Football's Dark Rotten Heart

wisbeech(54)

Published in

#politics

Words

1078

Reading

5 min

Listen

Play

Football used to be a sport, it was about team work, determination, perseverance, sportsmanship, but the more I see of it these days the more I find it to be sleazy and corrupt and a terrible example to any younger people who aspire to sporting excellence. I would take a team sports, especially those like football, as instilling people with values that can be taken and applied to all the rest of aspects of that person’s life.

I was shocked when I came across the story of an Argentine defender who thought it was okay to use an actual needle and jabbing opposing strikers with it! What sort of person does that? Okay, I get a bit of shirt pulling and tripping someone up, but this is a needle on the pitch, you can read about it here quite what example that's supposed to set I'm not sure.

I was shocked and then started thinking about what I’d read and noticed happening over the last few years and it's not a pretty picture of a sport watched by millions.

Tax Evasion and Avoidance

Lionel Messi plays for one of my favourite teams, Barcelona. A great footballer and a hero to many, and gets paid £256,000 a week, now I don't know about you, but to be able to earn that for kicking a ball, something he does very well, well wouldn’t you be grateful. I would. Read the full story here. A man making a fortune determined not to pay back what he should to society.

The Panama papers opened up this can of worms, but little has been done about it.

Then there is Ronaldo, the opposite of Messi, a strutting peacock of a man, endowed with skill and paid a pirate’s ransom for doing the same and is accused of 14 million Euros worth of tax evasion. Come on!! Another footballer who earns a fortune but doesn’t want to pay tax on that fortune, do these people feel they are above that? We pay taxes, and I will hold my hand up, if my country and government got their act together and started improving services and infrastructure instead of renewing Trident I would stump up, but I earn a fraction of what these two earn and still pay my tax.

Exploitation.

At the top of the ladder we have naked unashamed greed and then at the other end we have young footballers paid on zero hour contracts and clubs getting away with it because the football high ups don’t have the ability or desire to tackle these kinds of issues head on, better to draw a wage and cast a blind eye I suppose.

This certainly seems to be the case with the SFA in Scotland, read this shocking account of two senior people try and tell the Scottish Parliament that it’s okay to exploit young players because the clubs don’t know the rules, isn’t that the purpose of the SFA to enforce those rules? Read the account here

Greed

The case of Sam Allardyce, former England manager sums up perfectly for me what is wrong with the whole system, this is a man who fulfilled a long-held dream to be England Manager and then when he was in the job a matter of weeks he used the position to craft a £400,000 deal to advise shady businessmen on how to circumvent FA rules on player transfers. this is where the ugly word slave rears its head -

"The issue of “third party ownership” in football has been described as “slavery”. It effectively allows companies to own a stake in a footballer. The FA led the way by banning the practice in 2008 and football’s world governing body, FIFA, followed in 2015."

Allardyce offers advice on how to bend the rules associated with the banning of this practice, then goes on to mock a predecessor’s speech impediment, and openly criticizes his players.

For those interested the full article on this shameful man and his escapades can be read here

You would now think that someone caught out this blatantly would slink off into obscurity and shame, but this being the world of football he ends up being given a massive contract and manages Crystal palace worth £2.5 million a year till 2019, a man with no shame.

You can read more here

Corruption

Where do you start with an organization like FIFA, well you could start here, every level seems to be corrupt, from the top to the bottom, if you can’t tell a bung is morally and legally wrong what hope for the world of football in general?

It goes from the bad to the ridiculous with FIFA, Chuck Blazer got his cat an apartment in Trump Tower,

this may sound hilarious and anywhere else it might be, but a cat has its own apartment, paid for by sleaze and corruption and bribery, and Sepp Blatter has the gall to say Crisis, what is a crisis? Umm, the raging corruption and cat apartments might point to there being a problem.

Chuck may look like Santa, but rearrange those letters a bit and you come closer to the truth of the man. 150527-charles-blazer-jpo-557a_5fb1797b36c9d2a6999b8fa94508f1d5.nbcnews-ux-2880-1000.jpg

With a culture of corruption this pervasive I think morality must shift and what takes it place is a venal greed that no amount of money can satisfy, you wonder where it will end but you never think it might get this ugly and disgusting.

Modern Slavery

I don’t say that lightly, but look at the case of workers in Qatar, I have included a link to the article here, but the article uses words like -

Forced labour
passport confiscation
denied access to water in desert heat
brutal conditions

One worker was quoted as saying "we'd like to leave, but the company won’t let us"

look at the definition of slavery,

A Guardian article I found said the following,
"Qatar was given 12 months to end migrant worker slavery or face a possible United Nations Investigation"

This is meant to be a sport enjoyed by millions, but it seems to be riddled with sleaze and corruption that seems to have made people cruel and indifferent to plight and suffering of other human beings being forced into modern day slavery

This is appalling that we have allowed this to fester under our very noses, think about it next time you watch the beautiful game... goalie-desperation.jpg.size.custom.crop.1086x633.jpg