The Fifa president's likely rescheduling of Qatar 2022 will affect not only the 2021-22 season, but the two that bookend it
With the possible exception of Gandhi, there has been no more inspirational colonial rebel than the Fifa president, Sepp Blatter. "I think it is high time that Europe starts to understand that we do not rule the world anymore," ran his latest salvo on moving the 2022 World Cup to winter, "and that some former European imperial powers can no longer impress their will on to others in faraway places."
Admittedly, this argument might have appeared a shade more noble had Blatter deployed it when trying to persuade people of the merits of Qatar's bid, as opposed to producing it as a defensive line now he's checked a climate graph and made the extraordinary discovery that it's "very hot" in the emirate in high summer. It's a bit like England failing to qualify for 2022, then retroactively claiming their absence at the tournament is a protest against the Qatari government's human rights record. (Not that that clump of moral high ground isn't a prudent one to have in our back pocket, you understand.)
And so once more to the rolling auto-satire that is Qatar 2022, which Blatter is endeavouring to style as a post-imperial blow for human fairness, when everybody knows the tournament is meant to function as a reputation-laundering facility for a non-democratic regime whose record is deplored by any number of respected rights organisations.
The greatest sadness for many of us, of course, is that a winter World Cup in Qatar will deprive humankind of all the amazing technological advances we were promised to make it work, such as the air-conditioned streets, and those man-made clouds that were going to be parked above the stadiums to provide shade. (What an edifying quirk of late capitalism it is that it takes a football tournament to spur on talk of such advances, while uninspiring things such as desert famines clearly fail to provide the requisite fillip.)
That said, the timing – by which I mean the tournament's relationship with time itself – sounds increasingly fascinating. Latest word is that a winter World Cup would affect not only the 2021-22 season, but the two that bookend it. How? Well, it's currently all a bit of a mystery, but looks most likely to rely on what David Tennant's Doctor Who referred to as "wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff". My own preference is for each season to begin three weeks before the previous one has finished, though a friend thinks that if the supra-stadium clouds were a possibility, there is absolutely no reason why some sort of chrono-loop could not be created to allow two seasons to play concurrently.
The nice thing is that we've got a few years to play with, and with at least three of Fifa's executive committee statistically likely to be imprisoned/deposed by military coup during that time, we must demand that Stephen Hawking is parachuted into the first vacancy to begin exploring the temporal paradox. Then again, at the current rate of cultural annexation, Qatar will own such large swathes of European public life – maybe even England itself – by 2022 that a summer tournament might still be a possibility, held on the emirate's European territories. We may well see the Wembley World Cup final that has eluded us by all other means.
*Professional Footballers' Association united?
*
Have you been enjoying the TUC Conference taking place this week in Bournemouth? The answer, I suspect, is "never quite as much as I think I am going to"– which should set organisers wondering. Next year, couldn't some platform time be dedicated to the leadership of the Professional Footballers' Association, the trade union that represents football players – or "the Tolpuddle Martyrs of fannying about getting cheap BMW deals for their members", as I like to think of them.
To recap a few of the developments of the past fortnight: the PFA chief executive, Gordon Taylor, was reported to have gambled millions, and amassed a personal debt of more than £100,000. Despite having previously advocated a "zero tolerance" policy on players with betting problems, he has refused to offer a single word on the matter, let alone cobble together some explanation as to how he isn't remotely compromised. [Mr Taylor – or Gordon Taylor OBE as the sender's name appears in one's inbox – is reputed to be the highest paid trade union official in the world (and who could question his worth to his members when you consider he took hundreds of thousands of pounds of hush money from News International to keep quiet on a phone-hacking scandal he might reasonably have expected to extend into the lives of his members?)]
Meanwhile, the Daily Mail has this week published extracts from the forthcoming autobiography of the PFA's chair, Clarke Carlisle, in which Mr Carlisle described two of his members, Rio and Anton Ferdinand, as "shithouses", apparently for not being against racism in the way the PFA wants them to be against racism. Elsewhere, Carlisle sounds quite the lofty logician: in seeking to make a point about the irrelevance of money to some flashily arrogant Newcastle Academy youngsters he played against in a reserve game, he recounts how he rises above them with the words: "I'll remind you of that when you're serving me in Nando's in another three years". And in the course of reacting to some pensée of Joey Barton, he reveals the occasions on which the union has intervened with clubs on said player's behalf – a sideswipe that underscores the commitment to confidentiality that Taylor had shown when he discussed details of Gazza's medical treatment with a load of media outlets earlier this year.
Whether Carlisle's candour will translate into sales is difficult to say, but the entire fortnight surely offers the neatest of solutions to the PFA's perennial problem: sourcing a comic turn for its annual awards night. The surest answer is for the PFA to keep the entertainment in-house on awards night, given how well it does it for the rest of the year. Reported by guardian.co.uk 18 hours ago.
With the possible exception of Gandhi, there has been no more inspirational colonial rebel than the Fifa president, Sepp Blatter. "I think it is high time that Europe starts to understand that we do not rule the world anymore," ran his latest salvo on moving the 2022 World Cup to winter, "and that some former European imperial powers can no longer impress their will on to others in faraway places."
Admittedly, this argument might have appeared a shade more noble had Blatter deployed it when trying to persuade people of the merits of Qatar's bid, as opposed to producing it as a defensive line now he's checked a climate graph and made the extraordinary discovery that it's "very hot" in the emirate in high summer. It's a bit like England failing to qualify for 2022, then retroactively claiming their absence at the tournament is a protest against the Qatari government's human rights record. (Not that that clump of moral high ground isn't a prudent one to have in our back pocket, you understand.)
And so once more to the rolling auto-satire that is Qatar 2022, which Blatter is endeavouring to style as a post-imperial blow for human fairness, when everybody knows the tournament is meant to function as a reputation-laundering facility for a non-democratic regime whose record is deplored by any number of respected rights organisations.
The greatest sadness for many of us, of course, is that a winter World Cup in Qatar will deprive humankind of all the amazing technological advances we were promised to make it work, such as the air-conditioned streets, and those man-made clouds that were going to be parked above the stadiums to provide shade. (What an edifying quirk of late capitalism it is that it takes a football tournament to spur on talk of such advances, while uninspiring things such as desert famines clearly fail to provide the requisite fillip.)
That said, the timing – by which I mean the tournament's relationship with time itself – sounds increasingly fascinating. Latest word is that a winter World Cup would affect not only the 2021-22 season, but the two that bookend it. How? Well, it's currently all a bit of a mystery, but looks most likely to rely on what David Tennant's Doctor Who referred to as "wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff". My own preference is for each season to begin three weeks before the previous one has finished, though a friend thinks that if the supra-stadium clouds were a possibility, there is absolutely no reason why some sort of chrono-loop could not be created to allow two seasons to play concurrently.
The nice thing is that we've got a few years to play with, and with at least three of Fifa's executive committee statistically likely to be imprisoned/deposed by military coup during that time, we must demand that Stephen Hawking is parachuted into the first vacancy to begin exploring the temporal paradox. Then again, at the current rate of cultural annexation, Qatar will own such large swathes of European public life – maybe even England itself – by 2022 that a summer tournament might still be a possibility, held on the emirate's European territories. We may well see the Wembley World Cup final that has eluded us by all other means.
*Professional Footballers' Association united?
*
Have you been enjoying the TUC Conference taking place this week in Bournemouth? The answer, I suspect, is "never quite as much as I think I am going to"– which should set organisers wondering. Next year, couldn't some platform time be dedicated to the leadership of the Professional Footballers' Association, the trade union that represents football players – or "the Tolpuddle Martyrs of fannying about getting cheap BMW deals for their members", as I like to think of them.
To recap a few of the developments of the past fortnight: the PFA chief executive, Gordon Taylor, was reported to have gambled millions, and amassed a personal debt of more than £100,000. Despite having previously advocated a "zero tolerance" policy on players with betting problems, he has refused to offer a single word on the matter, let alone cobble together some explanation as to how he isn't remotely compromised. [Mr Taylor – or Gordon Taylor OBE as the sender's name appears in one's inbox – is reputed to be the highest paid trade union official in the world (and who could question his worth to his members when you consider he took hundreds of thousands of pounds of hush money from News International to keep quiet on a phone-hacking scandal he might reasonably have expected to extend into the lives of his members?)]
Meanwhile, the Daily Mail has this week published extracts from the forthcoming autobiography of the PFA's chair, Clarke Carlisle, in which Mr Carlisle described two of his members, Rio and Anton Ferdinand, as "shithouses", apparently for not being against racism in the way the PFA wants them to be against racism. Elsewhere, Carlisle sounds quite the lofty logician: in seeking to make a point about the irrelevance of money to some flashily arrogant Newcastle Academy youngsters he played against in a reserve game, he recounts how he rises above them with the words: "I'll remind you of that when you're serving me in Nando's in another three years". And in the course of reacting to some pensée of Joey Barton, he reveals the occasions on which the union has intervened with clubs on said player's behalf – a sideswipe that underscores the commitment to confidentiality that Taylor had shown when he discussed details of Gazza's medical treatment with a load of media outlets earlier this year.
Whether Carlisle's candour will translate into sales is difficult to say, but the entire fortnight surely offers the neatest of solutions to the PFA's perennial problem: sourcing a comic turn for its annual awards night. The surest answer is for the PFA to keep the entertainment in-house on awards night, given how well it does it for the rest of the year. Reported by guardian.co.uk 18 hours ago.