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Earlier this week, Sepp Blatter took another important step along the road to transforming FIFA from a governing body of the world’s most popular sport into a comedy troupe with a penchant for the absurd.
Ahead of the draw for the Russia 2018 World Cup qualifying groups, FIFA announced that they would be instigating a “wide-ranging sustainability strategy” focused on improving responsibility, "inclusivity", transparency, integrity and respect within Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation.
That’s right: the organization that may or may not have brought us a rigged World Cup bidding process, also may or may not have covered up the ensuing “independent” review and is currently in the midst of an FBI investigation actually thinks it’s in a position to guide others on the topics of integrity and transparency. It’s like Walter Palmer holding a press conference to detail his 5-point plan for saving Africa’s endangered species.
Perhaps, however, we’ve indirectly struck upon the nub of why FIFA went out of their way to ensure countries such as Russia and Qatar were handed the right to host the next two World Cups: football’s governing body needs to work with people it can feel morally superior to. After all, Russia takes corruption within sport to a whole new stratosphere: It managed to spend more on the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics than all prior Winter Games combined ($50 billion+) and still delivered brown water and malfunctioning doors. Putin handed out billions of dollars’ worth of contracts to his political cronies, who duly built stadia and infrastructure at a cost several times higher than the prevailing market rate, all financed by the taxpayer.
Where could the money have gone?
Putin’s Russia is almost as impressive when it comes to tolerance and inclusion. In 2013, the government effectively outlawed the discussion of gay rights, while police routinely turn a blind eye to violence and discrimination directed towards members of Russia’s LGBT community. Earlier this year Putin passed into law legislation that allows the government to arbitrarily criminalize foreign NGOs deemed “undesirable”. The law has been described by Amnesty International – itself a target of the legislation – as threatening “fundamental freedoms”, and this week the National Endowment for Democracy, a body which promotes the strengthening of democratic institutions in over 90 countries around the world, was booted out of Russia.
Given the Herculean task at hand, and the fact that they can't even organize their own internal review, we're not entirely sure how FIFA intends to turn Russia into a haven of inclusion, transparency and freedom. With World Cups typically attracting more than double the Winter Olympics' number of spectators and many times more its revenue, there could be an awful lot of intolerance, opacity and corruption between now and 2018.
No wonder Vladimir Putin thinks Sepp Blatter deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.
