FIFA Officials Arrested on Corruption Charges
As an ardent soccer fan, waking up to this headline on the New York Times website was like waking up to a gourmet breakfast in bed, lovingly prepared and served by a well-drilled team of supermodels.
When the vote came down back in December 2010 and FIFA presented us with Russia 2018 and Qatar 2022, I don't think any fan of the game thought anything but that the vote had obviously been rigged. Russia 2018 we could understand--it's a big country with an active domestic league, a growing presence in European club competition and a solid history in the international game. But Qatar? QATAR!? Qatar in the freakin' summer!?
We've grown so accustomed to powerful people and organizations lying right to our faces that it seems we've lost much of our capacity for outrage. A well-connected person in a position of power acting corruptly? Yawn. I mean, what else is new?
So you couldn't count me among the gleeful when the NFL handed down a four-game suspension to Tom Brady and a million-dollar fine and loss of two draft picks to the Patriots for Deflategate. First of all, the punishments for both man and organization amount basically to slaps on the wrist. But secondly, the circle-the-wagons mentality, the constant denial of wrong-doing by an organization with a history of it, shows that nothing is going to change. When the Patriots' lawyers posted a 20,000-word rebuttal to the Wells report, challenging it on pretty much any point they could think of, was anyone surprised? Was anyone surprised that the organization would throw up a smokescreen to protect themselves and their superstar quarterback?
But think for a minute about what they're actually asking us to believe. They're arguing that a man who throws footballs for a living, who is one of the five best people alive at throwing footballs, who has presumably thrown more footballs than pretty much anyone else in the world, who is well known for being very particular about his footballs, can't tell that the footballs in question were underinflated? And that furthermore, if the footballs were intentionally underinflated (the Patriots dispute even that), that someone in the locker room took it upon himself to do so, without consultation with the team's cleft-chinned angel-haloed golden boy quarterback?
Are you fucking kidding me?
But they aren't. They clearly figure we're utterly inured to this kind of bullshit by now. I mean, hey, Qatar 2022 was a legitimate choice, right?
There are couple of words that come to mind when, despite their power and connections, powerful, connected, corrupt people get what's coming to them. One of those words is schadenfreude. The other word is justice.
Postscript: Weeding out corruption in sports is lovely, but should it ever come to pass that the obvious criminality at the highest levels of American business--I'm looking at you, mega-banks--ever leads to actual prosecutions, I might find myself with a restored faith in humanity and our future as a species.