By Andreas Selliaas in Norway (translated by Pelle Kvalsund)
The day after. Sunday 15 January, 2012, I received an email from the former director of FIFA’s international operations, Jerome Champagne. Receiving the e-mail on that particular Sunday was a bit odd since I had been to a champagne party the night before and the desire for something that had to do with champagne was very minimal. Attached to Mr. Champagne’s e-mail were three documents: a 25-page memo on how Champagne wants to reform FIFA, a press release from FIFA in 2010 on Champagne’s departure from FIFA, and a newspaper article from Le Monde the week before where Champagnes outlines the main points in the lengthy memo. The same e-mail was sent to all 208 members of FIFA and people attending the Play the Game conference in Cologne in October 2011. The memo is interesting in several respects.
Category: Hosting
Guest Post by Andrew Guest (drewguest AT hotmail DOT com)
It’s that time again; the biennial opportunity for Africa’s best national teams to compete for the continental championship, and European club management to complain about the audacity of former colonies holding a tournament smack in the middle of the league season — extracting labor in a reverse flow that might promote some useful self-reflection, if not for the blinders fused on most of the professional football world.
It always good fun to watch the machinations, even from a distance — the actual football starts January 21 in Bata, Equatorial Guinea, and ends with the final on February 12 in Libreville, the capital of co-host Gabon. As in 2010 in Angola, most of us will be watching from a distance: the oil-rich states that CAF has recently favored in its hosting decisions are note easy places to get to.
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Kick Blatter Out
A must-have t-shirt that riffs off the brilliant Kick it Out campaign, courtesy of our friends at Philosophy Football. “From vote-rigging to covering-up corruption, via advocating tight-fitting kits for women footballers, selling the game short to sponsors and now fighting racism with a handshake. It’s surely time for Blatter to go.”
Get yours here.
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South Africa’s Day of Shame
On a day when the Springboks crashed out of the 2011 Rugby World Cup, Bafana Bafana failed to qualify for the 2012 African Nations Cup. After a squalid 0-0 draw against Sierra Leone, the South African players danced to the crowd at Mbombela Stadium in Nelspruit thinking they had done enough to qualify on goal difference.
But with Bafana, Niger, and Sierra Leone tied with nine points, as the rules of the competition clearly state, it was head-to-head points that settled the score. On that basis, Niger qualified. “I’m confused,” said Bafana coach Pitso Mosimane. Really?
Bafana’s inability to produce on the pitch is a natural reflection of the contradictions in the South African game. On the one hand there is a super-rich and gentrifying Premier Soccer League, but on the other hand there is rotting at multiple levels: adminstration; coaching and youth training; playing grounds in townships and villages; schools; and the female game. What the national team symbolizes in fact is the castle of cards that is South African football. The 2010 World Cup was a tremendous success, but local football continues to deteriorate. What’s needed is structural change and long-term sustainable development for the benefit of the 99 percent of SA football outside the PSL.
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Rebels 1 Mambas 0
The Catenaccio was deployed in Maputo the last time Libya played Moçambique. Green shirts, green shorts, green socks all stacked up against the Mambas. Smoke from the said SMS revolution had barely cleared when Libya sneaked away from Estádio da Machava with a 0-0 draw. Last night in neutral Cairo, Libya also remembered to score.
Rebels 1 Mambas 0. It must have been that sexy new kit.
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2014 World Cup Draw: Fans Protest in Rio
The 2014 World Cup officially got underway today with the qualifying draw in Rio de Janeiro. Simultaneously, the Associação Nacional dos Torcedores de futebol (ANT, the National Association of Football Supporters) organized a demonstration against the World Cup (and the 2016 Olympics). ANT’s call to protest read thusly:
Do you think that the World Cup belongs to us?
Our government continually says that the World Cup and Olympics will bring benefits to Rio de Janeiro and Brazil. But who will benefit? The cost of living and rent are continually on the rise, families are forcibly removed from their homes and street vendors are prevented from working.
More: they are wasting public money on all of these projects and have put forward a law that will hide how much they have spent. To make things worse, the organizers of the World Cup, FIFA and Ricardo Teixeira (the president of the Brazilian Football Federation), are being accused of corruption by multiple sources.
Everything indicates that the World Cup and Olympics are going to repeat, on a larger scale, the history of the 2007 Pan American Games: misappropriation of public funds, unnecessarily large construction projects that become useless after the competition, benefits only for large businesses whose owners are friends of those in power and the violation of the human rights of millions of Brazilians.
The forced removal of families affected by these projects is happening in an arbitrary and violent manner. This situation has already been denounced by the United Nations. Mega-events are being used to install a State of Exception, with the systematic violation of the rule of law.
In this vein, what will be the legacy of the mega-events? The privatization of the city, of health and education? The gentrification of football culture and its stadiums? That private companies will reap profit and benefits with exemptions from taxation and subsidized loans? The profits from the World Cup will be for entrepreneurs, and the debt will be ours. Are we going to allow the mega-event histories of Athens 2004 and South Africa 2010 to repeat themselves?
Join us! Together we will change this trajectory, come and fight! Come kick a ball around with us at the Largo do Machado, the 30th of July beginning at 10am.
Zero evictions!
The city is not merchandise to be bought and sold!
No to the privatization of land and public resources, airports, education and health care!
Categories
Stick it to The Man: Fick Fufa
Fifa has turned the World Cup into a corporate jamboree, yet it’s the fans who have to pick up the pieces writes Mark Perryman, co-founder of Philosophy Football. In 2010 at their World Cup dissident South African fans used the slogan FICK FUFA. Now Perryman’s group put it on a campaign T-shirt as a manifesto to clear up Sepp’s mess. Buy it here.
Read Perryman’s article in The Guardian here.