But the people who run the game are getting lots of money that they really shouldn’t. But you can argue that he’s one of the best footballers in the world and he’s providing something and earning that money.
It’s one thing for Ronaldo to earn a quarter of a million pounds a week, though I do have a problem with that. They are getting incredibly rich out of the game. These men are making millions and millions of pounds out of our game and, at the same time, claiming that everything’s going back into the game and that they love football. You get people who have been in power for years and years and years and they nobble their opponents so they get to carry on.ĭoes it matter? Why do we care? Isn’t the game the same? Blatter has been the president of FIFA since 1998. He is the only journalist who has ever been banned from FIFA press conferences. Andrew Jennings is a top investigative journalist and has done all sorts of things that people would consider more serious, but he has really lifted the lid on how corrupt some parts of the modern-day game really are. Football began to change in the 1970s and FIFA is now an incredibly rich and powerful body, but incredibly corrupt as well and, for all its talk about transparency, it’s actually one of the least transparent organisations in the world. There were no sponsors, there were no official partners, no sponsored ball-boys, none of this. This World Cup in South Africa is a world away from the World Cup in England in 1966. Like a lot of sports, football has become incredibly more commercial over the past 30/40 years. Next you’ve chosen Foul, by Andrew Jennings. The book starts with a Brazilian footballer playing in Scotland’s Faroe Islands, showing how football had become Brazil’s main export, and how global Brazilian football had become. I wouldn’t pick up a book about Brazilian history, but a book about Brazilian football I would and I did and it taught me more about Brazil than anything else I’ve read. It’s a beautiful way of telling the story of a country. And less well-known stories about the players, like Garrincha, who was this bow-legged boy who became one of the best footballers in the world.
And, in fact, the famous kit that they wear now, the yellow shirt and the green top, came from a competition they held afterwards when they decided they had to change absolutely everything, including the colour of their kit. Out of the ashes of that came the Brazil that we know now. Everyone was so confident they would win in 1950 that the newspapers anointed them champions the day before the final. We think of Brazil as the greatest ever World Cup side but back then they still hadn’t ever won it. They built a new stadium, the Maracan, which was the biggest in the world – for 200,000 people. There are several fascinating stories, although my favourite is probably the tale of Brazil hosting the World Cup for the first time in 1950. I know that it’s there and I know about its football, but this book tells the story of the whole country by telling the story of its football. I didn’t have much interest in Brazil as a country.
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