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FIFA making football null and void with Qatar captain's call

Roar Guru
20th March, 2015
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Sepp Blatter will have nothing to do with football for eight years.
Roar Guru
20th March, 2015
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1132 Reads

The lead up to the 2022 FIFA World Cup is like watching a giant conspiracy unfold in plain daylight. FIFA have now made official the decision to move the 2022 World Cup Finals to November / December.

We all knew it was coming, and the breathless arrogance of the governing body has come to be expected. The organisation, which has more members than the United Nations, repeatedly wields their power and influence in totally non-egalitarian ways.

As Simon Hill so emphatically stated on Fox Sports, when nations bidding for the 2022 tournament back in 2010 were doing so, they were bidding under the impression that they would be hosting a June/July tournament.

Cast your minds back five years and the drama surrounding comments made by the then-AFL head Andrew Demetriou as the World Cup bidding process was hotting up. According to Demetriou at the time, AFL fans were facing the prospect of a cancelled 2022 season if the World Cup came to Australia and utilised the two major Melbourne stadiums.

Of course that didn’t exactly engender bilateral support for our bid with other codes, yet none of those headlines would have happened if we knew we were bidding for a November/December tournament. As Hill stated, the whole bidding process should now be declared null and void.

The sensible thing to do would be to take the tournament off Qatar, who are as appropriate a hosting destination as Townsville would be a Winter Olympics host. But FIFA have painted themselves into a corner with the whole Qatar fiasco, clearing themselves of any unethical dealings in awarding the tournament there in the first place, which is a little like Al Capone running his own trial.

To take the tournament off Qatar would be a tacit admission that the governing body’s own Executive Committee did in fact engage in less-than squeaky-clean dealings back in December 2010.

The decision to move the dates rather than the destination confirms FIFA as pig-headed, arrogant, and a collective who truly believe they are above the law and bigger than anything in the world. At least 400 European football games will need to be re-scheduled. TV rights for other sporting events will be affected and will make football no new friends with other sports.

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A sport loved by hundreds of millions is being held to ransom by its own governing body. It’s time to lop the head off the octopus.

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