Preview #1: The World Cup is AWFUL

"We'll just say you're on holiday"

There’s nothing like a global football tournament held every four years to spur the semi-retired Magic Spongers team into getting their arses in gear and do some typing. So in time-honoured fashion, here’s the first part of a double header on the World Cup. Ladies and gentlemen, the World Cup is awful. Here’s why…

On the surface, the 2018 incarnation of the World Cup will look like all the other World Cups that have gone before. And that is exactly what Russian president Vladimir Putin wants. With the eyes of the world on the country for a month, the World Cup offers up a perfect opportunity for Putin to launder his regime’s reputation, with James Kirchick, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, explaining: “Russia is causing a lot of problems, and this is part of a strategy to airbrush their image.”

It is these problems that makes it slightly difficult to separate the event from the host nation. Ignore military interventions in the Crimea and Syria, and the whole meddling in the US election, the ‘pee tape’ and the Sergei Skripal episode, and let’s go back to the World Cup bidding process. Now, we’re not ones to court a libel case (we are), but we’re going to stick our necks out and say that Fifa has perhaps struggled with transparency and free and fair voting processes in the past.

There was a taste of rancid onions in the mouth immediately after the decision to award Russia the 2018 tournament and Qatar the 2022 edition. Not least from English representatives, with former prime minister David Cameron and Goldenballs both crying foul on Russian attempts to influence the voting. ‘Well, there’s no smoke without fire’, as absolutely no one says these days.

Of the 22-man Fifa executive committee who made the decision to hand the greatest show on earth to Russia, Sepp Blatter, Michel Platini and Worawi Makudi were provisionally suspended over backhanders, the ever-likeable Jack Warner and Mohamed bin Hammam banned for life, Chung Mong-Joon banned for six years, Angel Maria Villar Llona fined, whistleblower Chuck Blazer banned for life and Ricardo Terra Teixeira was under FBI investigation. Franz Beckenbauer was banned for 90 days from any football-related activity for allegedly refusing to cooperate with an inquiry into corruption.

*Takes a deep breath* Meanwhile, Reynald Temarii and Amos Adamu did not take part in the 2018/2022 voting process as they had already been suspended after being caught on camera by the Sunday Times demanding cash for votes. There were also allegations surrounding Issa Hayatou, Nicolas Leoz, Marios Lefkaritis and Jacques Anouma. That’s essentially the whole lot of them. What a fucking roll call.

In a spectacular, Sergio Ramos-esque display of bastardry, it came as little surprise that Putin has invited Blatter to attend this year’s World Cup as a personal guest of the Russian president. That alone should be enough to make you want to put back at least one of your packets of Panini stickers. And call us sticklers but we’re pretty sure that THE WORLD CUP counts as ‘sporting activity’ from which Blatter is supposedly banned. Blatter has unashamedly described the all-inclusive jolly as a “sporting and diplomatic mission for me”.

So there you go; it absolutely isn’t a sporting activity, except that it is ABSOLUTELY A SPORTING ACTIVITY. THE BIGGEST SPORTING ACTIVITY IN THE WORLD.

If all this wasn’t enough to make you want to just focus on Wimbledon and Love Island this summer, throw in Russia’s appalling stance on LGBT rights and you have a veritable shitty mix of politics and football, with the choice being to either ignore it all or else feel a bit grubby that a Russian World Cup is, to some degree, a vote of confidence for Putin and his cronies.

Fear is something that should never seep into watching football. And that’s precisely what members of the LGBT community will be feeling if they have made the decision to travel to Russia. Even if there is no major incident over the course of the tournament, when the bells and whistles are packed away on the evening of July 15, it should be remembered that the anti-gay laws will remain.

The hooligan element may have been downplayed by the Russian media too, but as Bob Mortimer put it on the Athletico Mince podcast, when he was in France for the Euros in 2016, the level of violence from proportions of the Russian contingent was “like something from fucking Spectre”. Lest we forget, the violence is roundly applauded by Russian MPs with Igor Lebedev, a member of the Russian Football Union [RFU] executive committee and MP of the Liberal Democratic party, taking to Twitter to offer a bit of encouragement for the army of MMA fighters: “I don’t see anything wrong with the fans fighting. Quite the opposite, well done lads, keep it up!”

We’ll be controversial and say there’s something really shitty about hooliganism, especially when it completely detracts from the football during a World Cup a la France ‘98 and the warzone at the waterfront area of the Old Port in Marseille. No repeat please, morons.

Lastly, the football itself. Kicking off festivities today will be Russia and Saudi Arabia in the inaugural human rights derby. The pre-tournament excitement gives way to a certain indifference when you remember that the World Cup will open with a potential stinker, especially given that we don’t want either team to win. Or care that much.

Rather (ok, massively) disingenuously, we can’t hand on heart say that we think the World Cup is awful. In more than shades of our last World Cup preview, perhaps ‘Putin/Fifa is awful’ would have been more apt. Ok, that absolutely would have been more apt, but then how would ‘Putin is awful’ have fit into a two-part preview when the other article is called ‘The World Cup is ace’? Ask yourselves that. You could say we’ve created our own problems there, but we’d just blame Putin. Or Fifa.