kevo
Well-known member
- Mar 8, 2008
- 9,103
Love this comment on the Guardian article about Blatter (http://www.theguardian.com/football...er-king-fifa-land-corruption-claims-world-cup). At least Blatter opposed Qatar unlike Platini and his cronies who supported the bid:
Dreadful man; mafioso organisation; blood on their hands given what's happening in Qatar. A German journalist once said of Sepp Blatter that "he has 50 new ideas every day, and 51 of them are bad": what's happened at FIFA under the Havelange/Blatter axis has been just awful.
And yet... he's the great survivor. Next to nothing sticks to him. Teixeira gone. Leoz gone. Warner gone. Blazer gone. Bin Hamman gone. Havelange in disgrace. Johansson defeated; Platini in the process of being isolated. But Blatter's still there.
And that's not just because he's protected his own fiefdom while throwing everyone else under a bus. It's because he is very, very shrewd: with an extraordinarily refined sense of how to stay out of the worst kind of trouble.
More than that: Platini, Beckenbauer and Rummenigge have proven they'd be EVEN WORSE. They were behind sending the world's greatest sporting tournament to Qatar: where homosexuality and drinking alcohol in public are illegal; where temperatures reach 50C in mid-summer; which has zero football culture whatsoever; and doesn't have the infrastructure capable of sustaining the World Cup in a million years. Yet they wanted it anyway; they couldn't have given a toss about anything else.
Blatter, on the other hand? He opposed it. And ever since Qatar was awarded it, he's been in a flap: because he knows that if the tournament is moved to the winter, the big European clubs will say "fine - so let's play every World Cup in the winter in future; let's keep our players for international exhibition games in mid-summer; let's take even more power for ourselves and devalue the international game even more"; and in all probability, "you know what? Let's take control of the sport for ourselves, and screw anyone who gets in our way".
It's precisely because he has a far, far more acute sense of football politics than Platini that he's been desperate to find a way of getting the tournament taken back off Qatar. The extraordinary amount of information leaked to The Sunday Times? It's obvious where it came from. Blatter and those close to him. Cui bono? He does. He's running rings around all his enemies.
Havelange and, subsequently, Blatter swept to power in FIFA by buying off African and Asian associations, insisting that the Europeans and their neo-colonial tendencies were the problem, and promising to globalise the sport. This they did. It's only because of their success in doing that that there's been so much money to siphon off; had the Europeans had it their way, no way would world football have boomed as it has over the last quarter of a century. No way at all.
That's not to defend the wanton levels of corruption, money laundering, brown envelopes, you name it, for a moment: FIFA is an organised crime family with more power than many governments and completely untouchable by almost anyone. But what's happened with Qatar shows that Blatter was right: the Europeans are even worse, and they've blown it. They've blown it completely.
Dreadful man; mafioso organisation; blood on their hands given what's happening in Qatar. A German journalist once said of Sepp Blatter that "he has 50 new ideas every day, and 51 of them are bad": what's happened at FIFA under the Havelange/Blatter axis has been just awful.
And yet... he's the great survivor. Next to nothing sticks to him. Teixeira gone. Leoz gone. Warner gone. Blazer gone. Bin Hamman gone. Havelange in disgrace. Johansson defeated; Platini in the process of being isolated. But Blatter's still there.
And that's not just because he's protected his own fiefdom while throwing everyone else under a bus. It's because he is very, very shrewd: with an extraordinarily refined sense of how to stay out of the worst kind of trouble.
More than that: Platini, Beckenbauer and Rummenigge have proven they'd be EVEN WORSE. They were behind sending the world's greatest sporting tournament to Qatar: where homosexuality and drinking alcohol in public are illegal; where temperatures reach 50C in mid-summer; which has zero football culture whatsoever; and doesn't have the infrastructure capable of sustaining the World Cup in a million years. Yet they wanted it anyway; they couldn't have given a toss about anything else.
Blatter, on the other hand? He opposed it. And ever since Qatar was awarded it, he's been in a flap: because he knows that if the tournament is moved to the winter, the big European clubs will say "fine - so let's play every World Cup in the winter in future; let's keep our players for international exhibition games in mid-summer; let's take even more power for ourselves and devalue the international game even more"; and in all probability, "you know what? Let's take control of the sport for ourselves, and screw anyone who gets in our way".
It's precisely because he has a far, far more acute sense of football politics than Platini that he's been desperate to find a way of getting the tournament taken back off Qatar. The extraordinary amount of information leaked to The Sunday Times? It's obvious where it came from. Blatter and those close to him. Cui bono? He does. He's running rings around all his enemies.
Havelange and, subsequently, Blatter swept to power in FIFA by buying off African and Asian associations, insisting that the Europeans and their neo-colonial tendencies were the problem, and promising to globalise the sport. This they did. It's only because of their success in doing that that there's been so much money to siphon off; had the Europeans had it their way, no way would world football have boomed as it has over the last quarter of a century. No way at all.
That's not to defend the wanton levels of corruption, money laundering, brown envelopes, you name it, for a moment: FIFA is an organised crime family with more power than many governments and completely untouchable by almost anyone. But what's happened with Qatar shows that Blatter was right: the Europeans are even worse, and they've blown it. They've blown it completely.
