Studs Up

This was easily one of the craziest periods of a season I can remember. Hughton getting sacked seemed to have the butterfly effect necessary to kick everything up a few levels. Pardew coming in and immediately sending Roy and Liverpool back to crisis mode, Tevez handing in his transfer request, Allardyce getting sacked, Vendy’s stating some… interesting ambition, and then of course United beating Arsenal in a rather disappointing match.

Somewhat under the radar, the FIFA finger-pointing took an interesting turn during Monday night’s match as a random Newsweek correspondant tweeted that he’d been told by a reliable source that FIFA World Cup Selection Committee members each got a “legal bribe” of $10 million from Qatar for their support. A quite spectacular story, if true, and its sad that such a thing isn’t remotely out of the realm of possibility. It should be shocking, but its not.

The saddest part is that it’s not corruption, hence the use of the term “legal bribe”. FIFA isn’t some benevolent non-profit or government entity that is required to act outside the laws of capitalism. It’s a business, that’s why if they want to assign the ticketing business to Sepp Blatter’s son it’s no different to the president of any other business hiring a family member. If they want to “sell” the World Cup to countries, it’s no different to any number of other corporations selling products or events to the highest bidder. It may seem like it should be, but it’s not. FIFA is a corporation, a business, and is rightly being run as such. It’s the rest of us who have been taken by the ruse of it being anything more sophisticated than that.

If you don’t like the way a company is doing business or how it sells its product, you go to a competitor and force them to rethink how they do business in order to avoid losing more customers. It’s daunting to think of what the football equivalent of that would be, with entirely new governing bodies being established and leagues and competitions being fractured, but that’s likely to be the only option for the foreseeable future.