Yeah, well, Platini voted for Qatar and his son got a job with a Qatari corporation shortly thereafter, oddly enough
Unfortunately, and therein lies Blatter's power, the African and Asian confederations are strongly supportive of Blatter. he's managed to cultivate a lot of third world support and they are with him thick and thin. One African member even described the attacks on Blatter as "blasphemy". The problem for them is that UEFA has the ability, potentially, to break away, do their own thing and still make shitloads of money. Unfortunately, that would ruin a lot of the international competition because the Europeans care most about the Champion's League.
Interesting thing from that E:60 report is that all nations get the same amount of money. So while USA or Germany gets a few million, that is nothing to their GDP. But Rwanda? Guyana? Saint Kitts and Nevis? It has a built in incentive to keep the guy in place.
Does Fifa have anything to do with champions league? I don't know much about this stuff, but from what I'm gathering, soccer would go on just fine without fifa. Almost in the same way cfb would miss nary a beat if the ncaa dissolved. if that happened, there would still be sec teams playing sec teams every saturday and 100,000 rednecks and rednecks-for-a-day there for the viewing.
FIFA runs everything, everything. Well, they don't run my son's travel team or college teams here in America, but they have a piece of the pie in everything else. So, oh yeah, they have their mitts on the Champion's League. It makes a ton of money, so they absolutely have a piece. The value of FIFA, though, is that it is the organization that can coordinate all of the disparate elements of a very international sport. It is the arbiter for players going from one country to another professionally and organizing all the international competitions fairly. Soccer could operate without FIFA, but it would probably be very fractured and Euro-centric.
But wouldn't an organization just like FIFa but with a different name be formed in its place. If the whole deal is we need some international organization to make sure these little countries that hate each other but love soccer play nice with each other when it comes to soccer, then this doesn't strike me as something that would be terribly difficult to figure out.
Yes. Just like the NCAA, it only has power because UEFA, CONCACAF, CONMEBAL, etc. give it that power. However, you tell people that "Sorry, we are not going to take part in the World Cup" and you might have domestic problems. I don't think it would work. FIFA needs to be purged from the inside out and change its procedures, become more transparent. And this will cause it to happen. The Mafia is about to be taken down.
Exactly. If the number of people against Blatter is so large, why not split and form a different organization to run a different international competition and, in turn, wash our hands of FIFA? From what it sounds like, the majority of the group against the man are the countries that are making FIFA such a wealthy organization. If most of his support lies in third world countries, surely the organization isn't sustainable financially if all the big players money-wise drop out?
But if you organize something in its place with a large portion of the teams, would anyone really care? If Spain, France, Italy, Germany, and a lot of the other top teams in the world are jumping ship, I struggle to see how FIFA maintains power.
But will Jose Doe living in Barcelona want Spain to win the World Cup or the International Soccer Championship (or whatever the name of the new competition would be)? You grow up wanting to win the World Cup. You will have a hard time selling it to the average fan. IMHO.
I actually disagree here. I think that it's just about being the world's best. Whatever you call it, if it's recognized as a tournament that figures out who the world's best is, and it isn't a farce, it will be a big deal.
Perhaps, but the human attachment to history and name is pretty big. Not sure you could just simply replace it.
Exactly. I think your average fan outside the U.S. understands these issues, is aware of the corruption within FIFA, and would most likely welcome a break from the organization so long as an international tournament containing the best teams still took place. And on the flip side, I think the World Cup loses out BIG TIME if European countries sit out. At that point, what are you even having a competition for?
I think so, too....after all the "Champions League" and "Barclays Premier League" are pretty new things, too, in name.
