- The effect the transfer chit chat has on Arsenal’s future and who they buy
- Football civil war is just what we wanted and have needed for so long
By Tony Attwood
We have been saying it for quite a long time now – Fifa is not fit to run football in this world. Mmaybe it could do it on Venus or Mars, but not on Earth. But the problem with that argument has been that the only other international football body of note on the scene – Uefa – doesn’t look that much better.
Although I must admit I can’t quite work out if Fifa has sunk so low that Uefa does actually look like a viable altnerantive or could it be that really they are pretty much as awful as each other.
What is so disappopinting however is that it has taken this world cup for countries to wake up to the fact that Fifa is an atrocious organisation which ought to be investigated for corruption, while Uefa seems to be nothing but giggling on the sidelines saying “we told you they were up to no good”.
It is of course possible that President Trump will now tell us that the pitch on which his USA team were defeated was in some way not suitable for football and the match has to be played again. And it is equally possible that the ever compliant Americans and the world cup organising committee will say, “Yes of course, sorry we should have noticed this before – we’d like to play all the games again but we don’t have time so we’ll give the world cup to the USA and now let’s move on.”
The danger with recent events of course is that the result of the latest blip in WC arrangements does look like a win for Gianni Infantino and that absolutely cannot be good news for football. While the American president will declare that it is not a proper game anyway and when is the American Football World Cup starting?
And yes I do agree we ought to raise a glass to Beglium in seeing their way through all this twaddle. And also allowing the creation of the headline of the tournament:
“Antwerp 4 A twerp 1.”
Not one of mine but I was wish it had been. Mind you the President really did outdo himself with the subsequent statement, “I was the one who got them to do it,” was clear enough. I mean you can’t actually find a double meaning in “I was the one who got them to do it,” can you?
But the question now is, “what now?” The President of the host nation has persuaded Fifa to fix a match – although the subsequent fixing went wrong. We know that each world cup finals have to be bigger and more imaginative than the last. But what exactly is bigger than match fixing? As the Guardian put it, “If Leandro Trossard was American he’d be on a million billboards eating crisps and talking about his global legacy.”
But utter farce though the whole thing is, there is a real spot of light shining in the distance, and it comes with the sentence found in the Guardian to the effect that, “The real issue is Gianni Infantino and Fifa, the live note in a genuinely jaw-dropping sporting scandal.”
I never thought the day would come when a national British paper would say, “The real issue is Gianni Infantino and Fifa,” I am almost tempted to run it as the headline for each and every Untold article for the next year. Only the loss of all our readers through boredom stops me. So let me continue quoting them… they are not quoting Untold of course, but they are saying what Untold has been saying for years and years….
“…this might even be the first significant note of Infantino’s own endgame, the moment football’s great preening waxwork power-gargoyle flew just a bit too close to the sun and began to melt inside his own blue suit.”
Trump I guess, will now say that nobody really cares as it is not proper football. After all he has already admitted that he wasn’t quite sure what a red card was.
Football, Uefa and Fifa have a way of carrying on no matter what – they just go on and on. It is suggested in the Guardian that “Infantino must be held to account here, at the very least for the breathtaking levels of vanity and power-lust that have normalised such interventions.”
And of course I agree, except I would take out “must” and say “should” because I just don’t believe anything will happen.
We have it reported in UK papers that the New York Times has said Trump called Infantino after Balogun was sent of and the next day the rules were changed. And it was a bit like Argentina lead ingFrance 1-0 when the referee Gilberto de Almeida Rego blew for full-time in the 84th minute as French winger Marcel Langiller broke clear with only the goalkeeper to beat.
Such events that have run through international football history unfortunately make it ever harder for us to argue for reform of PGMOL where we find the same referee involved in Arsenal games over and over again during a season. Perhaps what we learn is that this is what refereeing is like across the world
Meanwhile the media will get worked up about things when it is those dopey foreigners doing it because they don’t understand the game, but in England, well no, we wouldn’t allow that sort of thing here. We have PGMO so it’s all ok
Isn’t it?
