• The Fifa World Cup started this morning, with 104 games of football to be staged in just over a month and 6 billion people predicted to tune in.
  • Travel bans and visa restrictions have meant fans from Iran, Iraq and Haiti have been barred from entering the US.
  • Ticket prices have dominated the headlines in recent weeks, with the attorneys-general of New York and New Jersey launching an investigation into Fifa’s practices.

Are billionaires ruining football?

The World Cup is the most watched sporting event in the world, with 6 billion people predicted to tune in, according to its organising body, Fifa. If you’re not interested, you might want to turn off every piece of technology you own and avoid speaking to your colleagues for the next 39 days.

The anticipation of 104 games of international football in just over a month is sending shockwaves of hype through my Wellington flat and football team. Our TVNZ+ World Cup Pass is secured; our match schedule poster is on the wall; potential sick days have been identified. We’re ready.

But among the conversations of what 5am games we’ll get up for and how many Instagram followers Tim Payne has now, many fans are aware we’re going to be watching a World Cup marked by unrestrained capitalism, war, insecure male leaders and Fifa’s history of corruption.

So has the beautiful game been stolen by the rich and the powerful once and for all?

If you’re like me, you probably asked yourself this in 2022.

The World Cup in Qatar that year was littered with allegations of corruption at the highest level, abuses of migrant labour, extortionate ticket fees and geopolitical tensions that brought into question whether the event would even go ahead.

But somehow the situation today feels even worse. A host nation is at war with one of the participants, ticket prices are in the tens of thousands, stadium workers are threatening to strike because of the fear of ICE raids at stadiums, and to top it all off, the man behind the world’s most recent war was awarded the Fifa Peace Prize.

The 2022 and 2026 World Cups are a grim analogy for our world right now.

Football is supposed to bring us together. It’s meant to transcend class, religion, politics, culture and ethnicity. So why does it now stink to high heavens of everything that’s going wrong with the world?

The fans

The fans are the most impacted by the billionaires’ takeover of world football.

“Football is for the fans,” says Pep Guardiola, arguably the most successful football coach in the modern era, speaking with disappointment about the cost of World Cup tickets.

Ticket prices have dominated the World Cup headlines in recent weeks, with the attorneys-general of New York and New Jersey launching an investigation into Fifa’s practices, claiming they are “artificially inflating prices”, creating “fake scarcity” and “impossibly high prices”.

The consequences of these prices might well be seen on TV next week in the form of empty seats, with the United States’ opening match in LA still not sold out. The cost of the cheapest ticket for this game is currently listed as $1719 NZD.

Travel bans and visa restrictions have meant fans from Iran, Iraq and Haiti have been categorically barred from entering the US.

For the majority of us, however, we’ll be watching from afar, praying TVNZ won’t sneak in any 90th-minute ad breaks.

Fifa

If Pep is right, and football belongs to the people, then Fifa has spent much of its history trying to convince us otherwise. One needs only to look at the host nations of Qatar (2022) and Saudi Arabia (2034) to see how money can buy Fifa.

The 2015 arrests of senior Fifa officials exposed a culture that prioritised power and money over the beautiful game, confirming decades of allegations of bribery, vote-buying and corruption that had long haunted football’s governing body.

When Gianni Infantino became Fifa president in 2016, he promised reform. Instead, Fifa has doubled down on getting rich and found new ways to accumulate wealth and influence.

Under Infantino, the World Cup has expanded from 32 teams to 48, while the number of matches has increased from 64 to 104. With more games and record high ticket prices, Fifa - which demands tax exemption from any country wishing to host - is expected to earn $15.36 billion NZD revenue from the tournament.

The hosts

The US is hosting the lion’s share of the World Cup matches, more than Mexico and Canada combined.

The US public-private model of building stadiums sees privately owned stadiums subsidised by taxpayers, with the promise of jobs and economic growth. Instead, this year’s World Cup is being criticised because public money is flowing upwards to private wealth.

At the stadium of the US’ opening game, workers threaten to strike if ICE isn’t banned from World Cup games. “If we’re forced to strike, those $100,000 [NZ$172,000] Fifa suites will have nothing but bottled water and Doritos,” one union co-president said.

With almost as much anticipation as the matches themselves, many will be watching to see if the US, Mexico and Canada can play nice for the 39-day tournament.

The players

Perhaps the only thing billionaires can’t buy is the joy the players give their nations. I cannot begin to imagine the scenes if Chris Wood scores an 89th-minute winner for the All Whites. Or if 18-year-old Lamine Yamal, born of Muslim faith to a Moroccan father and Equatorial Guinean mother, dribbles past defenders like statues and gives Spain their second World Cup. Or if the underdogs of Uzbekistan, Cabo Verde or Curacao win their first World Cup match.

Yes, players have become brands themselves, contributing to the commercialisation of the sport. But they also use their platforms mostly for good: Kylian Mbappé on racism, Yamal on Palestine, Marcus Rashford on child poverty. And if a European team wins, they’ll almost certainly have immigration to thank.

So is there still hope?

I think we can confidently say the billionaires have ruined Fifa. Perhaps we can even say they’ve ruined parts of this World Cup. They’ve priced out fans, enriched stadium owners and turned the beautiful game into a vehicle for politics and profit. But they haven’t ruined football. Not yet.

Like the Christmas truce of 1914 during World War I, when British and German troops played a game of football on no man’s land, football still gives us a break from the issues of the day.

Every 90 minutes of football reminds us that the people running the game are not the game. When the referee blows the whistle, the game belongs to the players on the pitch and the billions watching from afar.

Timothy O’Farrell is a communications adviser who lives in Wellington and plays football at Island Bay FC.

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Source: New Zealand Herald