The World Cup

The World Cup starts tomorrow and I am very excited. But I feel guilty too.

On the one hand, there is a deluge of quality and meaningful football where virtually every result is crucial to each team. All of this, with some of the best players on Earth and some virtually unknown ones who are yet to be stars. There are managers pitting their wits and skills against each other who know that this is the time to shine, or fall on their sword. This is the run-in to the EPL and the knock out stages of the Champions League crammed into 4 weeks. But it is managed without the European predictability and money counts for nothing in this version of the game.

Which brings me to the guilty part and this is difficult to write (not because I feel bad, but because it is hard to avoid nonsensical waffle here).

FIFA is an organisation based on corruption, apathy, ambivalence and impossibly obtuse yet knee jerk rulings. They are the Taliban and the Suffragettes, the Republicans and the Hippies, Ladbrokes and the charity ‘Shelter’. In other words, they comprise of a hideous amalgam of departments and employees who are as conflicted and misguided as the BNP on a recruitment drive for ethnics minorities in their futile quest for legitimacy. It just doesn’t make any sense.

I don’t really want to go into reason why I feel this about FIFA. Suffice to say that they are exploitative leeches that bleed countries dry in the name of handing out the high-class drug of SOCCER. That being said, they are no different really to the IOC, or the FIA, or Simon Cowell.

What I am implying here is that the benefits that they claim to bring to a nation, a continent, the world – are so great, yet their benevolence is far from obvious. It is almost as if they give the globe the game of football and in return they want our money. And lots of it!

So why should I feel guilty? Mainly because the awarding of the tournament to the host nation is seen as a license to print money. This is all well and fine if you are Germany or France or the USA. It fits the capitalist mold and, if well managed, will bring a sizable wealth to the economies of those 'developed' countries/economies. But in awarding the tournament to South Africa, as if this country is to be taken seriously as a 'World Class' economy, this is crazy and blind. The one place the money needs to go is exactly where it will not go - to the poorest communities and most needy.

In an age of austerity and international unemployment, is the tourist industry of South Africa and the Southern African countries really going to benefit from 4 weeks of madness? An economy is relative to its surroundings. If hotels and bars put up their prices, then the servicers and providers to those industries will make sure they do as well. If this is the case, then where will the profit go?

In short, surely to the likes of Radisson, Coca Cola, Visa, Barclays, Shell, etc etc etc. Do we think for one minute that the South Africans will get a pay rise? Is there any guarantee that the large amount of temporary staff will have anything more than a 6 week contract? Will the money coming in, even touch the sides of the South African pockets who need it most? Will the tournament dramatically change the infrastructure of the country/economy in a way to raise it out of the clutches of poverty? Will it fuck.

The curse of the tournament (EG Olympics and Greece), is that unless you have a thriving economy, it is very difficult to balance and manage the demands placed by the inflation of demand on a very short and fixed timescale. It is impossible to tell where or how the demand will feature strongest and then you are left counting the cost of success vs failure. Failure usually wins.

If the poorest nations are meant to be thankful and use the good grace of the tournament to kick-start its economy, then maybe it would be worth these poorer nations reminding the developed world that there is no working engine in the shell of an antiquated motorbike of an economy that they are meant to be riding on to the New World of ‘Development’. Fuck that, fuck the meaning behind that, and fucking having to read that sentence again. It is shocking that we don’t even question this and spit at the sponsors and FIFA again and again.

But as with all things money, if you organise the layers carefully and spread the conglomerate wealth out using horizontal and vertical integration, (a means of deception and exhausting avenues) – then no one will really know who, how, where, when or what they are meant to complain about when they see oppression, poverty, human rights issues, awful working conditions and so on.

Football brings many people together but inadvertently, it also breeds collusion. Collusion with the National Front in the 70's, the racists, the marketers, the capitalists, the fascists, the fundamentalists, etc. So, do we accept the tournament for the beauty of the spectacle, or do we cynically turn away thus denying ourselves the enjoyment of one of sports’ greatest shows?

I will watch, I will drink coke probably too, but I hope by asking some questions, I am on the right path beyond collusion into bringing benefits to those who need them. I just don't really know how.

Football and money. What a drug cocktail?