Sports-suits of world football look even sleazier after the summer

Is there a more cruelly abused word right now than “challenge?” Time was it meant a call to account. Now it’s a synonym for, well, whatever you want really, a once functional piece of language reduced to gelded meaninglessness by corporate and political captains able to straight-facedly describe water lapping on to the sinking ship as “a challenging environment” while stepping into their single-seat life-rafts.

Which means poor old “challenge” might get a particularly rough mauling this week with reports that Fifa’s ethics committee could finally be in a position to submit a report into the bidding process for the next two World Cups.

But even if it isn’t, if you ever need confirmation about how boardroom football is really just politics and business for the cynical, then keep in mind the obfuscating depths of bullshit to which Fifa’s top-brass are capable of submitting the language in order to maintain veneers of propriety which fool no one but are sufficient to keep them out of the courts.

In this they are not alone, of course. There are sporting bodies in this country that could teach bullshit-as-a-foreign-language and get government support into the bargain. When it comes to thought-leading, paradigm-shifting, self-incentivised, product-focused professionals happy to transition your ass into a challenging new environment, there’s nothing like a sports-suit to put the knife in, positively, going forward.

Sleazier than before

But this was still Fifa’s summer, something even more glaringly obvious now that we’re in autumn and able to view in cold hindsight a chain of events that somehow managed to make the administration of world football look even sleazier than before.

It actually seemed like a real tipping-point, where expectations that really the proverbial “something” really would have to be done; the whole enough is enough, root-and-branch reform, change, the hard rain’s gonna fall vibe.

This was the summer when acres of newspaper revelations about the bidding process behind Qatar's successful 2022 World Cup bid were revealed in grubby detail, the mechanics of how a tiny piece of sand most people couldn't find on a map, and which is hardly more climatically ill-suited to the hosting of a football tournament, still managed to get awarded the planet's most prestigious sporting event.

It was also the summer where 298 people got shot out of the sky over Ukraine on the back of expansionist wet dreams from a country that will clasp the sporting world to its repressive bosom for the 2018 World Cup.

And all of it, still, on Sepp Blatter’s watch, the Fifa president who has had all sorts of accusations thrown at him over the years, not least a grave suspicion of not taking racism very seriously, or any ism really, bar maybe narcissism, and certainly not feminism given his novel marketing plan for women’s football – “tighter shorts”.

By now the only ones not in the desperately unfunny joke that is Sepp are the majority of Fifa delegates but even so, after such a summer, surely his wriggle room had got very cramped indeed.

However last week came news that Michel Platini won't challenge Blatter to head world football's governing body on the not unreasonable basis that he hasn't a snowball's chance in hell of winning given that five of the six continental bodies have already indicated they're voting for Blatter who has typically chosen to forget a public pledge not to stand again.

And any ethics committee report has to be taken in the context of how submission is no guarantee of it being published. And even if it is, and ultimately outlines a vista so terrible it manages to bring a blush even to Fifa’s shameless face, then there’s the reality that nothing concrete can actually be done in terms of removing or rescheduling a World Cup until next May’s Fifa committee meeting: that’s a meeting of those cunning enough to have climbed football’s greasy pole deciding what they should do about themselves.

So, just as expediency means another summer story Luis Suarez has fizzled out because a lot of money is at stake, the suspicion has to be that time will also do its job diluting all that summer indignation about corruption and murder with the ultimate outcome being that everything stays pretty much as it is.

Just with the bullshit moved around a little bit to maintain the veneer.

Russian hospitality

Putin will continue to sabre-rattle and shape and still get to continue looking forward to showing off Russian hospitality in 2018 because what does naked expansionism matter when Gazprom’s an official partner?

And what does it matter that the Qatar World Cup is being built on cheap migrant labour with reports of 1,000 deaths already during the effort to construct a logistical framework capable of hosting something as massive as a World Cup out of nothing.

These aren’t problems but “challenges”. Just as playing a World Cup in summer desert heat isn’t a disaster waiting to happen but a “challenge”. Reports last week that summer temperatures in the Gulf are a threat to spectators, never mind players, are just “incentivisations” to think outside the box.

As for hosting a tournament so near the world’s terror basket, well pointing that out is just racist, and Fifa is very hot on any suggestion of racism that might interfere with what it actually wants to do.

What everyone knows Fifa wants to do is to follow the money wherever it is, even if it’s to places where basic human dignities can be optional extras. Only those with an agenda can believe otherwise.

And it is a real challenge to continue hoping there can be any meaningful call to account.