Are you feeling it yet? The Fifa corruption fatigue? It has, after all, been seven years in the making, from the oddly homespun excesses of the whistleblower Chuck Blazer, football’s own mobility scooter Liberace; to the cold, gangsterish disdain of the Grondona-Teixeira-Leoz axis, the kind of Fifa men who would carve out your liver with an ivory-inlaid oyster knife if it meant getting a step closer to a secret six-figure TV rights access sweetener.
This week the US justice department court case sparked into life in New York. Its first few days provided such a vivid dose of toxic colour it is tempting to call Fifa’s continuing corruption debacle a gift that just keeps on giving. Except it fees like something else by now, a gift that has, frankly, given too much, but which still keeps on dishing up its shovel-loads of corruption and human weakness. This is the other thing about the World Cup. It isn’t only the money now. It’s the horror and the death too.
Related: Wild-eyed fury, urchin’s grin, sheer dynamism – Gianluigi Buffon had it all | Richard Williams
Continue reading...