Fraud and greed also affect football – 06/14/2023 – Juca Kfouri

“Eternal hatred of modern football”, says the maxim of those who miss the times of grassroots football.

That it ended is not today. It has been since FIFA, headed by João Havelange, became a huge transnational. For good and for bad.

For the good of African and Asian football, for the bad as a factor of exclusion of less favored fans and as propaganda for dictatorships around the world — or as money laundering for unscrupulous companies.

What’s worse is that there’s no turning back, the result of savage capitalism, capable of trampling the simplest traditions, such as each team entering the field at a time — one to be applauded, another to be booed.

The appeals for security and good treatment in the stadiums turned into the expulsion of the excluded, the arenas, 8 or 80.

Globalization swallowed romanticism, “golbalization” created the nutella crowd.

Cell phone in hand, the most important thing is to record the goal that celebrates it. And if the fan appears on the screen, even at the moment of defeat, it doesn’t matter, the important thing is to smile for posterity. What are you laughing at?

If greed has warmed the climate and kills the planet, why expect football to be spared?

Parmalat/Palmeiras shamelessly laundered money, MSI/Corinthians belonged to the Russian mafia, ISL/Fifa was nothing more than pure gangsterism, Crefisa lives on usury, the British Empire bowed to petrodollars managed by autocratic, misogynistic and homophobic regimes and French pride recoiled from the same temptation.

It’s just not worth demanding heroism with someone else’s neck.

Players and coaches who get rich at the expense of the so-called “sportswashing” will never open their mouths to denounce the origin of their fortunes, because very few are those who act like this in other professions.

What journalist publicly criticizes the vehicle he works for, no matter how much he disagrees with the editorial line? And look here, in the Sheetcan, as the rare reader and the rare reader are tired of knowing and reading.

Football is the biggest lode of the entertainment industry, and the climb, whether to wipe out dictatorships, as in the 1978 World Cup in Argentina, or to clean up Qatar, as in 2022, mixes millionaire figures with the worst forms of exploitation — including work analogous to slavery.

That doesn’t mean football is dying, it’s just changing, and the new generations, acculturated by “changehood”, worship and will worship it to the sound of discotheques, louder than the fans’ choirs.

Go to the stadiums and witness: the distinguished person at your side is divided between what happens on the pitch and the cell phone screen. Everything programmed.

(Reminiscent of an old ad published on trams and buses, brilliant, but unthinkable these days: “Look, distinguished passenger, the handsome guy you have by your side. And, believe me, he almost died of bronchitis. Creosoted Rhum saved him”).

And if you’re watching the game on TV, the youth will be divided between the two screens.

It’s as sure as TikTok to drive Tico and Dale crazy.

The famous French chemist, and guillotined, Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794): “In nature nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is transformed”.

So it has also been with football. And someone will say that nature and capitalism cannot be confused, they are not the same thing, on the contrary.

In fact! But it is what we have.

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