Come Back Sepp Blatter, All Is Forgiven...

It really is quite astounding, but FIFA's draw for the 2026 World Cup, presided over by the organisation's president Gianni Infantino and including the award of the 'FIFA Peace Prize' to Donald Trump, has achieved what we all thought impossible.  It has made us nostalgic for the days when Infantino's disgraced predecessor, Sepp Blatter, presided over FIFA.  It suddenly seems unimportant that the latter's tenure was mired in corruption, (although we should note that Blatter himself was recently cleared of corruption charges), and characterised by the bullying of various national football associations that objected to FIFA's gradual land-grab of club football, instituting such things as the Club World cup, which, even in its original form, was hugely disruptive of domestic league programmes.  Because, despite all of that, under Blatter, FIFA at least confined its corruption to football and didn't go around handing out spurious 'peace prizes' to quasi-fascist would be dictators and sex offenders who are currently gearing up to invade Venezuela (and possibly Greenland) whilst simultaneously trying to reward Russia's aggression by forcing Ukraine to concede territory to Moscow as the price of 'peace'.  Halcyon days.  It's just another example of how bad things seem to have gotten that we look back in nostalgia at the likes of Sepp Blatter, or even George W Bush, thinking 'well, maybe they weren't so bad, after all'. Even if, as in the case of the latter, they actually did invade somewhere - they still seem like a class act compared to the orange bollock currently occupying the White House.

These latest FIFA shenanigans just emphasise how, depressingly, everything has become about money, or, more accurately, the greed for money.  More and more money, because, it seems, these people can never have enough.  Nothing else, it seems, matters any more.  Morals?  Integrity?  Sportsmanship?  Fairness?  Decency?  None of them are enough to trump the profit motive any more.  Now, I'm not naive, I lived through the eighties, I know all about how materialism can be used as a powerful political motivator - it kept Thatcher in power for far too long.  But that was before the internet came along and the likes of Google and Meta got their claws into it and started telling everyone that if you were just creating stuff for pleasure, because you wanted to share your ideas freely with others, then you were an idiot.  Because, hey, you can monetise all of that stuff!  Hence the rise of all those You Tube 'stars' and web 'influencers' who were apparently coining it despite having no creative abilities whatsoever, instead peddling trivia and nonsense for paid clicks and sponsors.  The fact that, by comparison to the total online population, they were a tiny minority, didn't deter people falling en masse for the delusion of wealth through monetisation.  Once the idea was established, it went far beyond the web, with every organisation and enterprise doing their best to squeeze every last ounce of monetary value from their products, with sport in the forefront.  Suddenly events like football matches weren't available free-to-air because the organising and regulating authorities could get obscene amounts of money from cable and satellite broadcasters to sell them to fans on a pay-per-view basis, instead.  Then there are the sponsors - just look at the number of sponsors each football club has now.  They have separate sponsors for first team kits, training kits, U-21 kits and so on.  

This FIFA shit show just reminds us of the ultimate outcome of this grasping greed - you inevitably find yourself having to cosy up to the unspeakable, like Trump, or the Saudi Arabian government, in order to secure your revenue streams and continued expansion.  Because the bigger you are, the more product you have to exploit and wring money from, right?  Right?  Except that, eventually, you'll reach saturation point and you'll come up against the limits of demand as fans just don't have enough money to cover it all anymore.  I suspect that FIFA is fast approaching that point.