well as a cricket one, I, among with millions of others, can only hope that his deficiency will be broken at some point in the near future to start the process of mending the beautiful game.

The 2018 World Cup will be held in Russia, a decision which most would understand. However, Russia's claim that their computer files which held information regarding their bid for the competition had been "accidentally destroyed" also brings into question the genuineness of their bid.

It appears that FIFA is an organisation whose members are largely motivated by money, and perhaps it may take a stand from the sponsors to withdraw their support in order to influence change. Failing this, members themselves may be forced to take direct action themselves, and surely if enough countries boycotted a competition or took similar direct action, some kind of change would have to be taken?

The only positive thing to be taken out of this is that the game of cricket has not descended into anarchy such as this, and we can only hope that controversy on this level never corrupts our game, like it has in football...