U.S. should be outraged over World Cup vote
Where is the fury, America?
Where is the outrage that should have come from being slapped in the face and laughed at?
Or is it that you just don’t care? A bunch of men with demonstrably questionable ethics can give minuscule Qatar the World Cup in 2022 at your expense and your response is “Ah, well, maybe next time”?
Is President Obama’s calling it “the wrong decision” the best you can do?
Perhaps you are relying on England to show your anger for you. If so, you’re in luck.
The English are livid. Not only that, they plan on doing something about it. Like you, they were slapped in the face and laughed at, but unlike you they were also shoved down the stairs and kicked.
Metaphorically speaking, of course.
They too lost a World Cup vote in Zurich on Thursday, watching Russia run off with the 2018 tournament that they sincerely believed might be coming their way.
It didn’t pan out. England received only two of the 22 votes cast by FIFA’s executive committee. The U.S. at least managed eight votes when its turn to be humiliated arrived.
England was shown the door in the first round. The U.S. lasted four rounds. Then both were put on the canvas.
Thanks for making a fool of your future king and current prime minister, England. Thanks for dancing to our tune and then putting on a brave face when the inevitable occurred. You can show yourself out.
Thanks for dragging your former president Bill Clinton all the way to Switzerland, U.S. Thanks for showing us all how meek and mild your soccer “leaders” are. Boy, that Sunil Gulati, he’s impressive, isn’t he? Oh, by the way, we’ll still take your sponsorship money and your television money. Is that OK?
England spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $25 million trying to land the World Cup for the first time since 1966. For that, it managed exactly one vote in addition to the one it cast for itself.
That additional vote reportedly came from Issa Hayatou of Cameroon, a man England had backed in 2002 when he ran unsuccessfully against Joseph “Slippery Sepp” Blatter for the FIFA presidency.
England blames Blatter, the poisonous spider at the center of the FIFA web, for the debacle. The U.S. should be doing the same.
Blatter got what Blatter wanted. His cohorts — notably Jack Warner, Julio Grondona and Nicolas Leoz — no doubt got some too. Merry Christmas, all.
Small wonder that words such as “betrayed” and “double-crossed” and “deceived” were prominent in the press.
Few punches were spared by the English media.
“A commitment to honesty will get you only so far at FIFA,” said the Guardian.
“The World Cup is a competition that is, essentially, forged in corruption, which is why it goes to countries that are essentially corrupt,” snorted the tabloid Daily Mail.
Of course, had England won, the same newspapers would have been singing a different tune.
The fact is Russia and Qatar — “a nation in name but a city-state in practice” sniffed Australia’s Brisbane Times — should not be blamed for taking advantage of a system that is designed to enrich a few at the expense of the many.
Russia and Qatar, better than England, the U.S. and the five other losing bidders, saw FIFA for what it is, an organization wide open to bribery because it acts in secret, an organization where a few powerful arm-twisters control the rest, an organization that bends and twists rules to suit its own needs.
For instance, no sooner had Qatar been awarded the 2022 tournament than one executive committee member, Germany’s Franz Beckenbauer, already was talking about moving the tournament from June to January, to avoid the appalling heat that FIFA’s leaders had conveniently ignored while being wined and dined by the ultra-wealthy Qataris.
The heat in Qatar is merely one wriggling worm in a can of uncertainties that will surround Russia 2018 and Qatar 2022.
For the moment though, FIFA will have to endure the fallout from Blatter’s having orchestrated the vote against England by telling executive committee members not to forget “the evils of the British press,” whose expose of corruption had caused two of their number to be suspended.
England’s bid was dead before the first vote was cast. So all that Prince William, the heir to the British throne, accomplished by having breakfast with Paraguay’s odious Leoz, for instance, or being photographed with Trinidad and Tobago’s unsavory Warner was to embarrass himself.
In the aftermath, Roger Burden, the acting chairman of England’s Football Assn., said he was stepping aside.
“The role entails liaising with FIFA and I want nothing more to do with them,” Burden told the Guardian. “I am not prepared to deal with people whom I cannot trust.”
Isn’t it time the U.S. stood up and said the same?
