The Lost Pilot

Goodtime Jesus
Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dreaming so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it? A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off. But he wasn't afraid of that. It was a beautiful day. How 'bout some coffee? Don't mind if I do. Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.
– James Tate

JAMES TATE died on Wednesday, and if you aren’t into poetry, you’ll probably have no idea who he is. If you are into poetry, you realize what a loss this is for modern literature and the arts. James Tate won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Yale Young Poets Award. I was first introduced to his work when I began taking poetry classes in 1988 – Goodtime Jesus there was the first poem of his that I had read, and I wondered what the hell I’d just read, and then pretty much made a point of reading everything he’d ever written after that, and emulating it, if not just out-and-out stealing it – bad poets borrow, after all, and good poets steal. And it was his poetic voice that I wanted to have. James Tate was my poetic hero, and probably still is.

And what voice is that? For starters, it’s funny, goddamnit. I went to school with a whole bunch of narcissists who wanted to drown themselves in faux angst and malaise, having been inspired by the likes of Sylvia Plath. I wasn’t interested in confessional crap. Give me comedy, damnit, because poetry is all about lying, and the best way to get away with telling a lie is to make it funny. James Tate taught me that poetry could be funny – and, more importantly, that it should be funny. In the kingdom of literature, he was the court jester. I still remember sitting in the office of my professor, Jim Harms, with three of my poetry buddies after writing class, the five of us reading through Tate’s poems while drinking beer and literally laughing until we cried.

But the comedian is always sad behind the masque. Tate’s genius was his ability to take the absurd and make it poignant, to verge on abstraction and yet make that abstraction seem somehow tangible – and he could do it in the same verse. His personae in his work were often losers, fringe characters, dumb guys next door happening upon a situation that suddenly became profound. He’d write poems about going to visit doctors, about wild rounds of cheese roaming the countryside, about Galapagos birds which had grown duller over time, about listening to the nondescript neighbour having awkward sex. There was something amazing about his ability to turn the mundane into the meaningful. The world according to Tate was mad as hatters. His work is often described as ‘dreamy’ because it was only in the dream world where the world seemed sane.

One of my great triumphs from the days of Serendipity, Berkeley’s world’s greatest bookstore, was unearthing a copy of Row With Your Hair from somewhere deep in the bowels of the 1,000,000 volume store. Peter Howard, the store’s owner, was notorious for being unwilling to part with a book if he didn’t think the buyer deserved it. He and I had clashed several times, as he disapproved of me making off with some of his finest books of poetry, and he was particularly displeased to see someone approach with Row With Your Hair in hand. Row With Your Hair is a hand printed, hand illustrated, limited edition (1,000 copies) of James Tate’s work published in San Francisco in 1969. It may say $1.50 on the cover – the original cost – but penciled inside the front cover was Peter Howard’s asking price: $90. Much as he had done with another 1960s book I’d made off with  – Jack Gilbert’s Views of Jeopardy – Howard quizzed me on the contents of Tate’s book. 

“What’s your favorite passage?” he asked. Not poem, mind you, but passage.

“Yes, Sister Michele, it is all true: the fire-dance you are waiting for in the next life happens every night on my livingroom floor.”

I quoted verbatim a passage from The Fire Dance, a poem on p. 27. He turned to p. 27, confirmed I had uttered it correctly, and then sold me the book for $75.

And there was always an element of heartbreak in his work. Optimism, too – his poems would have this curious sense about them of “it’s all going to be alright … well, not really, but we’ll manage and get by.” Tate was, in some ways, born with a tinge of heartbreak to him by nature. His debut book was titled The Lost Pilot, and the title poem is about his father, a WWII bomber pilot who was killed when his son was only 5 months old. He had grown up never knowing his father, only imagining him, and yet there was a connection there impossible to let go of. It was unshakable and unbreakable, a disappointment he was destined to be saddled with that what never of his choosing:

The Lost Pilot
for my father, 1922-1944

Your face did not rot
like the others—the co-pilot,  
for example, I saw him

yesterday. His face is corn-
mush: his wife and daughter,  
the poor ignorant people, stare

as if he will compose soon.
He was more wronged than Job.  
But your face did not rot

like the others—it grew dark,
and hard like ebony;
the features progressed in their

distinction. If I could cajole
you to come back for an evening,  
down from your compulsive

orbiting, I would touch you,  
read your face as Dallas,  
your hoodlum gunner, now,

with the blistered eyes, reads  
his braille editions. I would
touch your face as a disinterested

scholar touches an original page.  
However frightening, I would  
discover you, and I would not

turn you in; I would not make  
you face your wife, or Dallas,  
or the co-pilot, Jim. You

could return to your crazy  
orbiting, and I would not try  
to fully understand what

it means to you. All I know  
is this: when I see you,  
as I have seen you at least

once every year of my life,  
spin across the wilds of the sky  
like a tiny, African god,

I feel dead. I feel as if I were  
the residue of a stranger’s life,  
that I should pursue you.

My head cocked toward the sky,  
I cannot get off the ground,  
and, you, passing over again,

fast, perfect, and unwilling  
to tell me that you are doing  
well, or that it was mistake

that placed you in that world,
and me in this; or that misfortune  
placed these worlds in us. 
 – James Tate

And when I began writing poems again in 1998, after a long hiatus, one of the first poems that I wrote was in a similar vein – it was called Breaking Down the Bridge, and is about the grandfather that I never knew, but whose influence upon my family and the way they acted was inescapable. And I had Tate’s Lost Pilot in mind when I wrote it:

Breaking Down the Bridge
for George Morgan (died 1971)

Yours is a lost entry: never was your name
a subject of dinner conversation, no jaundiced
photographs perched upon bookshelves
or the hearth. My one true point of
reference: an abridged quotation

from your second son. When I asked
of you, he paused to edit and strategize,
portraying you as a man content
rocking in a rocking chair, passing
the hours with a volume of Plato.

We were driving that day, perusing
valleys of butternuts and zealous fog,
incomparable landscapes inhabited
by the sorriest of folk. Your homelands.
After decades of founding and refounding

your dreams – Chicago and Detroit,
Bay City and Watertown – you built
an empire here, a hotel and stone
castle on the bank of a small pond,
and you fancied the horses, spending

your every last moment at the Downs,
even as misdirected trotters carried
your dowry and your ægis back
to the stables. I inherited your features
and your luck at the races (I hit the Daily

Double and it paid $4.80). I’m saddled
with the bitterness of your two youngest
sons, anchored in the mud while
the eldest – my father – cut himself
loose. I never even knew you, yet

I find myself inexorably stuck with you,
the bridge between us a ludicrous
wrought iron bridge which hovers
atop a dry riverbed, the river long since
having altered its course. Place a hammer

in my grasp and I would hammer free
the rivets and bolts, reducing that bridge
to an elegant heap of rubble, waiting
for summer rains to overflow the gulch
and carry the remains to the sea.

That poem was published in Washington Square, the literary journal of New York University, in 2000. I still have the copy of that literary journal over here on the shelf, a copy I remember purchasing at a bookstore in Santa Fe on what was otherwise one of the lousiest days of my life, a day so lousy that I’ve spent 15 years and $10,000 on therapist bills trying to come to terms with what it meant. But there was my work on the pages of this terrific literary journal, and for a moment there, being an abandoned and mentally ill artisan suddenly seemed worth it. A few weeks later, I was at City Lights in San Francisco and I peered over the shoulder of a man reading through that particular issue of Washington Square. I asked him what he thought about the poem on p. 50 (mine), he read it and nodded and said it was pretty good, I then said, “I wrote that,” and he not only bought the journal but asked me to sign it. What price, small victories?

And also published in that edition of Washington Square were three poems by James Tate.

I always wondered if, when reading through the issue, if he noticed the poem on p. 50, noticed the subject matter and the word “lost” in the opening line, and made the connection, coming to realize that it was an homage to his work. Probably not. He probably just read it and said, “this Morgan guy, he’s kind of a jackass.”

There’s a weird sensation when someone whose work you so admired, whose work meant so much to you, passes on. It’s an odd sort of creative emptiness you cannot really explicate. You feel a great loss, even if you never knew them. You feel like you disappointed them somehow by not living up to their level of inspiration – you weren’t good enough to say that they influenced you. Robin Williams made me want to be funnier. Roger Ebert made me want to be more mutable and insightful. I wish I’d been a college kid when Kind of Blue and Time Out came out in 1959 so I could use Miles’ and Brubeck’s masterworks to try and seduce cute girls. When I turned 46 on the 25th of May, and began to attempt to plot some sort of life course for the umpteenth time, I was instantly reminded of three other artisans, across a multitude of genres, whose work I truly admired and revered who died when they were 46 – Philip Seymour Hoffman, David Foster Wallace, and Mark Sandman. My new life course immediately involved vowing to make it to 47, since none of those three did.

But on the writing front, I know what I want to say. Or should that be that I know how I want to say it. I am proud to be an absurdist, a humorist, a satirist – understanding that doing so requires sharper senses of observation, incisiveness, and compassion than I thought I was capable of. It’s who I am, who I want to be, and who I strive to continue to be. And I owe more thanks to James Tate for that than anyone else. I wish I’d had the chance to thank the Lost Pilot himself for steering me in the right direction all of those years ago now, even if I was too dumb at the time to realize it.

5-Course Meal with a Side of Chile

That one is gonna be hard to live down

MYSELF and The Official Wife of In Play Lose were eating our way through the Napa Valley during this long holiday weekend, and the weekend also offered up a scrumptious meal of footballing losedom to take stock of. And there were plenty of other tidbits of losedom as well, but we’ll dine on bad baseball and the folly of NBA free agency here later in the week. In the meantime, let’s contemplate the 5-goal feast from Sunday:

1. 
I said yesterday at lunch that not only was the U.S. going to win against Japan, but that they were going to win big. My reasoning for this was that the U.S. could do every single thing against Japan that England did, and do it better, because the U.S. has better players than England (and pretty much everyone else, for that matter). The best counterargument anyone offered up was, well, that it’s a 1-game situation, and anything can happen in a 1-game situation, and that soccer is a stupid fucking game because the wrong team wins an awful lot of the time in 1-game situations. And yes, the U.S. found that out the hard way four years ago in the final against Japan, dominating the game and then basically throwing it away. But Japan wasn’t as good as they were four years ago, and the U.S. was arguably better. And in truth, in 1-game situations, the better team generally does, in fact, win.

Japan, of course, love to possess the ball and play defense with their offense, slowly driving their opponents mad in the process. They can do some truly awesome stuff. They were the defending World Cup Champions for a reason, and against the uninitiated, mesmerized opposition they faced in their first five games, it always seemed inevitable that they’d prevail:

This goal is just sick

But in the semifinal, the English didn’t give a shit. They just went out and knocked the Japanese around and took the game to them, and should’ve won the damn game. So it stood to reason that the U.S. was going to try and do the same thing. And a good way to attack a team that wants to play defense with their offense is make them play defense with their defense. Watch any match that Spain has lost in the past decade – granted, there aren’t very many of them – and generally what you see is a direct approach to the game that forces the defense to be honest and minimizes comfortable possession in the midfield. Up until the England game, no one really attacked the Japanese with any sort of authority, but the U.S. love damning the torpedoes and charging straight ahead. It is their favoured way to play, in fact. Their size and athleticism made them a terrible matchup for Japan.

And really, if the U.S. was going to lose this tournament, they were going to have to get nicked early on, when they couldn’t figure out what sort of a lineup to play, but other than a goalless draw with the tepid Swedes, that didn’t really happen. While the offense was finding its way, the U.S. defense didn’t give up a goal for nine hours. When you don’t give up a goal for nine hours, you have plenty of time to figure stuff out. The defense really won them the tournament, affording them ample amounts of time to fine tune and tinker under the hood. And once Jill Ellis found a lineup and a formation that she liked, everyone else was in trouble.

I figured the only way Japan could win this game is if they got to halftime nil-nil and some nerves started to settle in on the U.S. side. Instead, it was basically over in 15 minutes.

2.
I flashed back to January 1990 while watching a full replay of this match last night. I was in the U.K. at the time, and we American exchange students were starved for some “real” football, so stayed up late to watch the replays of the NFL playoff games, which I think were on ITV. The 49ers played the Rams in the NFC Championship in San Francisco, and the field condition was absolutely terrible, like it always was at Candlestick. (Which mercifully, is no longer. RIP Candlestick my ass.) Heavy rains in the run-up to the game had turned Candlestick into it’s usual muddy mess, and the players were slopping all over. And yet, amid all of the slop and the mud, the most striking image of that particular game was the jersey of Joe Montana, which was perfectly clean. Montana would drop back to pass and no Ram defender ever came near him. He was 26-30 for 262 yards and 2 TDs in the game, and never once was even as much as touched by a Ram defender as the 49ers won 30:3. Montana was a maestro conducting a symphony. The 49ers were near perfect.

And two weeks later, the 49ers basically were perfect. We had a Super Bowl party which started at something like 12:30 a.m., and it was over pretty quickly, because the 49ers were up 34:3 on the Denver Broncos at halftime. Mick Luckhurst, the British former Falcons kicker, was the host of the British TV broadcast, and I remember him trying to give a justification as to why people should keep watching such a blowout even though it was well after 2:00 a.m.

“You’ll probably never see a team play football this well again,” Luckhurst said.

The U.S. Women’s 5:2 win over Japan was like that. I would also liken the Screamin’ Eagles’ performance yesterday in Vancouver to the Seahawks 43:8 win over Denver in the Super Bowl a couple of seasons ago, or maybe Spain’s emphatic 4:0 win over Italy in the 2012 Euros. Great performances by great teams, triumphs of great talent but also great preparation.

We love the tension and the drama of close, competitive games, of course, but sometimes one team is clearly better than the other going into that final, and when that team plays to its maximum potential, and simply blows away the opposition, it really is beautiful to watch. You don’t get to see that very often.

In the end, this was a landmark performance by the U.S. Winning in 1999 was cool, but that match was still 0:0 and decided on penalties. This match in Vancouver, meanwhile, was dominant and emphatic. This is the gold standard in women’s soccer, just as Brazil’s 4:1 win over Italy in the 1970 final is the gold standard on the men’s side. (Colossal Brazilian defensive faux pas aside.) It simply gets no better, and sometimes you just have to be thankful that you got to see it.

OK, there, I’ve done some gushing and praising. Now it’s time to trash some shit.

3.
WTF Japan? Play some defense! That team just didn’t look ready to play in a lot of ways. The Japanese had to expect a U.S. onslaught at the beginning, and yet they seemed woefully unprepared. Like I said, the U.S. game plan was to make Japan play defense with their defense, and it was a wise game plan, because as it turned out, Japan’s defense was absolutely horrible.

The goalkeeping, in particular, was miserable. The defining moment of this game, and of the entire tournament, was Carli Lloyd chipping Japanese goalkeeper Ayumi Kaihori from 60 yards. Props to Lloyd for having the audacity to even try it, but that was exactly the right time to try something like that – up three goals after a full-on barrage to start the game, Japan forced to press forward, etc. Also, the high ball in the sun is actually really problematic for a goalkeeper, but it almost never happens that the ball gets up high enough to cause that problem. The art of goalkeeping is all about employing the right sorts of techniques in an instant to cope with a split-second of panic when a shot comes your way: how you dive, where you place your hands, how you guide the ball if you cannot take hold of it, and so forth. So when you lose sight of the ball, you can get all crazy legs and get yourself tangled up. (This may or may not have happened to me before.)

Now, I don’t know if Kaihori lost it in the sun or what, but she’s at sixes and sevens on that chip from Lloyd and she gets herself all screwed up. The end result is a truly terrible play. It was a stamp of incompetence on a truly inept all-around performance by Japan. This play was so bad that it, in retrospect, it almost makes you forget how badly Kaihori flapped at the 5th American goal, a fairly standard cross on a corner that she turned into a mess. The fourth and fifth goals were a case of just awful goalkeeping, plain and simple.

And look, Hope Solo is a lunatic. There isn’t any doubt about it. She’s absolutely a crazymaker. But she is also about the best female goalkeeper we’ve ever seen – even when she doesn’t have to make the save. Solo clearly put the ziggy on Sasic in the semifinal, getting into her face and into her head, and the German promptly shanked the penalty. You never feel like Solo is going to make the big mistake. She’s like Neuer is for the German men, that rock at the back you can count on, one who can afford you the chance to make some mistakes on defense, and thus also provide you some freedom with which to take risks. The Japanese didn’t have that rock. Quite honestly, few teams do.

Of course, Kaihori can also sue her teammates for non-support. The Americans scored three goals on set pieces, and the Japanese basically didn’t mark anyone on any of them. And hey kids, if you’re watching at home, here’s an important safety tip: don’t ever do this …

Egads. Lauren Holiday should’ve yelled “fore!” with a ball so nicely teed up as that one.

Pass the Hot Sauce
Andrés Cantor should call every match, ever. Thank you, that is all.

4.
Scoring in open play can be really damn hard. Most of the time, you either have to do something brilliant, or have the defense completely gift you one. The set piece, meanwhile, always provides great opportunities for goal scoring. But time and again, you see the opportunities go wasted owing to a lack of imagination. As dramatic as the swerving free kick around the wall can be, most of the time it doesn’t come close to working. Likewise, the corner floated into the box doesn’t often amount to much, in part because the defense knows exactly what’s coming.

The set piece offers up the chance for the element of surprise, and a chance to use the defense’s tendencies against itself. I was going to make mention of this at some point, anyway, and it’s fresh in my mind after Real Salt Lake worked this masterpiece in the MLS recently. Great goalscorers have outlandish egos, of course – in fact, that sort of outlandish ego is somewhat necessary to be that brilliant – and it can take some coaxing to convince them that the arrogant approach of shooting from a free kick position isn’t the best course of action. Sometimes, the right ploy is to use the element of surprise. Watch that Salt Lake video again and notice how the Columbus defenders have no earthly idea what’s going on. Some of them don’t even move.

But this sort of ploy seems to go ignored a lot of the time when it comes time for a set piece. Soccer isn’t a game where people break from conventional wisdom nearly as often as they should. Well, this is the World Cup Final, so you may as well empty out the arsenal.

The U.S. ran two brilliant set pieces in the first five minutes of the game which were triumphs of imagination, but also clearly the result of some film study and some messing around on the practice pitch. There had been suspicion throughout the tourney that Japan would be susceptible to the set piece, and the Americans had some very definite ideas of what to do.

On this first corner, they catch the Japanese not paying attention. Carli Lloyd is lined up 30 yards from the goal at the start of the play. Now, if you’re Japan, the red flags need to be going up all over the place. Lloyd is the hot hand for the U.S. in this tournament. She’s scoring all the goals and making all the plays. You need to know where she is every single minute of this game. So what the hell is she doing 30 yards away from the goal? She ain’t there to play defense. That makes no sense. Something is up. Sure enough, here she comes charging like a bat out of hell:

And the play works, of course, because the service is perfect. It’s a wormkiller skidding along the astroturf, the type of ball you never see on a corner unless it’s a mishit, and one which also uses the playing surface to an advantage, since you can skid the ball and make it move a little quicker than on grass. It’s a genius play all the way around, one you would’ve had to have practiced ahead of time, given that it flies in the face of all accepted soccer logic and you wouldn’t be inclined to make it up in the game on the fly. Chalk this one up to superior preparation.

The U.S. had so much fun with that one, they thought they’d try something even nuttier a couple minutes later, this off a free kick from the right flank. The U.S. run a pretty standard pick play on this one, the idea being that you free up someone at the near post for a flick-on using the back of the head – only the cross comes in at the feet of the server, Julie Johnston, who then backheels it. This is flat-out, let’s-make-mayhem stuff. It’s based upon the idea that the defense isn’t going to be looking for this kind of ball, that they are just going to ball watch instead of maintaining their marks, and that chaos can overcome inferior numbers. I mean, count the numbers in the box here. It’s four on eight on this play. This play should not work.

And yet again, find #10 Carli Lloyd for the U.S. on the field at the start of the play, because the Japanese sure didn’t. She’s open before the play even begins, and no one picks her up amid the frenzy:

Now, most of the time, this stuff doesn’t work. But it’s soccer, for heaven’s sake: most of the time, nothing works. You’re always at a disadvantage in this sport when it comes to scoring goals. Sometimes a little unorthodox thinking goes a long way.

5.
The single-best thing FIFA can do to improve this tournament going forward, apart from never having it on astroturf again (and FIFA has said it will be grass only from hereon) is to put some money into the development of better officials. The officiating in this tournament was absolutely awful. Where you see the amateurism of it stand out the most is through the continual awarding of penalties on fouls which occurred outside the box. There was way too many of those. These are the best players in the world, these are professionals, and one of the things professional defenders actually know how to do (somewhat cynically, some would argue) is to know when you do and don’t commit fouls. Too much of the officiating on those types of plays was guesswork. There was too much decision-making based upon what was anticipated to happen on the pitch, rather than in response to what actually went on.

And it certainly made an impact upon the matches. There were five penalties called in the last four games, and three of them were downright awful calls, while the fourth probably should have resulted in Julie Johnston getting tossed from the game. Now, to the Germans’ credit, they didn’t bitch about the officiating after they lost the semifinal. Germans generally don’t bitch about officiating, and a good rule of thumb is that you don’t get to complain about the officials when you shank the penalty chance you’re given.

Part of the problem is that there is just not enough worldwide depth yet in terms of talent. Most people would agree that the Americans and the Germans and the English have the better officials, but we can’t have those teams’ refs on the pitch when those teams are playing in the meaningful games. The referees wound up having far too much impact on the games in this tournament. We need more good officials. Simple as that.

Mmm, Delicious Chile
Lost in the shuffle over the weekend (at least in this country) was the fact that, after 99 years of complete futility, Chile finally won a Copa America. Chile has always been a good footballing nation, but never quite good enough. This being South America, football and politics are impossible to separate. Chile’s Copa America triumph came on their home grounds, Estadio Nacional in Santiago, a venue which has a truly terrible place in history. This victory for La Roja was definitely something of a national catharsis, and their achievement, on many levels, should be celebrated.

The game itself was pretty lousy, a 0:0 draw with Argentina that La Roja won 4:1 on penalties. There were a lot of goalless draws in the tournament, and not a whole lot of creative play on display, whereas there were plenty of bad tempers to be found and quite a bit of strange officiating going on – Chile’s triumphs being aided somewhat by curious red cards awarded to Uruguay in the quarters and Peru in the semis. That said, you’d expect Chile and Argentina to put up some goals, given Argentina’s attacking talent and Chile’s frenetic, up-tempo, hell-bent-for-leather mindset. It was a compelling final in terms of tenacity, but lacked some creativity.

La Roja breaks their terrible jinx and props to them for doing so, while Argentina’s drought in international tourneys is now up to 22 years. Not even having Lionel Messi, the greatest footballer in the history of the planet, can get La Albiceleste over the top. Which is what Messi is – the greatest footballer in the history of the planet. And some of the dumbest narratives coming out of this game are about how Messi’s legacy is somehow tainted or lessened by his inability to bring home trophies for Argentina from big tournaments.

The goalless draw with Chile in the final was fairly typical of the recent plight for Argentina and also for Messi when he slips on the Argentine shirt. He sets up two chances for this teammates late, and neither one materializes in a goal. Messi then steps up and drills his penalty, just like you knew he would, and then the next two guys wearing the blue and white stripes promptly flub theirs. Game over. Yet in the eyes of many in the realms of the footballing media and punditry, this is somehow Messi’s fault.

You have to get your best XI out there on the pitch for these types of matches, and Argentina’s best XI these days is somewhat top heavy – lots of forwards, but not enough good link-up play. As such, Messi has to play the creator role on this team, playing deeper than he does at Barca, where he can just run at anyone and make shit up as he goes. If Messi doesn’t take on that creative midfielder role on this team, no one will and they’ll likely spin their wheels. Now, Messi can fill that playmaker role, because he’s also a great passer – he notched three assists in Argentina’s 6:1 throttling of Paraguay in the semis – but time and again, he does everything but put the ball on a silver platter for his teammates, and they constantly squander the chances. What more can he do? He can’t take penalties for them, for goodness sakes. He cannot make them not screw it up.

Messi’s game is a wonderful combination of imagination and a motor that just won’t quit. He simply moves in directions others can’t fathom, creating space for himself to shoot and make plays which others can’t even think of trying to do. Barcelona’s great triumph of this past season was putting Messi together with two other forwards – Suárez and Neymar – who think the game in a similar fashion and can key off of him. They’re a whirling dervish out there, they constantly move and shift shapes and create new angles. You simply have no idea how to defend them because the attack can come from any space and in any direction at any time.

Now, Messi has certainly not had his best games when it comes to playing in championship finals, but he was pretty damn spectacular at times last summer in Brazil. He’s done enough to put his team in a position where they very easily could be currently both World and South American champions. But at some point, someone else from Argentina has to step up and make a play.

The Copa America’s 100th anniversary is being celebrated next year with a centennial tourney to be held in the United States. Assuming this tourney doesn’t become a casualty of the ongoing CONCACAF/CONMEBOL/FIFA scandal, it has potential to be a great event. Oh, and speaking of that FIFA mess, notice who was conspicuously absent from both Santiago and Vancouver over the weekend. Uncle Sepp apparently had too many other things going on. Uh-huh. Sure he did.

The OG

I don’t even … what the …

“Look, football is cruel. Moments change matches. And sometimes, not always the best team wins. Sometimes you don’t get what you deserve.”
              
– Mark Sampson, Head Coach of England Women’s National Team

ONE of the many peculiarities about soccer which makes it both intriguing and maddening is the fact that, for a game in which it’s so damn hard to score, it’s comparatively easy to score on yourself. This happens exponentially more regularly in soccer than in any other sport. Jim Marshall of the Minnesota Vikings did this, of course, and no play epitomized the 0-16 Detroit Lions more than Dan Orlovsky doing this. You might see the odd basketball tipped in by a defender. Own goals can occur in hockey, of course, but are still quite rare. Occasionally, you pull the goalie and thus empty the net – during a delayed penalty, or going with six skaters late in the game – and the worst thing imaginable then happens, or occasionally something completely ridiculous will occur. The most dubious of these was in 1986, in Game 7 of a Stanley Cup playoff series between Edmonton and Calgary, when the Oilers’ Steve Smith put it in his own net and it proved to be the series-deciding goal.

But those are oddball one-offs. Scan the scorelines at the end of any weekend in the EPL and you’re likely to see 2-3 goals listed as ‘og’ in the boxes. There have been five own goals during the Women’s World Cup already, including Angie Ponce of Ecuador doing it twice in the same game. She also scored on a penalty in that match, thus converting one of the most unique hat tricks in history, but not the uniquest by any stretch: Belgium’s Stan van den Buys has her beat, and Sunderland once managed to score on itself three times in seven minutes. Point is, own goals happen all the time in soccer. It’s part of the game.

But no own goal in history was ever quite like what we saw on Wednesday in Edmonton, during the Women’s World Cup semifinal between Japan and England, when Lioness’ defender Laura Bassett steered one into her own net deep into stoppage time with the score level at 1-1, mere seconds from the end of regulation, thus sending the Lionesses out of the tournament with a 2:1 defeat in probably the most shocking, heartbreaking fashion I could ever imagine.

Which, for England, is saying something, since they’ve turned the act of crushing defeat into something of an art form. England have lost more penalty shootouts – six – than any other footballing nation on earth. It’s become something of a national joke. There have even been scientific studies commissioned about it, just because it seems so implausible that, in a format which seems something of a lottery or a dice roll, England somehow always turn up snake eyes. And even when they don’t get knocked out of the World Cup on penalties, England finds a way to make their exits memorable – be it the Hand of God in 1986, David Seaman forgetting to jump in 2002, or the fact that they won 3, drew 2, lost none, had a goal difference of +5 and still managed to be eliminated in 1982. (I’m serious.) But this latest in a long line of English footballing failures – this time on the women’s side – did something that may have seemed unthinkable. It even knocked the snark out of the Fleet St. press.

The stage for England’s 1998 exit from the World Cup was set when, mere seconds after the second half had begun in a 2-2 game with Argentina, David Beckham got baited and lashed out at an Argentine and got himself thrown out of the game. England had to play with 10 men from there and wound up losing on penalties. Now, never mind that it was a marginal call, if not a terrible one. Personally, I think it’s crap, but I also think Beckham was stupid. And never mind also that England played pretty well with 10 men for 60+ minutes, actually had a goal disallowed and then shanked two penalties in the shootout. In the eyes of the British press (and the public, who easily form these opinions), England’s loss was due entirely to the ice queen metrosexual pretty boy married to a Spice Girl losing his head. They even burned him in effigy. It was a ridiculous sort of overreaction, but when you carry the badge of being the ice queen metrosexual pretty boy married to a Spice Girl, the verdict has already been made for you. I have no doubt that, had that been John Terry blootering an attempted clearance into his own goal at 92’ of a World Cup semifinal instead of Laura Bassett, he would have been absolutely crucified in the press and online.

But as I say, the Lionesses toil in anonymity. This tournament has their best performance ever on a larger stage, and they play with great tenacity and organization and combative spirit – traits which will always ingratiate you to the British footballing fans (or fans anywhere, for that matter). That they seem to have the same trait for colossal disaster at the end of World Cup knockout matches as their male counterparts is, well, problematic, but they’ve earned a lot of cred. This is a likable lot of gals who the Brits have come to be fond of, they’ve spurred legitimate interest in the women’s game back home, and them managing to lose in the most awful way conceivable hasn’t undone the good cred they’ve built up. (Of course, when they inevitably lose on penalties to the Germans in 2019, well, all bets are off.)

England were not the favourites against Japan, although people who were saying they were not the favourites were apparently not paying much attention to what was happening on the pitch during the tournament, since the Lionesses were going about knocking out the hosts and duking it out with the French (who should’ve tanked, but we’ll get to that some other time), while Japan was sleepwalking their way through about the easiest tourney schedule imaginable, playing one World Cup debutant after another. England were arguably the better team against Japan – their physical play knocked the Japanese out of their usual rhythm, they outshot Japan 15-7, and they hit the woodwork several times. But as we’ve seen time and again, being the better team in football doesn’t necessarily matter. What a stupid game. Why do we put up with this shit?

‘Bassett 92 og’

I saw that in the scoreline and thought to myself, “oh, dear god, what have you done?” And then I saw the replay and couldn’t believe what I just saw. It’s the defenders’ worst nightmare, of course – you’re turned towards goal, scrambling to cover space, you have to make a play and the ball caroms crazily. Own goals are usually either the product of defenders actively trying to do the right thing and make a play on the ball, or by getting in the way of a shot or a cross and having it ricochet off them. They’re not trying to do that. (Unless you’re in Madagascar, of course. And now I’ve moved one step closer to mentioning all 209 FIFA members on earth in the context of this blog.) I still remember, from my last year of playing organized soccer, our team losing a game 1:0 on an own goal at around the 85’ mark. I dove left to make a save on a fairly harmless shot, our defender lunged to his right to make a block, the ball pinballed off his shin and went exactly where I’d been standing a second earlier. Now, as the captain of this bunch, I had to put on the proper air of authority after the match – we lose as a team, we lost because we didn’t score, blah blah blah. But of course, I was also thinking, “god damn it Kyle, why did you do that?” We managed to score on ourselves thrice that season, including our central defender doing it twice, one of which being a rocket from 20 yards into the top left corner that was maybe the best shot on goal we had all year. Too bad it was the wrong goal. (We made him a center forward after that, pointing him in the opposite direction.)

And you have to laugh about it, in the end. It’s all that you can do. Own goals are, by nature, ridiculous. They’re about as far away from the desired effect as you can possibly get in the game. If you’re going to play football, and you’re going to play defense, it’s probably going to happen to you at some point or another:

This was not Vincent Kompany’s finest hour

Oh, Liverpool, what are you doing?

Go online and you can find all sorts of gifs and videos like these. They are acts of high comedy, of impressive and well-meaning incompetence, and they happen more often than you might think throughout the course of a footballing season. But ‘Bassett 92 og’ didn’t occur in some Sunday club match. No, it happened on the game’s biggest stage, at the biggest moment in the history of the English players’ careers. Other players, past and present, were quick to offer words of encouragement. “Don’t let this one play define your career.” But of course it’s going to define your career. How could it not? Moments do, in fact, change matches. I mentioned before how my clubbers gave up three own goals. All three cost us results – two of those matches wound up draws, and the third was a 1:0 loss. In a sports where, on average, fewer than three goals are scored in a game, giving up any sort of a goal is potentially disastrous, much less doing it to yourself.

And, of course, you cannot talk about own goals without talking about the World Cup of 1994. Like most everything in soccer, it’s only funny until it isn’t. One of the greatest wins in U.S. history, 2:1 over Colombia, was due in part to an own goal by Andrés Escobar, who paid the ultimate price for this mistake when he was murdered in Medellin after the Colombians – thought to be a favourite to win the tourney – had been ousted early from the event. It’s one of the saddest moments in the game’s history. What should have been one of the greatest moments in American soccer – a huge upset by a young team which helped springboard American soccer success – feels forever tarnished. And blaming Escobar for the loss was nonsense, of course. The own goal came at 35’ and made it only 1-0, so the Colombians had plenty of time to equalize, but they got flat-out outplayed, as the U.S. made it 2-0 and had a third goal disallowed. The Americans were simply the better team that day, but Escobar – their captain and their leader – made for a convenient scapegoat.

Players from both sides have said they’re haunted by the memories 20+ years on. It took the Colombians 20 years to recover from that moment –  the game more or less fell apart on all levels in the country, and they did not return to the World Cup until Brazil in 2014. Like everything else in Colombia at the time, control of the game had fallen into the hands of the drug cartels. (The Two Escobars is a terrific documentary on the subject.) Soccer wasn’t safe, it wasn’t an escape. But it never is, in the end. We like to think of sports as an escape from real life, but part of why the game of soccer is so impossible to ignore is that the cruelty and unfairness inherent to the game mirrors real life, and sometimes comes to symbolize it.

Fortunately, common sense and an appreciation of absurdity prevail in the case of the game from Wednesday in Edmonton. It was a fluke and it was weird and it was nuts, and anyone who has ever played the game can empathize. Laura Bassett was understandably inconsolable after the match, but it wasn’t the only mistake of the match. It was simply the last mistake, the one from which there was no return. Consolation matches in World Cups are always dreadful for the players – your hopes and dreams have been crushed into dust, and yet you have to go out there and play another match amid the disappointment – but it’s also an opportunity for a side to go out on a positive note. The game doesn’t have to suck. Given the way they’ve played, I imagine the Lionesses will put in a good effort against the Germans. My hope is that the Lionesses prevail and Laura Bassett scores one in the process. For her own side this time. The footballing gods owe her one.

All the News That's Weak, We Print

Sigh

QUICK, to the buzzard points! We have no time for an intro:

• The Women’s World Cup is a wonderful event, showcasing some seriously badass lady footballers, and I recommend that everyone watch. The women’s game is still developing internationally, and while seeing two teams put up 10-spots might suggest FIFA was overly ambitious in expanding the field to 24 teams when there wasn’t really the depth of talent worldwide to merit it, there has been a surprising amount of parity so far, as only two teams have taken a full 6 points from the first two games. It’s good stuff and you should tune in when you get the chance (which, regrettably, I’ve not had nearly enough opportunities to do).
The women have been clamoring for years for their event to be taken seriously, and deservedly so. A good way to start would be for their governing body to take it seriously. That FIFA signed off so willingly on the damned fool idea of having this entire tournament be played on artificial surfaces is an abomination. It’s weird enough that they’re holding this tournament in Canada and none of the games are in Toronto, but I know they have the Pan Am Games there in July so I can understand it. Like I say, it’s just weird. (Would you have a World Cup in England and no games in London?) The idea to play the whole thing on artificial turf, however, is terrible. The Lose loves me some Canada, of course, but they got this one wrong from the beginning and it never should have been allowed to happen. Artificial surfaces have certainly improved since the Astroturf heyday of the 1970s, but it’s hard on the knees and the ankles, the turf burns are still gnarly, and the rubber and the sand flying everywhere is an ungodly mess. And even though Canada has winter 9 months out of the year, June and July ain’t among those months. Playing on a plastic pitch full of rubber and sand on top of concrete in 30°C temperatures or more is sort of like trying to work out in a tandoor. Only bikram yoga disciples are dumb enough to want to do that.
And I can certainly understand that all of the stadia in use for the Women’s World Cup are multi-use venues that operate year round in municipalities where the weather makes keeping a quality grass a challenge. Canada isn’t alone in having that problem. The two MLS clubs in the Pacific Northwest, Seattle Sounders F.C. and the Portland Timbers, play on artificial surfaces as well, since heavy rain + sea level tends to = swamp. Among the unexpected problems Iceland had when they nearly qualified for the 2014 World Cup was that they had to scrounge and scurry to get a pitch together for their playoff with Croatia, since Iceland hadn’t hosted a football match in November in its history, and grass has a peculiar way of not growing there at that time of year. They managed to do so, however.
And that’s precisely the point. Iceland managed to get a nice pitch together because they had to. FIFA generally doesn’t allow international matches on artificial surfaces – for men. Now that Costa Rica has a grass surface in its new home football grounds, none of the listed national stadia around the world have plastic pitches. Were the World Cup to take place in the United States in 2022 2026, they would almost certainly play some matches at Whatever The Hell The Phone Company Is Called Field in Seattle, and they would plunk down a temporary grass surface, just as they did in the Silverdome in Detroit back in 1994. If you can lay grass down in a dome, you can lay it down in Edmonton in June. Even though the Canadians were basically rubber stamped as hosts for this World Cup – they were the only bidders – FIFA has been pretty clear in saying to bidders for other tourneys that matches are to be played on grass. Choosing not to enforce that, in this case, seems incredibly careless and thoughtless.
And, quite possibly, sexist. Some 60 players filed a lawsuit to that effect, saying that it was discriminatory to make the women play on artificial turf pitches when FIFA would never permit that in the men’s World Cup. They have a point. The lawsuit wound up being dropped, since it wouldn’t have been heard in time. Scotts Lawn Care, upon hearing of all of this plastic pitch tomfoolery, offered to lay down temporary grass fields in the six stadia used for the World Cup for free – a cost of $3,000,000 they were willing to eat, having correctly viewed that laying sod for the event and solving an international dispute would constitute a pretty good use of their advertising budget. FIFA’s response to this was basically one of indifference.

“It wasn’t a long, drawn out explanation. We didn’t get a lot of detail back … I read about it in the press like everybody else.” 
– Chris Strunk, Scotts marketing director

The problem with suing FIFA is that it’s run by a bunch of stubborn old dirty bastards who respond to such a showing of dissent by digging in their heels and turning it into a pissing contest. They make bad decisions and, when called on their bad decisions, have a tendency to respond by making worse ones. In this case, they’ve dug their heels into the rubber and the cement. So we’re stuck with this nonsense. FIFA insists this is never happening again, but it never should’ve happened in the first place.

• The soccer ball bounces and skids and whizzes about on the artificial surfaces, so it takes a little getting used to, but other than the fatigue factor seeming heightened in the heat, I don’t think the quality of play has been diminished too much so far. Apparently, some of the players beg to differ:

“I think I score if we’re on grass … The ball as it comes off my head against Sweden hits a dry turf and bounces higher. If it hits grass, it's harder for a goalkeeper to react, so if the ball bounces higher the goalkeeper has more time to react off the turf.” 
– Abby Wambach, after the U.S. women’s 0:0 draw against Sweden.

Now, I gotta be honest here. That just might be the lamest thing I’ve ever heard. She’s one of the best players in the history of the game, and also one of the players who was most boisterous in the fight against FIFA to get the grass pitches installed, so this might be a case where she just doesn't want to let that fight go. But implying that the U.S. team’s inept offensive performance had to do with the pitch is nonsense. The Swedes were dealing with it, too. Everyone is. Who knows, maybe the Germans would’ve scored 13 or 14 against the Côte d’Ivoire on grass instead of just 10. I have a better idea: try playing better.
The USWNT has a loyal and allegiant fan base in this country, and deservedly so, because they’re terrific, but everyone involved seems remarkably prickly and defensive when sub-par performances are called into question. It’s the one thing I don’t care much for. Hey, if you suck, you suck. Take the hits and move on. Frankly, I think they choked in the final four years ago against Japan. Well, guess what? It happens. They are back and they are among the favourites and if they get offense out of neutral, they’ll probably win the thing, even though they’ll have to possibly navigate a mine field to do so once the knockouts begin, which leads me to my next buzzard point …

• What didn’t get nearly enough press, while everyone was griping about the turf, was the pairings for the Women’s World Cup. When it came time for the draw, the organizers locked all of the top sides into specific groups from the get-go and then built the schedule matrix from there. In the men’s competition, other than designating the top seed in Group A, which is always the host, everything is done through the random draw. In the process of locking top teams into specific groups, organizers also managed to arrange it so the Top 3 teams in the world – Germany, the U.S., and France – are all in the same half of the bracket should the games go to form. The reason for this was “financial considerations.” In other words, keep the U.S. and Canada as far away from each other as possible in the field, since they’ll have most of the fans between them and the organizers want to maximize the gate receipts. Some might also suggest the organizers dumped those Top 3 powerhouses together potentially in the other half of the bracket for the purposes of giving the host nation a better chance of reaching the final. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time a host country did that. (For Italia 1990, the young U.S. squad was ‘randomly’ drawn into the same group as the Italians, to the surprise of absolutely no one.)
The Lose thinks it’s lame to resort of that sort of stuff under the guise of getting more asses into seats for the games. Hey, here’s a good reason to go to the games: IT’S THE FUCKING WORLD CUP! They do the same thing for the women’s NCAA tournament, whereby teams are allowed to host games on their home floors whereas that’s strictly forbidden on the men’s side. Unsurprisingly, there tend to be very few upsets in the women’s NCAA tournament – teams don’t make it to be a Top 4 seed in the tourney by being lousy on their home court. The reason they do this is, of course, all about money – the NCAA wants to maximize their attendance, and really good teams also tend to have the largest number of fans. But the event should be big enough, at this point, that you don’t need to do that. It contributes to the same teams winning titles over and over again, which is boring. Connecticut and Tennessee winning every year is boring. We only love dynasties until we don’t.
UCLA won 10 NCAA men’s titles in 11 years, and part of why they were able to do that is because the tourney back then was, in fact, broken down geographically, so UCLA was playing whatever western fodder existed in the first couple of rounds. Not necessarily bad teams, mind you, but they weren’t going to play a Big 10 or ACC side until the Final Four at the earliest. The NCAA did away with the hard-fast regionalization, and while UCLA won 10 titles because they were really damn good, it would’ve been a lot harder, if not impossible, to match that feat using the sort of set-up you see in the NCAAs where they ship teams all over the place. The NCAA also did away with home court advantage in the tourney, and the game, as a whole, is better because of it.
The point is that if you’re seriously worried about financial considerations during a World Cup or an NCAA tourney, then you may need to question about why you’re holding it. Personally, I think the thing should stand on its own. Hey, its great athletes performing at an incredible level. What’s not to like? Were I hanging out in Moncton right now, I’d go and check it out.
And a funny thing tends to happen in football when you go about trying to play the meta game and massage the groups – the players aren’t in on it, and most of the organizers’ hopes wind up going out the window. The Spanish organizers went to great lengths in 1982 to try and set it up with the desired idea in mind of having Brazil v. Argentina and West Germany v. Spain in the semifinals if it all followed form, and that lasted all of one match in practice, because Argentina lost to Belgium in the very first game. Spain then lost to Northern Ireland, the Germans got beat by Algeria, the whole tourney went loopy and all of those organizational pipe dreams went kaput. Already in Canada this summer, the #3 rated French got beat by Colombia – a huge upset which may turn out to be a convenient one, as well, since the French now have a good chance of finishing second in their group, thus getting out of the bracket with the Germans and the Americans and being in a direct collision course with the hosts. Everyone should be careful what they wish for.

The Landsliðið are friends of The Lose. These guys are awesome.

• When the XI from the Faroe Islands defeated the Greeks 1:0 in Piraeus last November during European qualifying, not only was it the first UEFA win for the Landsliðið in four years, it was arguably one of the biggest upsets in the history of international football, if not the biggest. The Faroes were ranked 187th at the time by FIFA, the Greeks 18th. And we can hate on the Greeks for not passing the eye test and not being as good as their ranking, but they’ve been failing the eye test for 15 years now and it doesn’t keep the Greeks from getting results.
So that was a pretty remarkable win for the Landsliðið, who then decided to have even more fun at Greece’s expense in Tórshavn over this past weekend, beating the Greeks again, this time by a 2:1 scoreline. And neither match was a fluke. The better team won on both occasions.
And yes, I just wrote two paragraphs about the Faroe Islands. Go me.
UEFA 2016 in France will have an expanded field – 24 teams instead of 16 – and while it may water down the competition somewhat, it also generates more interest among the abundant number of European minnow nations, some of whom have taken to biting the big fish. After beating the Belgians over the weekend, Wales are on the verge of qualifying for a major tourney for the first time since 1958. The aforementioned Iceland XI have already beaten the Dutch and the Czechs and may qualify for the first time ever. I think you may see even more surprises in the future on the international level, simply because the club demands on top players, from top nations, are so great now that the international game has to take a back seat for them. Sides from the lesser nations, often built around players who sat on the benches for their clubs for a lot of the year, tend to have a bit more cohesion and freshness to their play which can somewhat neutralize the talent gap. You’re still going to get some Gibraltar 0:7 Germany scorelines though. There are still a lot of bad teams in Europe. And with the expanded field, all of the big dogs will still qualify unless they are completely incompetent. Who knows? Maybe England might actually make it.

Umm, where exactly are you going?

• Watching LeBron James attempt to singlehandedly beat the Golden State Warriors is pretty remarkable. In Game 5 last night, LeBron went for a triple-double and had a direct hand in 70 of the Cavs’ 91 points. 50.3% of Cleveland’s possessions in the NBA Finals result in LeBron doing something – a shot, a turnover, an assist – which is a figure you’re more likely at some small high school which has one good player, let alone in the best basketball league in the world. To their credit, the Cavs have stuck to their game plan of essentially playing defense with their offense – running the shot clock all the way down and then crashing the offensive glass for extra possessions – at least until last night, anyway, when David Blatt inexplicably decided to bench Timofy Mozgov, who is pretty much their 2nd-best player right now, as Blatt was mistakenly lured by the opiate that was J.R. Smith’s hot early shooting into thinking he could go small and match the Dubs’ small lineup for 48 minutes. Trying to play small against the Warriors made ZERO sense to me. Sure they were in the game for a while, but so what? Losing is losing. Mozgov had 28 in Game 4 and has been really effective crashing the basket from the high post and giving LeBron an option when he drives the ball. When he isn’t in the game, the other four guys basically stand around and wait for LeBron to do something for them, which tends not to work very well. Andre Igouadala has shown he can at least slow down LeBron in a one-on-one matchup, which is all the Dubs need because no one else for Cleveland is doing anything.
Thank you for not coaching, David Blatt.
Steve Kerr’s switch to a small lineup for Game 4 was mostly beneficial for the Dubs on the offensive end of the floor, as it created better tempo, better spacing, and some awful defensive matchups for the Cavs. Golden State’s defense has been fine in this series, but they lost two games mainly because their offense was a mess. Going with such a small lineup – 6’7” Draymond Green is playing center – came with the risk of getting hammered on the boards by the much bigger Cavs, but that potentially huge advantage that David Blatt basically neutralized last night by having his 7’1” center sitting next to him, and by the 4th Quarter, the Dubs were constantly first to the ball off the glass. Sure, Mozgov can’t guard anyone out on the floor, but like I say, the Cavs are better off playing defense with their offense. You gotta play to your strengths and take your chances.
Now, in practice, the Warriors have so many options that, in a 7-game series, eventually they are going to find something that works. I’ve felt all along that Golden State would only lose in the playoffs if they actually played badly. (A sentiment Nate Silver echoed. Always good to put some numbers behind my assertions.) Playing adequately is usually good enough, because they can just throw wave after wave after wave at you. LeBron has bordered on non-human in this series, and he still might be able to get them to a Game 7 through sheer force of will, but I can’t imagine he’s got two more games like last night in him. Or does he?

• And from the “something’s gotta give” department, the Official Wife of In Play Lose and I are going to the game tonight at Phone Company Park between the Giants, who are doing their usual odd-year-bullshit June swoon and have lost eight in a row at home, and the Seattle Mariners, who have lost 12 of 17, got beat 10:0 and 13:0 by the Astros over the weekend, and have pretty much shat on every prognosticator’s suggestion of their impending success this year (including mine). The Mariners are such a disaster that they merit further discussion later. As for the game tonight, which promises to be about as gloomy as the foggy skies over head, at least it also promises to be over quickly, since neither team can score right now.

"I am Not a Crook"

Oh look, a paper trail ...

WHEN I saw this letter on Tuesday morning, I knew this was going to be trouble. Unearthed by the South African media and then reported upon by the New York Times, this 2008 letter from the head of the South African FA instructs FIFA to set aside $10 million to contribute to the ‘Diaspora Legacy Programme Fund,’ a nonexistent Caribbean football development program invented by then CONCACAF Jack Warner. This letter corroborates the Justice Department allegation in this indictment which charges that Warner solicited a bribe from the South African FA and that, ultimately, it was paid out through FIFA accounts. The letter is addressed to Jérôme Valcke, who is the #2 guy at FIFA, which suggests that not only did Valcke know about the bribe, he appears to have had a hand in facilitating it. After the Zürich raids were undertaken last week, the FBI hinted that it was just the tip of the iceberg, and that the investigation was going after even bigger fish. It’s hard to get much bigger than the #2 guy. The only one bigger, of course, is the #1 guy in the office next door.

And after winning a 5th term as president of FIFA on Friday, and alternately acting defiant and gloating about it over the weekend in response, FIFA’s #1 guy, Sepp Blatter, hastily announced his resignation on Tuesday, a day that most everyone in the football-loving world – which is, well, almost everybody – will certainly remember. The news conference where this was announced was hasty and haphazard and short, which are three things that FIFA generally doesn’t do because, like all good authoritarian regimes, FIFA’s long on order and maintaining control of the situation. Blatter’s resignation was an awkward fall from grace, but as departing dictators go, there was considerably less kicking and screaming than is the norm.

“While I have a mandate from the membership of FIFA, I do not feel that I have a mandate from the entire world of football – the fans, the players, the clubs, the people who live, breathe and love football as much as we all do at FIFA. Therefore, I have decided to lay down my mandate at an extraordinary elective congress. I will continue to exercise my functions as FIFA president until that election.”
– Sepp Blatter

Now the FIFA spin here is that, after several days of reflection, Sepp Blatter has suddenly developed a conscience. But given that the Justice Department have followed the money and, apparently, the trail leads to the office next door to him at the FIFA HQ, I wouldn’t say it’s wild speculation to suggest that Blatter’s hand has been forced. The resignation seems an act of self-protection. It’s now suggested that Blatter himself is, in fact, the subject of the Justice Department probes, and the Feds are now apparently conducting their own inquiry into the bidding for World Cups 2018 and 2022. He cannot be extradited from Switzerland, but the Feds certainly can make foreign travel uncomfortable. I was somewhat joking the other day about the notion of the RCMP showing up and arresting him in Vancouver at the Women’s World Cup, but maybe that notion isn’t so fanciful after all.

Wow, what a mess. For The Lose, FIFA collapsing is Christmas in June. It’s the gift that will just keep on giving. It’s one part sports, one part politics, one part crime syndicate, and one part Vatican, given that the size of the egos involved reminds you of those clamoring to one day be the pope. There’s a $5 billion-sized pie which should be plenty for everyone to eat, yet everyone seems to want to take that pie and use it for a food fight.

Just ponder this story here to get a good idea of how insane this is. Here are two key grafs from the article, which centers on allegations of vote buying in the bidding for the 2018 World Cup:

England’s World Cup bid team uncovered a host of corruption allegations at the top of world football after using ex-MI6 officers and overseas diplomats in a spying campaign against Russia during the battle to host the 2018 tournament, according to new claims. 
Private ex-intelligence investigators carried out surveillance on the eight other rival bidding nations for the 2018 World Cup, paid for by sponsors and associates of the bid team, according to the document. Britain’s embassies abroad were also used to collect information that was fed onto an encrypted database. Embassies tracked the movements of the Russia 2018 bid team as they travelled the world lobbying voters and provided information on the activities of two former members of the Fifa executive committee English crew were even using British embassies for the purpose.

The story then goes to dredge up some stuff that’s been floating around for a while in the world of football innuendo – stuff like how the Russians broke out a Picasso and some other stuff from the Hermitage Museum and gave it to court votes, and how Russia and Qatar backed each other as part of larger energy extraction deals and such. But wait a minute: why are World Cup organizers spying on each other? This is completely ridiculous. Where do James Bond and Tony Soprano fit into all of this?

But as I’ve said before, this isn’t just about a game. Witness the fact that Qatar’s stock market plummeted at news of Sepp Blatter’s resignation. This is big business and big money we’re talking about here. In the 40-page transcript released Wednesday, American soccer exec-cum-state’s evidence Chuck Blazer testifies that he was taking bribes on World Cup bids for as early as 1998, and as we’ve seen with the processes surrounding events such as the World Cup and the Olympics, the stakes are always ramped up, the ante raised for the next go around. By the time the vote arose in 2010 for the World Cups to be held in 2018 and 2022, the corruption had apparently gotten so bad, and become so deeply-rooted, that nations resorted to spying on each other to see if/when/how they were greasing the skids. This is NUTS!

And this all comes back to Blatter, in the end. He’s the one who built the organization into what it is over 40 years. He’s the one who’s presided over it all. He’s the one playing old school, country time politics, playing the sides and pitting one region of the world against the other. But Jérôme Valcke getting implicated – a day after FIFA officials lied about it, and tried to pin the South African bribery mess on a now-deceased Argentine bureaucrat – was the last straw. Blatter played dumb last week, insisting that he doesn’t know what everyone else is doing within his own organization and can’t control what they do. Not only is that not in keeping with dictatorial behaviour – autocrats have a pressing need to know everything about everybody – but it defies all credibility that the organization would then pass on $10 million to some supposed football development foundation without knowing whether or not it actually existed. That whole transaction implies that bribery, wire fraud and money laundering were just aspects of business as usual. It’s exactly the sort of business that the Justice Department’s New York offices have a penchant for putting a stop to.

“These scum have stolen the people’s sport. They’ve stolen it, the cynical thieving bastards. So, yes, it’s nice to see the fear on their faces.” – Andrew Jennings, British journalist

Blatter really had no choice but to resign. The organization, in it’s disgraced state, can no longer function. Those alliances he’s culled over the years through passing out lots of development money aren’t going to keep him out of trouble, and are more likely to cause him more of it, at this point. And it’s killing his on-field product at the moment. We have an incredible Champions League final this weekend in Berlin, as well as the start of the Women’s World Cup – two of the world’s greater sporting events – but no one’s talking football and everyone’s talking the politics of football. So long as Blatter was still around, the distractions would simply mount. I’m not sure in what form the palace coup d’etat would’ve eventually taken, but I suspect it would’ve happened. Dictators who seemed far more invincible than Blatter have fallen before. Unlike those who’ve been found hiding in dirt holes and storm drains, at least Sepp Blatter still had a slight shred of dignity about him.

The king is dead! Long live the king! … so, uh, anyone want to be king? Any takers? Anyone? Sigh.

Sepp’s divide-and-conquer politics have worked so well over the years that he’s left behind a dysfunctional body politic which makes the U.N. look harmonious. You have the European rich bitch neocolonial snobs v. the Afro-Asian kleptocrats – a couple of nonsensical stereotypes Blatter made a point of reinforcing to serve his own needs. All of these different clans have taken to bloc voting to pursue their own regional interests, which is going to make it difficult to try and find a candidate to replace Blatter. Difficult, but not impossible. The heads of the three confederations I just spoke of – Michel Platini, Issa Hayatou, and Sheikh Salman Bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa – have all been mentioned as viable candidates, but the distrust and animosity amid the confederations is so great that getting anyone to cross the lines will pose a challenge. Heaven knows what sort of support anyone could expect from the Western Hemisphere, now that all of CONCACAF seems to be indicted and it looks like it may open season on football execs in South America soon – not only are there rumblings about the Brazilian government going after some of the ‘Top Hats,’ but in Paraguay, the home of CONMEBOL, the president is threatening to strip the organization of the embassy-like status its enjoyed and which has afforded it to act with a twisted sort of diplomatic immunity over the years. It would seem that the best candidate has yet to emerge, and I suspect it’s likely a former player – someone like a Figo or a Clarence Seedorf, if he wants the gig – who may emerge as the best candidate for the job: a player who was highly-regarded on the pitch and yet has the intellect and integrity off it, and who hasn’t been sullied by all of these corrupt administrative practices.

Whomever wins will have to break the bloc voting somehow. The narrative set forth is that Uncle Sepp gave lots of development money to the third world, and that somehow that development if you let those imperialist neo-colonial Europeans, or anyone they support, back into control of FIFA. As such, Prince Ali wound up being viewed as some sort of Western shill in this last election – never mind that, thanks in part to some sound governance and development programs over the years, his home nation of Jordan went from being completely off the radar to being two games away from qualifying for Brazil. And Ali blew that argument to pieces – if you take out all of the graft, after all, it leaves you with even more money to put towards development. That such an argument got voted down shows you where the real priorities lay among the FIFA voters. This is what you’re up against if you want to run this lot. You have to win their trust just long enough while you find a way to throw their asses out the door.

It’s hard to get a grasp on all of this. This is what I get for deciding to write a sports blog. Maybe I should write about something simple instead, like nuclear physics.

Whomever takes over this job is gonna have one hell of an undertaking, as attempting to navigate the sporting, economic, and geopolitical landscape of soccer is dizzying. It’s hard to say who that will be, and hard to say who he will be presiding over. As I’ve said before, don’t confuse last Friday’s vote as being the will of the footballing public. It’s the will of the footballing politicians, and that is a big difference. Whomever doesn’t get snared by the Justice Department probe is, nevertheless, probably going to have to tread cautiously for a little while, and my hope is that a few more nations demand some accountability from the persons who act as the head of their FAs – a glorious position of seemingly endless entitlement, but one which has obviously gone unchecked for far too long. Reform is going to be the order of the day at FIFA, I suspect, as I’m not one who subscribes to the notion that Blatter is somehow going to hand-pick a successor, at this point. The best way to bring about reform is to bring about reformists.

And were that to happen, everything is on the table – including revoking those World Cup awards. I still think 2018 is going to be Russia. That’s too far gone, the event is fast approaching, and even with all of the allegations, the reality is that Russia was likely to win that ballot, anyway. (I would attribute the poor English showing in that vote more to their penchant for being gadflies and making enemies within FIFA, no matter how justified they may have turned out to have been in acting that way.) But 2022? Well, I think Qatar has reason to be nervous.

But the problem is, Sepp Blatter loved power more than football. He likened himself to god and angled to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He wanted to be seen as a world leader. He wanted to be thought of that way, and is someone who seems to me to be very concerned with his legacy. How strange to run what is now referred to by the Justice Department as a RICO enterprise – a term they generally reserve for organized crime – and be so vain as to think you’ll wind up looking favorable at the end of it. Because what Sepp Blatter be thought of most of all, however, is a crook, regardless of whether or not he is ever indicted or charged. And given the human tragedy unfolding in Qatar in the name of FIFA, Blatter may wind up looking even worse than a petty crook, in the end. But however we come to view him – almost certain to be unfavorable – he’s certainly deserved every derogatory moniker we can hang on him and his organization. And simply using the word “crook” as I write about Sepp Blatter makes me draw comparisons to Richard Nixon. Nixon once said that history would look favorably upon him but historians wouldn’t. But simply making that association in my mind proves to me that Nixon was wrong about that. When you destroy yourself so publicly, so colossally, just as Nixon did, and as Blatter is doing now, the words and the images surrounding your defeat resonate for lifetimes.

The Biggest Loser

cartoon by Christopher Weyant, The New Yorker

THE GAMES we play come to mirror the world in which we live, and have always done so. As much as we would like for sports to exist within a vacuum, they cannot do so, nor have they ever done so. Two books which I have mentioned before, and which constitute required reading for all disciples of The Lose, are Franklin Foer’s sociological treatise How Soccer Explains the World and Simon Kuper’s classic 1994 exposé Football Against the Enemy: How the World's Most Popular Sport Starts and Fuels Revolutions and Keeps Dictators in Power, which has been updated for a 2nd edition and given an American-friendly title. Both authors delve into the seedy underworld of the game of soccer: football clubs dealing arms, fan clubs forming paramilitary units, assorted would-be kingpins and tycoons and grandstanding Ministers of Sport heisting the game for their own personal good. These books are extremely useful if you want to get a sense of just how messed up the game of soccer really is. Both these books are acts of gonzo journalism which are quite entertaining to read, although calling them ‘funny’ would do a disservice to some of the subject matter. There isn’t a whole lot that’s funny about Argentine juntas and Bosnian civil wars. I think ‘absurd’ is probably a better term, or maybe ‘crazy.’ The world is mad about soccer, and madness can make you do some stupid things.

Soccer is a beautiful game played by spectacular athletes before millions of adoring fans worldwide, but it is also a shameful sty of sleaze, slime and swine. But apparently it’s always been this way – in another excellent book, Andreas Campomar’s Golazo, a chronicling of the history of soccer in Latin America, Campomar traces the history of the game all the way back to its roots in ancient cultures such as the Mayans and the Aztecs, who played sports where a ball could only be kicked towards the goal and which, as it turned out, were often accompanied by large amounts of gambling. HUGE amounts of gambling, as in, “I’ll bet my entire kingdom that my team is better than yours” kind of gambling. Something about the act of kicking a ball seems to make humankind lose its collective head, and a whole lot of money winds up changing hands.

And it’s a whole lot of money these days, thanks to FIFA. Sky Sport just agreed to pay over £5 billion to broadcast EPL games, which is why Norwich City’s glorious victory (gloat gloat) on Monday took on such value. Broadcast rights to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil netted FIFA somewhere in the range of $4 billion. Fox Sports handed over $425 million for just the American broadcast rights to the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, which is a far cry from when I first started watching the World Cup back in 1982 on a 1-hour highlight show produced by Soccer Made in Germany. The sums we are talking about here are absolutely staggering. FIFA reaped a profit of more than $200 million on the World Cup in Brazil in 2014, and is thought to be sitting on a reserve of over $5 billion, an amount which should be enough for FIFA to fuel the game’s further development for generations.

But, of course, that isn’t going to happen. We know very well where that money is going to go.

Well, actually, we don’t really know, and that’s part of the problem. The Football Federation of Australia, for example, would like to know where their $500,000 ‘contribution’ to the development of a new football stadium in Trinidad and Tobago went, having made this ‘contribution’ at the behest of then CONCACAF president Jack Warner in the hopes of persuading him to support their 2022 World Cup bid on the FIFA Executive Committee – money which mysteriously disappeared, of course, and along with it disappeared whatever support Warner claimed to have had for the Australian bid. The FFA has come under some scrutiny in Australia for this, and their best defense is, well, a lame one, but one which you’ve heard many times in relation to crooked or criminal activities: this was simply the cost of doing business. If you wanted the World Cup to come to your country, you had to pay up. Indeed, the Aussies didn’t even want to report this possible theft, for fear that making a racket about this racket would potentially jeopardize their bid.

But now we have a better idea of where the Aussie’s money may have gone, given that Warner was one of 14 people indicted on Wednesday morning by the U.S. Dept. of Justice – the bulk of them high ranking present or former FIFA officials. Among those nabbed include the past and present presidents of CONCACAF, two former presidents of CONMEBOL, and two sitting members of FIFA’s Executive Committee. The investigation looked into more than 20 years’ worth of activities, and the Justice Dept. alleges that more that more than $150 million in bribes, kickbacks and laundered funds were involved. Racketeering, money laundering, wire fraud – the indictment reads as if the G-Men are going after some mafia crime syndicate or cartel. Four persons have already pleaded guilty, two of them being Warner’s sons, proving that dirty business is also a family business as well. The star witness, Chuck Blazer, was the secretary general of CONCACAF, served on the FIFA Executive Committee, was the highest-ranking official in American soccer, and lived a lifestyle so lavish that he kept a Manhattan apartment just for his cats. Blazer copped to charges related to tax evasion and then flipped, dishing the dirt left and right on FIFA’s illicit activities which took place within the United States, using American companies and American banks.

Easily the most damning allegation, but far from the only one, is that of Warner demanding $10 million from the South African government in exchange for supporting their 2010 World Cup bid, which Warner eventually did. When the South African government reneged, Warner got his $10 million transferred from a FIFA-controlled account in Switzerland, with some $750,000 of which eventually winding up going to Blazer. Australian authorities now think it’s likely Warner simply pocketed their half-mil, a sunk cost from a failed bid for soccer’s greatest showpiece. But what seems clear here is that, when it came to awarding the World Cup, votes were definitely for sale, and the bidding for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups may ultimately turn out to be quite expensive for everyone involved.

The U.S. was able to nab all of these fat cats when they gathered this week for FIFA’s 65th Congress in Zürich, at which point Swiss police raided the 5-star hotel where many of the delegates were staying and arrested seven people. While the U.S. is going after the money laundering set who have run roughshod along FIFA’s western flank, the Swiss are, at the same time, opening criminal probes into the allegations of bribery and corruption which have surrounded FIFA ever since 2010, when the awarding of the World Cup to Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022 was announced. The veritable souk surrounding the selection process has already been documented by the Times of London, who sent two reporters posing as representatives of America’s 2022 bid committee to meet with FIFA executives and nabbed several of them, on camera, saying their votes could be had for sizable sums. (The reporters have written extensively about this and also written a book which is definitely high on my reading list.) The England 2018 organizers have testified before parliament of having had FIFA execs demanding bribes in exchange for votes, with one of them – Nicolás Leoz – being audacious enough to also demand to be knighted by the Queen. That’s the same Nicolás Leoz listed in that U.S. indictment, by the way:

“Thereafter, in a private meeting, LEOZ told Co-Conspirator #2, in sum and substance, that Co-Conspirator #2 would make a lot of money from the rights he was acquiring and that LEOZ did not think it was fair that he (LEOZ) did not also make money.”  (U.S. v. Webb et. al, pp. 49-50)

There was an assortment of droll FIFA business on the agenda for the Zürich congress, but the most important item was the presidential election, pitting 4-time incumbent Sepp Blatter against Jordan’s Prince Ali bin Hussein. Amid this backdrop of scandal and corruption, the vote went ahead as planned, with Blatter getting 133 of the 206 votes cast – but lacking a 2/3 vote necessary for election on the first ballot, a second round was required. It was, at this point, that Prince Ali withdrew, handing Blatter a fifth term – one which he had said previously that he wouldn’t seek. In the run-up to the election, Prince Ali’s camp had been thinking they would have about 95 votes, enough to make a 2nd round of balloting quite intriguing given the current state of FIFA affairs. But with only 73, there was no point in continuing. In essence, amid all of Prince Ali’s campaigning and his many meetings with FIFA delegates, about 20 of them had lied to his face. Welcome to the way that FIFA does business.

That Prince Ali had gotten 73 votes at all was notable. Even with a constant barrage of scandals  surrounding FIFA during his 17 years as president, it was widely assumed that Blatter would win the election. I would recommend that all of you watch Jeremy Schaap’s excellent E:60 profile of Blatter, and the organization he heads, to get a better sense of what you’re dealing with here. Blatter is, without question, the most powerful man in sports. He said after his reëlection on Friday, “I am the president of everybody,” and what’s somewhat frightening is that, in some ways, he’s right. While Blatter may fancy himself a head of state, the Justice Dept. would suggest that he’s more like the head of a cartel. Marx had it wrong when he said religion was the opiate of the masses. It’s football. And Sepp Blatter controls the organization responsible for providing the world’s favourite drug.

Blatter’s win in the most recent FIFA election is a triumph of machine politics straight out of Tammany Hall. He has practiced what is essentially ‘honest graft’ for years – and done so under the auspices of what should, in theory, be a good idea, which is the further supposed democratization of the organization. FIFA had been a bastion of European and South American interests for most of its existence before Blatter took over in 1998. He promised at the time to give a voice, and a seat at the table, to all of FIFA’s members, which presently number 209. And intellectually, this makes sense. Why should all of FIFA’s decisions be made simply to benefit the self-interests of a few members? FIFA shares the profits from the World Cups equally with all 209 members, regardless of size or footballing prowess, and every nation has equal say when it comes to elections. One nation, one vote. FIFA has also invested billions, through The Goal Project and the like, in development in the game primarily in the third world. Again, this seems like a good idea. It’s no wonder his bases of power are in Africa, Asia, his “Oceania 11,” and in the many Caribbean islands who have come to dominate the way CONCACAF does business through their sheer numbers of votes. No one in FIFA gave a shit about those places before Blatter. In exchange, they offer him unwavering support.

But what may seem a good idea in theory may, in fact, have entirely different results, and that’s with even the best intentions behind it. The reason I refer to FIFA’s supporting of smaller federations as ‘honest graft’ is that it then turns a blind eye. What happens to that money after it is doled out is another question entirely – and if the behaviors of Jack Warner and Reynald Tamarii are any indication, it likely falls under the guise of ‘dishonest graft.’

We would do well to separate the opinions of the 133 people who voted for Sepp Blatter from the opinions of the rank-and-file members of the football community in the nations those 133 people are supposed to be representing. Ask the football community’s rank-and-file – the players, the fans, the clubs, the football media – in any nation what they think about their federation’s officers, and the answers you’re going to get will likely run somewhere from cynicism to outright disdain. They are assumed to be corrupt, assumed to be swindlers trading favours and engaging in illicit activities. What’s shocking is not that these rumours exist, but that those accused seem to be so brazen about it all, making only the minimal effort to conceal it.

The South Americans, in particular, are loving the fact that the Justice Department has gone after some of the villains they’ve assumed to be corrupt, having put up with this sort of nonsense from manga de viejos hijos de puta for ages. (In his book, Foer uses the wonderful local phrase ‘The Top Hats,’ to describe the assortment of shysters who’ve constantly run amok in the Brazilian game.) I’ve seen the phrase “US 7, FIFA 1” thrown about now in a few places in Brazil (7-1 having apparently come to represent a colossal asskicking in Brazilian lingo in short order). None of what the DOJ has uncovered is a surprise to them. None of it is new. That sort of corruption has always been there, they have known it existed and had to put up with it. (The ESPN FC commentator Shaka Hislop, who played for Trinidad & Tobago in the 2006 World Cup, has an amazing and ludicrous story of having to sue Jack Warner after players’ bonuses seemed skimmed.) The hope worldwide in all of this is that the Dept. of Justice will field an XI which proves to be an opponent that FIFA can’t defeat.

“Not sure this is what Havelange, Blatter and all had in mind when crusading for more US interest in football.” – Rodrigo Orihuela, Bloomberg   

And in the end, they can’t defeat it. This is not going to end well for FIFA. But one of the problems here is that, if you’re looking for a ‘smoking gun’ which links Sepp Blatter directly to all of this, I’m not sure you’re going to find it. Most everyone in football – indeed, in all of sports – outside of the 133 people who voted for Blatter on Friday would like to see him taken down. No one close to Blatter indicates that he, personally, has any real interest in graft. What he cares about, above all, is being in power. He may have been the one who built the organization into what it is, but he hasn’t needed to be bribed in order to do it. He doesn’t have to practice dishonest graft, when simple honest graft and the greasing of his political machine will suffice.

FIFA has many of the hallmark characteristics of authoritarian regimes. The ruler has total control, and demands absolute and unquestioning loyalty – but in exchange, he provides with underlings with cover, which frees them up to run rampant and do whatever they want free of cares or fears of reprisal.  The leader’s only interest, ultimately, is remaining in charge. You’ve seen this very scenario play out constantly in every dictatorship on the planet. But, as it turns, there are, in fact, limits to what you can get away with when you pledge your loyalty to a dictator, because loyalty turns out to be a 1-way street. Cross the line, and you go down – and you don’t get to decide where that line is. The state makes sure that you go down.

And Blatter has never hesitated, when a scandal arises which threatens his regime, to sell out the principal actors – people such as Jack Warner and Mohammed bin Hammam, Blatter’s former lieutenant who is alleged to have helped deliver several of Blatter’s elections, and who has also emerged as the principal actor in the mess that surrounds the 2022 World Cup. Cross Sepp Blatter and threaten his perch and he cuts you off, consolidating his power and casting you aside. He looks the other way while you do your dubious dealings, but only while it’s convenient to do so. But he will sell you out in a heartbeat – a point he made on Friday in a brilliant piece of rhetoric while addressing FIFA’s congress:

“If two other countries had emerged from the envelope, I think we would not have these problems today.” – Sepp Blatter

On the one hand, this plays to the base. The narrative which has emerged among the pro-Blatter set that all of these allegations regarding 2018 and 2022 are simply sour grapes on the part of nations – England and the U.S. – which lost out on the bidding, so you can view this remark as merely some sarcasm intended as a bit of levity. But one of the beauties when you practice the act of spin – and like all good political forces, FIFA are spinmeisters – is that you can, in fact, speak the truth and no one will take you seriously. Take that statement at face value: would FIFA be in this mess today if England and America emerged from the envelope? Probably not. And why not? Because on the merits of the bids themselves, England and America should have come out of those envelopes. That they didn’t speaks to some forces at work which, shall we fall, fell outside the boundaries of fair play. Now, the case for Russia in 2018 was an understandable one – it’s a footballing nation with great resources and a long tradition of the game in its own right. I’ve always thought the Russian bid made some sense. But Qatar?

“Qatar? There’s between one and 50 reasons why that is an awful idea … there are now allegations that some FIFA executives accepted bribes to put the World Cup in Qatar, and I hope that’s true, because otherwise it makes literally no sense.” – John Oliver

And if there is a single defining moment of the Sepp Blatter tenure at FIFA, it has to be the moment that the envelope for the 2022 World Cup opened up in December 2010. All of the graft and sleaze and slime and corruption perpetrated in the name of football was personified in that single moment. In looking the other way for so long, Blatter’s minions had now run amok and taken it to its most absurd conclusion. The inmates were officially running the asylum.

As so that cute little sarcastic jab I just mentioned takes on a much more ominous tone: “yes, we are in this mess now because of that vote, and some of you in this audience are responsible for that.” And don’t think for a minute Sepp won’t hesitate to throw them under the bus. When FIFA’s spokesman responded to Wednesday’s arrests by saying FIFA was “the aggrieved party,” it was met with derision and denounced as mere spin – but again, there is truth in that statement. Indeed, it’s been pointed out that the case now being brought forth by the Justice Department is going to particularly effective because it portrays FIFA as the victim and not the culprit. The Swiss case regarding the votes in 2018 and 2022 stems from FIFA’s own internal investigation (albeit a somewhat bogus one) and the Swiss prosecutors intend to call 10 FIFA Executive Committee members at the time in to explain themselves. Blatter had but only one vote, after all. It’s believed he voted for the U.S., and has admitted that it was probably a mistake awarding the World Cup to Qatar. FIFA would never have been so quick to turn over information to the Swiss government if Blatter himself stood to fall because of it. He may be a narcist and demagogue, but he didn’t get to where he is by being dumb. Those other 10 ExCo guys, however? Well, you all might want to hire yourselves some lawyers that are well-versed in Swiss law right about now.

I believe that Sepp Blatter has come to view all of this stuff related to 2018 and 2022 as a colossal mistake. But the problem is that now that it’s happened, he can’t get out of it. He can throw a bunch of ExCo cronies under the bus, because he can always find more ExCo cronies to take their places. But it’s all too far gone, at this point, to make any drastic changes. The political ramifications of yanking the World Cup away – and all of the dirt which would come out because of it – would far more likely lead to his losing his position of authority than the present Dept. of Justice investigation will. He’s caught himself in his own web, more concerned about keeping his position than anything else, and he’s willing to let what is building up to be the greatest sham in sporting history go forth seven years from now in order to save his own ass.

And in the meantime, people are dying because of this.

graphic by Christopher Ingraham/Washington Post

That’s what’s absolutely sickening about it all. That’s the human cost of the rush to create the necessary infrastructure to host such an event, one which is only going to get worse. That’s an awful lot of blood on FIFA’s collective hands. If Blatter was truly interested in reforming the organization he has created over the past four decades, and not just paying lip service to the idea, he would start by putting a stop to this. And he could do that, of course. He could yank the World Cup out of there tomorrow if he wanted. He has that power and authority. That anyone can just sit by and do nothing, knowing that is going on under their watch, is truly revolting.

And I always caution my non-sports loving friends who attach disdainful dismissives to speaking about this sort of thing. “All that just for a game?” If you haven’t figured it out by now, it’s more than a game. Football is not simply a pastime, and as Campomar points out in Golazo, with his example from the days of the Aztecs, it never really was just a game. Just like rum runners and bookmakers and gaming parlors, those associated in the syndicate of football have always thrived on the ability to control that which people want to have.

The game of football should, in theory, be about what takes place on the pitch. It shouldn’t have anything to do with these hucksters. Unfortunately, the business of football is rarely that simple. Witness the recent battle over reforming laws regarding TV broadcast rights in Spain, a pointless spat between La Liga, the Spanish FA, and some politicians with delusions of grandeur which the Spanish players union finally put a stop to by threatening a strike, reminding everyone involved in the process who the game was really about. For every multimillionaire on the wage bill of Real and Barça, there are far more professional footballers toiling away in the game’s lower ranks, or even among the first divisions of the game in other nations, who aren’t being paid on time, if at all. It is those people for whom the Spanish players took a stand. It is those people, who love and dedicate themselves to football, whom the game should be about, and not these opportunists who hijack the love of the game as an excuse to fill their pockets.

But how to get rid of the bad seeds? Rooting out the graft and sleaze within the game is a mammoth undertaking, one which would require a massive overhaul of the entire organization behind the game  – and would also require far more political will than anyone involved seems to have. And it has to start at the top, because the entire governance of the game, at this point, is based upon what goes on at the top. If you want to root out corruption, root out racism, root out scandal, the best way to start is to root out those who’ve allowed it to persist for so long, beginning with the overlord himself.

I would suggest that rarely has the U.S. ever looked so good to so many people as it does after Wednesday’s indictments. (Questions aside like, “do they even like football in America?) As I said before, it seems hard for me to believe that they’re going to be able to get to Blatter through all of these investigations – but then again, these FIFA guys are all masters of self-preservation, and I certainly expect all of those indicted to start singing much the way Blazer did in an effort to save themselves. The Attorney General stated on Wednesday that this was only the beginning of the investigation, suggesting the indictments were just the tip of the iceberg. If it were ever possible to get to the source, it’s probably through these two investigations currently being undertaken by the Feds and the Swiss. That snippet from the indictment about $10 million moving from Switzerland into the account of Jack Warner certainly raises some eyebrows, and the Feds are certainly good at following the money trail.

Hmm … I’ve already heard some whimsical speculation as to whether Blatter will ultimately attend the Women’s World Cup taking place in Canada. Canadians and Americans are good neighbours, after all. They do get along really well. Reading up on Canadian extradition laws, anyone?

But all of those investigations take time to unfurl, and in the short term, we’re stuck with this mess. UEFA members have been the greatest critics of Sepp Blatter and FIFA, and are now rattling sabres and saying they’ll ponder the idea of possibly breaking away from FIFA entirely. In truth, this might be the only effective way to deal with this, particularly if the Europeans can also bring into the fold a motivated Brazil and Argentina – two countries where calls to clean up the game are getting louder – and also the U.S. and Mexico – two countries frustrated by their dysfunctional confederation and often left to foot CONCACAF’s bills. It’s a pretty powerful alliance, were it to come to pass. It would have all the nations that fans want to see, it would have all the clubs that fans want to see, and most importantly, would have all the players that fans would want to see within its domain. But I don’t see there being any political will to do that. For one thing, UEFA would likely splinter over the question of 2018. Russia being a member of UEFA firmly in Blatter’s camp throws a monkey wrench into all these pipe dreams. And it’s not as if UEFA have always been a bastion of virtue. Everyone’s hands are dirty. Lest anyone forget that Michel Platini, the head of UEFA, voted for Qatar. He’s gotten something of a pass on this fact, having stated that he did so at the behest of the French government. Half the ExCo members expected to be called to testify in Switzerland are from UEFA nations. Just because you can generate a whole lot of revenue on the pitch, it doesn’t mean that matters off the pitch aren’t a mess. In the end, a good number of UEFA members voted from Prince Ali –but not all of them. Amid all of this posturing, UEFA would up looking like sore losers threatening to take their ball and go home. I suspect UEFA couldn’t deliver nearly as many votes to Prince Ali as they were promising. So far, UEFA has been all bark and no bite.

The Top Hats manning FIFA’s assortment of committees and positions do so because it’s in their best personal interests. It’s a collection of some of the most selfish people on the earth. What I found most curious about this recent FIFA congress was seeing just how many of them, in the aftermath of the Justice Department indictments, would still be willing to tether their futures entirely to Blatter. Sure, they’re entirely indebted to Blatter for having enriched them so (and, to be fair, for occasionally doing some good things for football in their respective countries in the process). But do you really want to keep tying your fortunes to a this organization when the biggest and baddest law enforcement agency on the planet has started digging around into its affairs – especially knowing that, were you found to be afoul of American law, FIFA’s likely to do nothing to protect you? All along, these guys have thought they can hide when need be, figuring that Blatter’s patronage would also amount to protection.

The Justice Department got involved because the misdoings of CONCACAF and CONMEBOL fell under its jurisdiction – there were American citizens, American banks and American companies involved in this mess. But the business of FIFA long ago became American business. Many of FIFA’s largest sponsors are American companies. As such, vast amounts of FIFA business runs through this country – which means, in one way or another, everyone involved in FIFA business (Blatter included) is accountable to U.S. law. Seeing seven fellow cronies hauled out of the hotel by the police undoubtedly made a few of them not sleep particularly well. (Apparently, the Brazilian rep hastily fled Zürich as quickly as possible, although the Brazilian government is apparently going to get into the spirit of things and planning on opening some criminal probes of its own.) As those delegates from the Western Hemisphere are finding out, Sepp can no longer protect you. And his history should make it clear that, when push comes to shove, he will not protect you at all.

But then again, a vote for an avowed reformer like Ali was likely going to result in you being tossed out on your ass even sooner. For the 133 who cast their votes for Sepp Blatter on Friday, it was ultimately better to keep dancing with the devil that you know.

So the votes have been cast and the “president of everybody” wins. But no one wins.  Football lost. Honesty lost. Morality lost. Everyone lost. For now. Blatter speaks of the “FIFA family,” and it is hard not to hear the mafioso overtones in his voice when he does so. He wants to avoid transparency and keep everything in-house, and thanks to 133 voters, he’ll continue to be able to do so. For now. Strange, it is, for so many people to want to keep living in a house when the building is on fire.