You know, I’ve had nothing to do with FIFA … ever, in my whole life. Even when I played football in my teens, FIFA never even entered my consciousness.
But it sure has the last month.
Actually, I should stop for a moment and recall all the late-night black-and-white television I used to watch when I was a kid in Africa in the 1970s. I don’t know why, but the one channel we had back then (the government Rhodesian Broadcasting Corporation), that normally shut down at about 22:30 or 23:00, would carry on during the World Cup (I’m guessing) and play football games. I remember nothing from that time, just that I was mesmerised by football games. I have no idea how many hours I watched, but it really couldn’t have been many, because my parents wouldn’t have allowed it and my own body probably wouldn’t have allowed it either. And I only really remember it happening once, but it was so long ago that memory is probably unreliable.
Fast forward to 2026, and FIFA comes in and rapes our city, closing down businesses, closing down roads (and demanding police escorts accorded only to heads of states), disrupting community goings on, just so that they can host a few football matches. Of course, I had absolutely nothing to do with it. I refused to participate with all of the other lemmings, did not pay the exorbitant prices to get into any games, and didn’t even attend any free events, because I just refused to be sucked into all of the hype and inadvertently contribute to it. The only sideline advertiser I remember is a company with which I already do business, much to my chagrin.
But I became very aware of how greedy and controlling FIFA is. The president of FIFA is a bum-buddy of donald trump, having just given him a lump of gold in the most rigged ceremony in the history of man, because trump had not received the Nobel Peace Prize because he hadn’t deserved it … and he made known to anyone who would listen how unhappy he was about it. I mean, even your average self-aware five-year-old could tell how cringy that was, but even trump doesn’t have the mentality of a five-year-old. And so we all just rolled our eyes and silently agreed that it was what needed to be done to keep the noisome (in any sense of the word) child quiet. Except it wasn’t, because the noisome child became upset at a red card, and we all know how that went.
So I’m here today to editorialise very strongly in favour of the failure of Gianni Infantino’s fever dream to make his commercial greed even wider. Let’s just raise the ticket prices of World Cup tickets by ten times; we know that the great unwashed of the world will support us because what choice do they have? A competing FIFA?
We all know there is no competition, which is how all monopolists start.