World Cup soccer in Brazil this summer! I’m hoping that, if Randinho can’t come back to keep us up to date, Richard Mayhew will fill in for BJ’s football fans.
Trash talk is warming up already:
… Brazilian sports minister Aldo Rebelo admitted the World Cup faces “serious” security problems and then, in an attempt to play down those concerns, pointed out that the country was not a war zone like Iraq or Afghanistan…
“We all have our tragedies and challenges, serious problems relating to security,” said Rebelo as he embarked on a spirited defence of Brazil, which is racing to be ready to host the World Cup from June 12 and has had to deal with years of negative press headlines.
That includes drafting a huge security force of 150,000 police and 20,000 private security agents for a tournament expected to attract some three million Brazilians and 600,000 foreign tourists.
But calling for perspective, he said: “I don’t think the English will confront greater threats in Manaus than in the Iraqi provinces or Afghanistan, where they recently lost hundreds of young soldiers.”
He did though concede that in Rio in particular, which hosts seven games including the final on July 13, there is “day-to-day civil violence … but we are taking precautions”….
And then there’s the next Cup, scheduled for 2022. Per The Wire:
In rare moment of diplomatic honesty, FIFA president Sepp Blatter has confessed that the selection of Qatar as host of 2022 World Cup was a “mistake.” In a Swiss television interview on Friday, Blatter was asked if FIFA was wrong to hold the biggest soccer tournament in the world in one of the hottest deserts on Earth in the middle of the summer. “Of course, it was a mistake,” Blatter responded, adding, “You know, one makes a lot of mistakes in life.”
The World Cup, of course, is a month-long summer tournament for a sport that is traditionally played outdoors. Qatar, being on the Arabian Peninsula, is extremely hot during that time of the year: Temperatures often reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit during the day in June and July. That is not ideal weather for playing soccer, which means that Qatar had to promise to build air conditioned stadiums and a transport system to let players and spectators arrive at the venues without melting…
Blatter said that the decision to give Qatar the tournament in the face of those concerns came down to “political” considerations, but he denies accusations that the World Cup was “bought.”…
Which gives me the chance to recommend, once again, David Roth’s five-part Qatar Chronicles at SB Nation:
Well, it’s complicated. Just because it’s FIFA and it’s the World Cup and so of course it’s complicated. But a short version I guess would be that FIFA is FIFA, which is to say it’s this sort of smuggo mafia of puffy, predatory globo-elite males in suits, all of them dedicated to extracting some sort of rent from the world’s totally helpless and justified love for soccer. And FIFA being FIFA, it has all these wildly un-transparent internal processes — everything done by design in secret, endless dodgy handshake deals between men whose handshakes are mostly worthless — that seem almost to incent lawlessness.
And so the result of this is that the very fact that the World Cup is awarded in the way that it is, by the people that award it, creates this ambient sense of corruption. It’s just very difficult to imagine this bunch of crooks using the system they built to make a reasonable decision for the right reasons. And this is true even if they make the right decision!…
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The Preakness Stakes tv coverage has just started. I assume that there’s also baseball / hockey / other sports stuff happening as well, but I’m gonna leave that for Cole or one of the other frontpagers, because we’ve got another garden center to visit.