This World Cup has been able to do it all. He deserves it. Suffers from “the horror of the void”: where he perceives an absence, he places a prosthesis. Fill in the gaps with imagined realities. If emotional orthopedics were as visible as physical ones, we would be amazed at the numbers that take refuge in our souls. This World Cup is an expert in making emotional prosthetics. The event continues. Despite the thousands of deaths in the construction of the stadiums, the obscene political and financial corruption, the 30 degrees in the shade in which the games will be played, and demanding the LGTBI + community to leave deep emotions at home and affective displays. A visit without hands, without lips, without kisses. That way of “going” without “going”, of “being” without “being”. He has been able to do it all. What a talent. They deserve it.
This World Cup has gotten into our beds like a festive, innocent lover, manufacturing an aesthetic so careful and convincing that, like good detergents, it cleanses reality and our gaze.
But the truth is otherwise. “Without Nicolas Sarkozy’s last-minute intervention on Michel Platini, Qatar would never have had the World Cup,” Josep Blatter told the French newspaper. The world. “It’s the first time that a political intervention changes a big football decision,” he said. Blatter’s statements have served, once again, to reopen the investigation by the French prosecutor’s office into alleged influence peddling, bribery and corruption of former President Sarkozy.
Blatter linked the president’s support to the purchase of Paris Saint Germain – Messi’s team – by a Qatari sovereign wealth fund and “to some privileges related to the great economic activities between Qatar and France.” The former FIFA president was forced to resign on June 2, 2015, four days after being re-elected as head of the entity. A short time later, Michel Platini was arrested by the National Financial Prosecutor for alleged irregular participation in the purchase of votes for the emirate.
The former soccer player participated on November 23, 2010, in a meal organized at the Elysée Palace, by the then president of France, together with the emir of Qatar Hamad Ben Khalifa Al-Thani, a few days before the vote. Blatter maintains that at that meeting it was decided to change the four votes that favored the emirate. The prosecution could impute, in the coming months, Nicolás Sarkozy, Michel Platini, and Gianni Infantino, as the second person in charge of FIFA in Blatter’s mandate.
Soccer is a territory for amazement. There is always something new to discover, a detail, a gesture, a shadow. Sometimes it is an esoteric journey of magicians, tricksters, illusionists, impostors, snake charmers, tycoons, billionaires, politicians. On January 27, 2018, at the Parque de los Príncipes stadium, President Mauricio Macri met for the third time (in the last four years), with Nicolás Sarkozy, with Gianni Infantino, the new president of FIFA, and the already resigned of UEFA, Michel Platini. The four shared the cold Parisian night with a smile. Today, Mauricio Macri is president of the FIFA Foundation, and Sarkozy, Infantino and Platini can be charged by the courts. It is that soccer of buddies, so toxic and corrosive, that the probable candidate practices. At home, with judges and prosecutors, and outside, with the corrupt and possible defendants.
