writerlywitterings

Football’s Over – Yippee!

Posted by writerlywitterer on 14/07/2014 · 5 Comments 

I know. It’s rather immature (mind you, no one’s ever accused me of maturity), but I so detest football, that I cannot help a little frisson of delight that the damn nonsense is over for a while.
My poor son is a perfectly ordinary lad. He enjoys all kinds of sports: he adores cricket, swimming, tennis, netball, rugby – everything, really. But to maintain his street cred, he is most particularly keen on football. And it is the one thing I won’t compromise on because I hate it.
When I think of football, I think of the weekends when I was a lad of his age, and I heard every week of violent assaults on innocent people. I remember the news reports talking about murders having taken place, the stories of riots, and the racism, sexism and cruelty. There were deaths, so it seemed to me, every week.
It’s not a recent innovation. Readers of my books will know that I’ve mentioned the game in books. A Friar’s Bloodfeud springs to mind here. And I mention it because even in medieval times football was mentioned pretty often in the Coroners’ Rolls for being responsible for homicides.
Then again, it’s not only violence on and off the pitch that football brings to my mind. It’s also the corruption. The way that the players can earn sums that are utterly ludicrous. Yes, they are competent at their sport. Does that make them worth £150,000 or £200,000 a week? No. To earn weekly what most people would take ten years to earn is, to my mind, appalling.
Then you see how nations are carefully selected in order to host the ‘world cups’, with massive stadia being constructed, as in Brazil, with people evicted from their homes, with the poor pushed out and away from the limelight because they don’t do a nation’s image any good. And then you hear of the interesting consultancy fees and advisory payments to people as happened in Qatar, and the whole process starts to reek.
Of course, to an extent the entire system is daft. Like the Olympics, the fact of moving every year makes the process a joke. Why should there be a group of people who hold such power over even nation states, rewarding those they like with the opportunity to have a games held in their country every so often. The cost of the British Olympics was insane, with buildings being thrown up all over the place, many of which were unnecessary and not needed. Far better to return to the old system and have the Olympics held once more in Greece and not to keep moving around the world every four years. There would be a single set of buildings to build which could then be maintained. No need to reinvent the world for every new games.
But when I become the world’s beneficient dictator, football will return to its correct status in the world, relegated to a game played for fun in the streets.