The totalitarian state - From a concerned football fan

Inactivity on crucial issues

To go on with other shortcomings, FIFA have been holding on to their archaic rules in the name of holding on to antiquity and have not taken any step to develop the game in anyway whatsoever and amongst all the sports that I follow, football uses technology the least, thanks to FIFA.

While other sports voluntarily implemented technology, it took Frank Lampard’s ghost goal in the 2010 World Cup (can’t believe it is more than five years, the frustration is felt to this date) for Blatter and his congress of loons to realise the importance of goal line technology. So, here you find the next feature of a typical totalitarian state in FIFA, that there is no step voluntarily taken towards development unless you’re forced to and you ingratiate only those whom you’re close to and I’d come to that in the next paragraph.

Ingratiating the people whom you want, another typical feature you’d find in any totalitarian state, shrunk to a single word – ‘cronyism’.

Refusal to negotiate

The incident that could be immediately recalled is the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, where alcohol was prohibited inside stadiums to curtail violence. But then, Budweiser was a chief sponsor of the FIFA and hence, even before Brazil raised any talk of amending the laws to make an exception for the World Cup, FIFA released a statement saying that Budweiser would be allowed to sell and eventually.

Brazil had to budge by passing a bill, colloquially termed as the Budweiser Bill. See, here you go, you’ve the next feature – suppression of the interests of citizens (members in this case) to support the interests of a select few large corporations.

Coming back to what I stated earlier, take the case of, say, Syria, said to have so many excellent relics of the Mesopotamian civilisation, the early Roman structures, Islamic structures in Aleppo, etc. and most tourists have narrated very positive experiences with the people of Syria but still, people had a negative opinion from the outside because of the Al-Assad regime.

Similarly, the headlines that the guardian of the beautiful game is grabbing is doing the game more harm than good and the game is going to make no inroads into countries where the game isn’t very popular when an organisation like FIFA is promoting the same.

To conclude, I’d say that FIFA isn’t doing the game any good, corruption is so deep rooted, and it is akin to an absolute totalitarian state as substantiated above. This means, to protect the game, only two things could be done – either a complete overhaul is required in FIFA to correct the mess that they’re in and the recent scandal wasn’t a revelation in anyway, but just something known to everyone and it took a lot of time to come out.

The second alternative is a complete boycott of the organisation and I’m happy that UEFA is taking the courageous step and I hope they carry it forward. The latter seems the only option at the moment as with the re-election of Blatter, things certainly don’t seem to change for the better and as such, he is someone who has the audacity to say, ‘I’d forgive but not forget’ while referring to Platini’s critical comments.

I read some positive headlines that England is willing to boycott 2018 if more join the movement and I hope the movement gains the momentum and hopefully, sooner rather than later, FIFA, the way we know it today no longer exists and what we see is a reformed guardian of the sport whose priority is the welfare of the sport.

Have a nice day,

Andy