Apologies from football's leaders we'll be waiting 12 years for
Sepp Blatter: “I made a huge mistake.” Qatar: “Hold our non-alcoholic Bud Zero.”
The World Cup break began in the shadow of former FIFA president Sepp Blatter saying “Oops, our bad” and Swiss media outlet SRF confirming that’s it not paranoia if ex-CIA operatives working for a Gulf autocracy on a 9-figure contract really are out to get you. The tournament itself will open 48 hours after Qatar rugged one of the tournament’s major sponsors by banning in-stadium beer sales (at least for the plebs – luxury suites may still be able to imbibe).
The 12 years of consequences spanning Blatter-led FIFA’s “mistake” and Blatter’s admission of said mistake range from the thousands of dead laborers in Qatar and tens of thousands of enslaved others down to the career path of Chelsea players like Reece James and Ben Chilwell who, 12 years ago, were talented schoolboys at their respective football academies, became professionals and then full internationals, and are now missing the World Cup through injuries that can partly be attributed to the fixture congestion necessitated by the mistake of awarding the World Cup to Qatar. No, that is not to compare the two outcome sets. It’s to draw the contrast in order to show the breadth of consequences, and to highlight the net negative that is a World Cup in Qatar, where the only beneficiaries seem to be the Qatari state and the aforementioned now-much-richer ex-CIA operatives.
But at least Blatter says it was a mistake. Only took him 12 years to say it. Wonder when he knew it.
Blatter’s statement started me thinking about what other apologies should be forthcoming from football’s governing entities and executives in the coming decade or so. I won’t wager anything more valuable than a few FTT tokens on any of these happening. But if a former FIFA president can say he or his organization did something wrong long after there’s anything he can do about, there’s no reason why these others can’t make the same pathetically impotent gesture.
1. Football’s role in COVID insanity
As was often the case at the former home of my Chelsea writing, I was right. In this case, that means Jose Mourinho was also right.
In early April 2020, Mourinho was Tottenham’s manager and he took Tanguy Ndombele and Ryan Sessegnon out to Hadley Common for an informal training session. Future generations will struggle to understand why he did such a thing. They’ll ask the obvious questions: Why not just use the club’s training ground? Where was the rest of the team, and the rest of the coaching staff? And, wait, why was this a problem?
How will we explain 2020 and 2021 to future generations? You know, in terms they’ll be able to understand given the learning loss induced by many of the same decisions and decision-makers that ensnared Mourinho and his players? Here’s one way:
[O]thers who are angry at the Tottenham trio are those worried that the general population will realize that Mourinho is not dumb nor reckless, that he would never endanger his players’ health, and therefore that those three were quite safe outside, and therefore it would be quite safe for other people to be outside exercising or socializing in small moderately distanced groups. Maybe even for more than an hour at a time.
The government and the governing bodies who carry the government’s waters are worried that someone will look at Mourinho’s informal three-man session on Hadley Common and realize that when it comes to the social restriction regime, the emperor is not wearing any clothes. Not even a face mask.
Prohibiting two of the fittest people in the world from training outdoors under the guidance of the highly trained and experienced professional who was directly responsible for their health and performance was as absurd as closing playgrounds, filling in skateparks with sand, dispatching police boats to apprehend a loan surfer, deploying drones to monitor exercisers… you know the rest. Even his own club sold him out.
The rest of us will probably never get an apology for any of it, but maybe Mourinho will. Simply as a matter of respect. Respect man, respect.
12 years. That’s 4-5 clubs at Mourinho’s usual rhythm. He should be easy to find when someone owns up to apologize to him – and to all of football – for shutting down the sport when the world needed it most, and when the players most needed their gaffer.
2. Roman Abramovich doesn’t have to be a good guy to be a wronged guy
If, when Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea in 2003, you started a sentence with “Two prime ministers ago…,” you’d have been harkening back to the Iron Lady herself. No wonder it seems so long ago when you say that “Two prime ministers ago” the referent occupant of 10 Downing Street oversaw the expropriation and forced sale of Roman Abramovich’s property, including Chelsea FC.
In that time, Elon Musk and Sam Bankman-Fried have combined to purge the Russia-Ukraine war from the headlines. Maybe they are Putin stooges, after all.
But if Putin’s war – an actual war – is no longer worth the interest of the people who cheered on any action no matter how il- or extra-legal justified by tapping the “Russians bad” sign, no non-Putin Russian is going to be of interest. Nor the money extracted from him, which, at last look, still has not been disbursed to those affected by said war.
Abramovich’s last stint in the headlines – two prime ministers ago – was for his role as a intermediary between Russia, Ukraine and the West in nascent, somewhat off-books peace negotiations. Perhaps he’s not the master war criminal profiteer that we were led to believe. I suspect that if he was, even our derelict media would occasionally remind us of his criminality – or just his sustained existence – if for no other reason than his name pops up in the mesocycle of Two Minute Hates.
Even if you don’t think Abramovich was, is or could be a good guy, it’s pretty clear now that he was, is and will continue to be an uninvolved guy in Putin’s aggression. And even if you never come around to that perspective, there’s still the fact that his property, including Chelsea FC, was seized and forced onto the market without anything resembling due process. No trial, no hearing, no finding of fact, no recourse, no accountability for the money that changed hands. Just Russia. Because Russia. Roman Russian bad man.
And if that doesn’t bother you, whatever color your jersey or political party, well I don’t know how you ended up reading me in the first place, and can’t imagine you’ll ever make the mistake of doing it again. Hopefully before any more Western politicians make the mistake of sportswashing, someone from His Majesty’s Government will apologize for this among the many other mistakes that came out of 10 Downing in the spring and summer of 2022
3. Fixture congestion: Stand down from the Conference League of Nations
Many top teams limped into the World Cup break with depleted rosters, which meant many national teams showed up in Qatar with depleted rosters of their owns, with many prominent names missing the tournament through injuries and many others in the squad but uncertain of their ability to play. But at least they got through the last year or two of the Conference League of Nations or whatever UEFA’s third tier abomination tournaments are called.
The Conference League imposed the demands of a European campaign on 32 additional clubs, many of whom don’t have the squad depth or training / sports medicine resources to compensate for the higher demands.
The League of Nations had a much broader impact on European internationals, forcing managers to play their best players more frequently and to take seriously more games when everyone involved would rather be training lightly and playing friendlies. With some minimal level of prestige on the line and the opportunity to punch an early ticket to the next real international tournament, national teams could not give the League of Nations the respect it deserved. They had to give it more.
And while the period leading into a major competition is typically devoted to tapering workloads so as to hone players to a physiological peak, FIFA subjected prospective World Cup players to the opposite: three months of intense loading with games every 72-96 hours. This loading came after a shorter summer break that had a high concentration of international games, which in turn came only a few weeks after a regular club season that followed… well, you know the cycle.
As do Reece James, Ben Chilwell, N’Golo Kante, Timo Werner, Marco Reus, Christopher Nkunku….
Gianni Infantino, anything you’d like to say?
4. Multiply concussed players may not have 12 years to wait
As bad as the injuries to those players are, few of them will experience lifelong debilitations as a result. Certainly none of them will have a shorter lifespan as a result of their various musculoskeletal injuries.
Oddly, perhaps amazingly or literally unbelievably, to my knowledge no player is missing the World Cup because of concussion or concussion-related syndromes.
Surely, that’s because the concussion protocols that football’s governing bodies imposed and the teams and leagues fully and impartially enforce are doing their jobs in keeping players safe.
If you believe that, you might just work at Sequoia Capital.
If the National Football League is any indication, football’s governing bodies may not have 12 years to make the necessary apologies to some currently active players. In 12 years, they may already have permanent cognitive damage, or worse.
And if the National Football League is any indication – and in this case it surely is – the Premier League, FA, UEFA and FIFA all knew that concussions were a bigger problem demanding more stringent action well before these governing entities acknowledge the problem and began crafting half-assed measures for player safety.
I nominate Jan Vertonghen as the first player who should receive a face to face apology from the sport’s leaders, as I will never forget watching him take a major hit to the head, receive “treatment” on the field, stagger about a few minutes later and then nearly vomit and pass out on the sidelines after being “cleared” to play. The levels of malpractice on display in that 2019 Champions League semifinal game damned every person and institution involved with player safety and welfare, and I have seen nothing yet to suggest that we won’t see it happen again.
If the National Football League is any indication, something much worse will have to happen. Perhaps real football can diverge from American football and apologize for their negligence, particularly for this last decade when what they knew far exceeded what they did.
For all my non-Qatari readers, raise a glass and enjoy a few suds or spirits while you’re waiting for any of these apologies to roll in. We might be here for a while. Say, 12 years, give or take.
Photo credit: G Travels via Flickr, under CC BY-NC 2.0.