FraserWords

NOTHING convinces me that we live in the age of the cretin so much as the cult of the head-hunter. In times of crisis, the media demands a head and when the head falls, the whole issue – the issue that’s totally unaddressed by the fall of the hapless dolt at the top of it – is conveniently forgotten and the world limps on just the same as ever it did before.

Now, a world that proves its jaw-dropping stupidity by being shocked that football is corrupt – really! – seems to have decided it’s important that the senile German who’s been overseeing the whole stinking morass should be forced to quit.

What an irrelevance. What’s important is the rotten, festering structure beneath the idiot Blatter. Elite football is a stinking obscenity of money, greed and corruption and the head of one 79-year-old won’t solve any of its problems:

• The disgusting disconnect between the 22 millionaires on the pitch and the world around them.
• The cheats feigning injury.
• The cowards screaming each time they fall over.
• A governing body that permits clubs to bankrupt themselves while squandering Rupert Murdoch’s billions on millionaire cheats rather than on promoting the sport among its grass roots.
• A governing body that does little to promote the mass availability of decent facilities.
• A governing body that staged its last World Cup on the graves of the poorly-paid workers and starving children of Brazil, that gorged its gluttony while the people of the favelas staged protests on the streets outside.
• The fools who voted for Sepp Blatter even though they know beyond any doubt whatsoever that there is something rotten at the heart of the sport’s governing body.
• The award of a World Cup to Russia by ‘people’ who knew Russia persecutes gay people and prosecutes extreme, internationally illegal brutality as a means to achieving diplomatic ends.
• The award of another World Cup to Qatar, a country in no way geographically or climactically suited to the game, that abuses human rights, disregards women’s rights and profits from slave labour.

If there was any decency in the world of football whatsoever, the players would have refused to consider playing in Russia or in Qatar the moment the decisions, which were obviously ludicrous, were announced.

If there was any decency in the world of football whatsoever, the clubs and players would right now be demanding a fundamental bottom-up restructure of Fifa.

If there was any decency in the world of football whatsoever, there would be plans to tackle the complicity of Blatter’s third world supporters in the filth and corruption of Fifa by encouraging open-ness, honesty and change.

But there is very clearly indeed no decency whatsoever in the world of football. Everybody involved in the Fifa debate is more interested in dollar signs than fairness, more interested in greed than their game – otherwise they would already be pulling their delegates, their teams and their players out of Fifa.

What I would love to see is the rise of football’s grass roots, the League Twos and the Conferences, with an alternative world organisation where there are wage caps, open democracies with supporters given a vote in the structure of the sport, a structured mechanism for transferring TV money back into the promotion of sport and the health and well-being it brings.

Do you think anybody will sign up to that? Not while their snouts are in the trough they won’t.

The FA’s chair Greg Dyke says there’s no point England boycotting the World Cup on its own. Yes there is. There’s always a point to doing the right thing. The world has always needed courageous people to be the first to change. But what the world seemingly doesn’t have any more is courageous people.

And on we go. Every day, all the time, falling for the conjuring tricks – look at the funny comedy German while the real action goes on in the secret boardrooms and the quiet hotel rooms and the media fiddles while Rome burns. The beautiful game? My arse.

Talking of…

Talking of corrupt elections, I see pressure is growing for the introduction of democracy to Great Britain.

There has, of course, never been a case against proportional representation. The nonsense idea that people vote for their MP, not the party he or she represents, is blown wide open by an election result in which highly-regarded constituency MPs lost because of their party, not their record, and by a BBC survey which shows exactly how few people even know the name of their MP.

We live in a country in which beliefs and principles are not fairly represented in our Parliament – how can it be right that a million Green voters have 55 less MPs than the SNP’s voters? How can it be right that the bigots of the Democratic Unionist Party have eight seats on 190,000 votes while the bigots of UKIP have 1 seat on four million?

It’s not right. It needs change. But while the Tory party, like Sepp Blatter’s voters, have got their corrupt hands in the till and are busy collecting the financial thank-yous of their business backers for delivering profit to the few at the expense of the many, nothing will change.

And Labour are even more guilty than the Tories: they could have protected us from this forever during the Blair and Brown era and introduced a socially just means of representation. They didn’t, for the same reasons of greed and corruption as their successors. Shame on the filthy lot of them.