The problem with all this FIFA hokery-pokery is that you don’t care. Yes, you. Sat there at your desk or flicking through your smart phone on the way home on the train. You couldn’t give a monkey’s. Life’s too short to worry about what 208 fatties and baldies in a convention room in Switzerland find to argue about. If a friend of yours shakes his head over a pint and says that Sepp Blatter is some cowboy, you’re more than happy to agree. But really, you will go on living your life just the same as you did before he was re-elected on Wednesday.
And who could blame you? It’s all so far removed from what any reasonably sane person would choose to be interested in when it comes to football. Blatter and all the mini-Blatters who’ve spent the last week at FIFA’s congress in Zurich know this better than they know the price of a nice rib-eye-and-lobster surf-n-turf.
“We have just seen a beautiful Champions League final with Barcelona, with fair play,” smiled Blatter early in the week with a nothing-to-see-here wave. “Football is in some difficulties but they will be solved inside our family.” Never mind all that dirty laundry everyone, ignore the knuckles and toes peeking out of those closets. Here, go watch Leo Messi and fugheddaboutit.
And you will. We all will. The media – most especially the English media – has a serious bone to pick with FIFA just at the minute but give it six weeks and the Premier League will kick back into gear, the transfer window will open and we’ll all go back to betting on who the first manager out the door will be next season. Hell, give it a fortnight. That’s because even though this whole farrago has thrown up some of the juiciest and most hilarious episodes of plain old honest-to-God chicanery this side of the third season of The Wire, very few in the media have the heart to write about it.
Not because they’re afraid of upsetting the apple cart or anything like that. Just because there’s a very limited audience for it. Trust me, there’s not a lot in a journalist’s life as dispiriting as covering a story that you know people aren’t interested in. Back in the bad old days of the Eircom Park/BertieBowl/Croke Park/Lansdowne saga, you could tell the poor unfortunates who were saddled with chasing down fresh newslines by the 1,000-yard stare in their eyes. They used to wave to the reporters covering the actual matches like weeping mothers at a departure gate watching their kids go off on a J1.
But it was a genuine story of political bed-feathering that impacted on sport – or would have if Bertie had been let build his palace out by the M50 – and it had to be covered. That’s the point. Some of these stories just have to be covered. To ignore them would be far easier because they surely don’t sell papers. Even when they’re interesting.
This week is a perfect example. The FIFA boondoggle has been astonishing in places. At one point, there was a photograph of an actual brown envelope of cash, bank-wrapped in bricks of $100 bills, with only the word ‘Bahamas’ written on the envelope. It couldn’t have screamed on-the-take any louder if it had just been pulled out of the safe in the Bada-Bing. It was used as Exhibit A in the allegations against the Qatari presidential candidate Mohammad Bin Hamman that paved the way for Blatter to be re-elected unopposed.
At another point, it came out that one of the South American FA presidents had, with a straight face, asked that the FA Cup be renamed in his honour in order to secure his vote for England to host the 2018 World Cup. The FA Cup! And this was after he had turned down an audience with the future king, sending back word that as an old man, a trip to London and a meeting with Prince William “would not be enough”. Seriously, you wouldn’t dream of making some of this stuff up.
But it’s just so hard for the general public to care. Even in Ireland, with all the piss and vinegar there was around Blatter laughing down his nose at the FAI over the whole 33rd team business, very few but a raft of Twitter malcontents could see fit to raise an objection to his re-election. The FAI themselves voted the way the majority of their Uefa partners voted, for the simple reason that the signing of the new TV rights pool deal a few months back will keep the game here in clover for the foreseeable future.
Were they wrong not to stand up to Blatter? Or were they right to make nice with Michel Platini, the seemingly nailed-on next head of FIFA in four years? They appear to have taken the very measured approach of realising that a tiny nation with no clout won’t be beating anybody anytime soon and so they may as well join them. In many ways, it’s the obvious road to take. Don’t you think?
You don’t care, do you? It’s just not on your radar. You’re more concerned – and rightly so – with who your team will buy over the summer. Or whether your county will make it into August and still be playing. Or if you’d take the handicap down a point or two if you got your putter regripped.
These are the things you care about because you’re a normal, rational, sentient being. FIFA are delighted for you to keep your normality, your rationality and your sentience to yourself and to apply it all where you see it giving you most satisfaction. As long as that place is nowhere next nor near to the corporate, ethical or financial interests of the people who run world football, that will suit everyone just fine.
Oh look! Wayne Rooney just said Messi wouldn’t do it against Stoke away! (Well he didn’t, not really, but let’s spend the next week talking about it anyway.)
And so it goes...