The shock with the latest news coming out regarding corruption is FIFA is that anyone thought Fifa wasn't corrupt, it has been as dodgy as an email from a Nigerian Prince for as long as i can remember.
What i don't understand is why it is the Americans leading the charge although it is good that someone is finally doing something about the people who runs the Football World.
I must admit to cringing when i watched the US attorney general, Loretta Lynch, announce the arrest of senior members of Fifa and called it soccer all the way through and the 'we are showing them the red card' bit was more cheesy than a shop full of Cheddar as it just cemented the idea that football is not an American thing and made it all the more strange that they are meddling in things that doesn't concern them.
That aside, if it takes down Blatter and his corrupt cohorts then i don't care who does it although it seems to be concentrating on the 2010 World Cup which the USA lost out to South Africa in much the same way the British team seem to be wanting to look at the 2018 World Cup which we lost out to to Russia.
That a country that who think a football is an oblong ball carried or thrown through the air can take on the Fédération Internationale de Football Association and based on evidence provided by someone called Chuck Blazer who wears an extravagant Santa Claus style beard is intriguing, as is the ranting of Greg Dyke against Blatter although he never did hand back that £16,000 watch he received from the Brazilian Football Confederation as a 'gift'.
We are therefore grateful to America for having the cojones to go after FIFA when everyone else just mumbled into their belly buttons about the corruption and it shows it in a good light for once and not the world’s bungling warmonger hacking the mobile phones of other World Leaders phones and torturing people although Blatter has since been voted back into office so nothing seems to have actually changed.
Deep down we all know that FIFA mistake was not handing the 2010 World Cup to the USA because if they had the USA 'won' the 2010 World Cup, and the UK the 2018 one, the investigation wouldn't have got off the ground.
Nice try though USA but one note for future press conferences, you are the only ones who call it soccer and it just makes you look like someone clutching a Chuckle Brothers DVD at a Comedy Convention.
6 comments:
We spell it Aluminium and pronounce it Alum-min-ium. Is this you guys and your refusal to use vowels again??
Two things:
(1) I think the US might have taken the lead in this because soccer is relatively less popular here (although it is definitely ascending), so there is not as much fear of angering FIFA. For example, I would equate Germany or Spain or England going after FIFA with the state of Alabama or Oklahoma or Texas (states where football is king) arresting a bunch of NCAA leaders and claiming the whole organization is corrupt. That would be a very difficult thing to do.
(2) Re "football" vs. "soccer": I read a paper on this a year or so ago (http://ns.umich.edu/Releases/2014/June14/Its-football-not-soccer.pdf) which basically concludes that "soccer" and "football" were used interchangeably in Britain until around 1980, at which point you Brits apparently stopped using the word "soccer." The paper attributes this decline in usage to "a reaction against the increased usage in the US." So, based on this paper at least, "soccer" was an acceptable word for "football" in Britain until around 1980, at which point the British apparently got mad that we were using "football" to describe "American football," so as retaliation you guys stopped using "soccer" and began an international semantic smear campaign against us. Really, you guys have a much better case against us for using "football" to describe "American football" than for using "soccer" to describe "football".
If we had a joint US-UK summit on this question, I would think the proper outcome would be that we start calling "football" "gridiron" and you guys agree that "soccer" is interchangeable with "football". That's a good compromise, right?
The unsaid but implied over this side is that America and the UK went after FIFA because they never won the World Cup bids for 2010 and 2018. From the UK side of things, we certainly did 'spit the dummy' when Russia got it over us especially as we arrogantly thought we had it in the bag and we were only too happy to play along with FIFA. The FA even went mad over a BBC show highlighting dodgy FIFA practises at the time so it does smell of sour grapes.
I can't say that i ever heard it called Soccer except in an ironic way and used in conjunction with a really bad American accent before or after 1980. I don't think any teams have soccer in their name either, almost all are FC for Football Club. I did hear that Soccer is a shortened form of something but i would have to look it up.
apparently what we did worked if you consider a wholesale turnover of senior personnel to be significant...
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I agree, the head has been cut off.
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