Monday, September 16, 2013

"In principle" my arse

Qatar are in danger of having 2022 FIFA World Cup snatched from them with major pressure on FIFA

Pressure from Europe’s football elite — including the Premier League — as well as the concerns of powerful American TV interests, Qatar’s beaten rival bidders for 2022 and anti-corruption investigators could scupper the project to stage the world’s biggest football tournament in the small but oil-rich desert state.

It is virtually certain that football’s world governing body, FIFA, will announce early next month that the 2022 tournament cannot be staged in Qatar in the summer — as originally envisaged when the World Cup was awarded to the emirate three years ago — because of the dangerously high temperatures, which can reach 40 degrees centigrade. ...

See the whole story here, courtesy of Fox News.

Kicking Back Comments: So in the article we see the mounting legal challenges to moving the World Cup to winter of 2022. Fox, Telemundo, EPL, and various bidding association are among them. It would seem clear that if the EX-CO takes the decision to move the Cup, all (legal) hell is going to break loose and FIFA could wind up losing substantial revenue as FOX paid $1BILLION ... for a tournament in the summer (when nothing else is going on in the US sports-wise). It suffices to say they have concerns about bumping into the NFL schedule in winter.

Now from the article we see yet another weak justification from Sepp:

Blatter appeared to attempt to claim last week that FIFA had the latitude to move the event at will, saying 2022 bids were made for a summer event ‘in principle’.

Of course the contracts to host the Cup do not say that, but reportedly actually state June and July in there, as any good contract would.

Sepp's pathetic explanation continues to lend credence to just how arrogant this empty suit is. A single handed belief that he can move a honored tournament that has been played in June and July since the 1930's, to another month.

Now, here is the other side of my mouth, and I loath to make Sepp's case, but ... what about countries like Qatar who can't reasonably host the tournament in that timeframe due to factors out of their control, like the weather. Should they be denied the opportunity to host?

I don't think so ... but this is an issue that should have been disclosed before the bidding even began.  

No comments:

Post a Comment