Welcome to the World Cup
The World
Cup is the biggest sporting event in the world!
Unless you’re American, that is.
The sport of soccer isn’t really that big in America, and besides that
when we want to have some kind of “world” thing like our “World Series”, we
usually only want American teams to participate. Some people think America is the center of
the universe!
Stupid people aside, there
are millions, possibly billions of people worldwide who care about the World
Cup. They are passionate and hang on
every word the announcers say whether watching the matches on television, or
listening to them on a radio. A lot of
people who aren’t American will tell you that soccer, English football,
European football, or whatever you want to call it is a religion. For some people, losing a war would be less
important than losing the World Cup
The last
World Cup was held in 2010. England had
a strong team and was going up against Germany.
I was working security at a Las Vegas casino on the day of that match
and it was going to be shown on some large screens in the casino’s sports
book. There were a LOT of people from
England in town and they began gathering pretty early in the morning to get
good seats in the sports book to root on their national team. There was a lot of excitement in the air! Germany took off and scored the first goal of
the match and then notched a second goal making it 2-0 in Germany’s favor. But then England came back! England scored making it 2-1 and then scored
again making it even! Or did they?
Though
the ball went into the goal area and was clearly a goal, the keeper grabbed the
ball and threw it back out onto the field and the match went on as if there was
no goal. The English side was
horrified! If football is a religion,
then the match referee just stepped on the English God.
I’ve seen
cheating in sports before and even a few times when I thought a player was
trying to intentionally lose a game, but this was the World Cup. How do you ignore a goal in a match this
big? Though I was in America when the
goal was disallowed, I think I actually heard the majority of England
scream. One guy in the casino sports
book stood up from his seat and began yelling “This is an embarrassment!” He was quite upset. Germany did go on to win 4-1, but would
things have turned out the same if England had been given that goal? And what crosses my mind is if a referee was
crooked enough to not allow a legal goal, how many other illegal things did he
allow to go on during the match? Things
just didn’t seem fair.
Now the
World Cup is organized by FIFA. FIFA
also controls quite a few football leagues.
So could FIFA have maybe had any part in what happened to England in
2010? Let’s take a look at the FIFA
track record.
Back in
2010 the World Cup, or the FIFA World Cup if you like, was held in South
Africa. FIFA decided that the South
African court system wasn’t good enough and convinced South Africa to allow
them to create the FIFA World Cup Courts.
So basically FIFA ran their own justice system in the country of South
Africa. And these courts even sent
people to prison if they were convicted.
And if you went to the FIFA World Cup Courts, your trial wouldn’t take
very long. Two guys from Zimbabwe robbed
a couple of journalists on a Wednesday, went to court on Thursday, and then
began 15 year prison sentences on Friday.
NO ONE MESSES WITH FIFA! To show
I’m not kidding, here’s a link to an article:
The 2014
FIFA World Cup is being held in Brazil.
(I spell American. In European,
and according to FIFA, the country is spelled “Brasil”.) Brasil had a few too many deaths involving drinking and so decided to pass a law that no alcohol would be allowed
to be sold during football matches. One of FIFA’s
big sponsors is Budweiser who makes and sells alcoholic beverages. So in order to make FIFA happy and to have
the FIFA World Cup in Brasil, they will allow alcohol to be served at the World
Cup matches no matter what their laws say. Nothing can go wrong with
that, right? But who cares if things do
go bad and people die? It’s FIFA and the
World Cup!
Brasil
also decided to spend 270 million dollars, or Euros, or whatever Brasilians
spend on a new stadium for the World Cup.
It’s built in a place called Manaus along the Amazon river. There is almost no access to this place from
a normal roadway and really no football team that will play there after the World
Cup. After all the matches are over, the
stadium may become a home for a nearby Amazonian tribe. Either that, or they’ll just let the jungle
over grow it like an old ruin.
One
question I have is if it’s so hard to get to Manaus, how are fans going to
arrive to watch a match? Will everyone swim,
or row, or somehow go up the Amazon river to get there? I’m sure it’s hard to find tickets to a World
Cup match to begin with, but once you get the tickets you now have to find Humphrey
Bogart to take you up the Amazon River on the African Queen to get to the
damned stadium! Doesn’t anyone see
anything wrong here?
There are
rumors regarding bribery to FIFA officials.
Mostly because they decided that the 2022 FIFA World Cup would be held
in Qatar. Sadly, I don’t even know exactly
where Qatar is. The Qatar national
football team has NEVER even qualified to enter any World Cup in history, but
now they’ll get to host it in 2022? Oh definitely
click the link below if you’d like to read more about this!
The
President of FIFA Sepp Blatter claims the organization is “non profit” however
FIFA has over a billion dollars in the bank.
That’s more money than quite a few countries have! They had a shot of him on television when the
English goal was disallowed against Germany back in 2010. I think his expression looked something like
this:
Blatter
claims the Billion dollars in the bank is a “reserve”. A reserve for WHAT? What is all this money for? From what I’ve seen FIFA relies on countries
to build their own stadiums, and fund everything for the World Cups themselves,
so who gets all this money? Maybe they could use the money to promote women’s
soccer? When asked how women’s soccer
could be made more popular, Sepp Blatter replied “They could wear shorter
shorts.” Wow.
I will
admit that there is one very popular video on YouTube of Sepp Blatter. The clip is only a few seconds long, but is
very entertaining, especially if you don’t much care for the FIFA organization. I think for this clip I’ll let “Keyboard Cat”
handle things:
Ok, I’m
sure I’ve ranted and raved enough about the FIFA organization enough. To be truthful, to me they’re just a soccer
video game name. I’m actually looking
forward to the World Cup matches this year since I’ll be able to watch
them. If it were up to me though, I
would make one change. If I could, I
would bring a bunch of Oakland Raider fans to Brasil to root for the United States team. The Oakland Raiders are an
American football team and play American football, not soccer, and some of their
fans are pretty insane. Let’s take a look at
regular American World Cup fans:
They may
scream and yell and even blow into a vuvuzela once in a while, but they’re
probably mildly distracting at best. Now
let’s take a look at some Oakland Raider fans:
You think
English soccer hooligans can cause problems?
I think we need a stadium full of these guys for the United States matches! *chuckle* And since the stadium in Manaus is only going
to be used for four matches, these guys can tear the place apart and no one
will care! It’s win win! We’ll just dress the United States team all in
black, write “Raiders” across their kits and let the fun times roll! *chuckle*
All
foolishness aside, I really am looking forward to the World Cup this week. And if football really is a religion, then
count me in. I’ll be right along side
the millions of fans worshiping this weekend.
GO UNITED
STATES!
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