Then finally came the day when Sepp Blatter emerged as the voice of reason.
The soon-to-be 90-year-old Swiss, also scandalized former Fifa president, wrote this week on social media that supporters should refrain from going to the World Cup in the United States and referred to former colleague Mark Pieth.
Pieth is a Swiss lawyer with corruption as a specialty and Fifa as a former client.
In an interview with the Tages-Anzeiger newspaper this week, Mark Pieth urged soccer fans to avoid the United States this summer:
– Upon arrival, supporters can expect that if they do not behave as the authorities wish, they can be sent home immediately. If they are lucky…
The increasingly widespread calls for a boycott of this summer’s World Cup playoffs stand, roughly chopped, on two legs.
One is the arguments Mark Pieth reports: The United States cannot be considered a safe country to live in, given what is currently going on in the federal ICE force’s violent attacks on its own citizens. This mainly applies to an international audience boycott, based on security concerns.
The second is the more moral, political and to some extent psychological question before this summer’s championships: Who wants to be a puppet in Donald Trump’s ambulatory shit show?
The world is what it is. Sport is, of course, something else. There are pain limits and thresholds, and as football lovers you are forced to reassess them quite often.
Football has, with the good help of Fifa, sold off most of its moral capital in recent decades. It has become an arena for decision-makers to show off and for light-hearted dictatorships to build a brand.
USA 2026 is something else. It is an ongoing democratic collapse, a global badass that is rapidly severing all ties with contemporary history and bullying and threatening its allies.
All we know right now is that the entire world order is being renegotiated and that one man is solely responsible for it. It is the same man who will see a successful football World Cup as a purely personal triumph.
– Does Donald Trump deserve to hold a football World Cup? I don’t think so and it’s time for people to react, said Claude Le Roy in an interview in Le Monde last week.
Le Roy is before this captain of more than a handful of African national teams, including Senegal and Cameroon, and one of the continent’s loudest soccer voices.
– The American president has cut aid for education and health to Africa. That means thousands of potential deaths. In addition, he is refusing entry visas to masses of Africans, Le Roy argued.
“Does Donald Trump deserve to host a soccer World Cup? I don’t think so and it’s time for people to react”
He is an outspoken exception in a football world that is currently sitting on pins and needles. Different variants of the mantra “we follow developments closely” circulate as soon as a chairman of any football association is asked the question.
It’s understandable, if regrettable. Football’s job is to compete, entertain, create memories and – in the best case – take home the trophy. Few of those who have dreamed of the World Cup since childhood are ready to forgo what could be the only chance of a lifetime for political unrest.
In Germany, the question of a boycott has nevertheless been aired from the highest places, when vice-president of the football association Oke Göttlich said that he “would personally advise against people going in view of the situation in the USA”.
Chairman Bernd Neuendorf took his colleague lightly in the ear on Monday and said that “it is completely the wrong time to have the debate”.
In German politics, it sounds a little different.
– Skipping the World Cup would be a last resort to get Trump to come to his senses on the Greenland issue, said Jürgen Hardt, member of the Bundestag for the governing Christian Democrats in an interview a couple of weeks ago.
His party colleague Roderich Kiesewetter, who sits on the foreign affairs committee, went even further:
– If Trump goes ahead with his threats about Greenland and starts a trade war with the EU, I have a hard time seeing any European country participating in the World Cup.
In Great Britain, a motion to boycott the championship has been signed by around twenty members of parliament from across the political spectrum. Conservative MP and former minister Simon Hoare said during a House of Commons debate last week that Donald Trump has “thin skin and a big ego” and raised a possible British boycott of the championship.
– It’s something that would embarrass him, we have to meet fire with fire.
TV personality Piers Morgan, long one of England’s best-known Trump supporters, suggested last week that eight of the European favorites for the World Cup title should “pause” their participation in the tournament until further notice.
In France, the boycott line has so far been driven by a few left-wing members of the National Assembly.
A full-scale – or even individual – European boycott of the football World Cup is a long way off at the moment.
– So far we are only in the phase where people are threatening (with a boycott) and no football association will make an individual decision, says Kévin Veyssière, an expert on sports and geopolitics, to the newspaper Le Monde.
It is still worth noting that the calls to stay home from the championship have come from all possible political quarters recently.
Maybe Donald Trump has already started listening.
Read more texts by Johanna Frändén
