For anyone with any kind of conscience, being a fan of big-time sports has always involved a certain amount of willful ignorance.
There are always unsavoury elements that must be ignored, explained away or accepted in order for the fun to continue. This has always been true but it seems more acute than ever in the information age we live in.
To be a pro football fan you have to ignore or accept that — according to a growing mountain of evidence — most of the players who gain our love and give us thrills over long careers will die premature deaths with badly battered brains.
To be a hockey fan you have to ignore or accept that greedy expansion has made it so that while there are no NHL teams in hockey-mad Quebec City or Saskatoon or Hamilton, there is one in Glendale, Ariz. (most people seemingly choose the ignore option on this one, excepting perhaps the players on the Arizona team and some members of their immediate families.)
To be a fan of the Olympic Games you have to ignore or accept that a system built on the backs of mostly modestly paid athletes often sucks cities dry, leaving monuments to excess behind to go along with crippling debt that can throw entire countries into disarray while simultaneously lining the pockets of various and assorted IOC cronies.
To be a baseball fan you have to ignore or accept that it is often incredibly boring.
Here in Canada we are just days away from a massive ignore or accept moment with the FIFA Women’s World Cup rolling into town. Soccer fans have always kind of known that there was a lot of sneaky business going on behind the scenes as massive tournaments pulled in billion-dollar profits. Following the arrests of high-ranking FIFA officials last week, however, we have charges laid by the United States Department of Justice that bring some of the corruption out of the shrouded smoking lounges of the world onto the front lawn for all to see.
On the same day that the arrests were executed, an article came out in the Washington Post that stated approximately 1,200 migrant workers have died in Qatar since that country was awarded hosting duties for the 2022 World Cup (in a vote that is now mired in bribery allegations, naturally).
A report from the International Trade Union Confederation estimated that 4,000 more workers could die before kickoff time in Qatar, which, incidentally, will need to be held in the winter because, you know, temperatures in Qatar can reach 50 C. I’ve never played soccer in 50 C weather but I assume it’s not ideal given that when I barbecue I use that temperature as a rough guide to let me know that my steak is almost done.
It’s all pretty astounding. Somewhere Dr. Evil is frantically trying to attach killer frickin’ lasers to frickin’ soccer balls in a vain attempt to outdo the folks over at FIFA.
So what’s a soccer fan to do? Is every ticket purchased for the Women’s World Cup an endorsement of FIFA’s cartoonish super villainy or, worse yet, another few coins for the “non-profit” organization to throw into its rainy day piggy bank which now reportedly holds more than a billion dollars in cash?
Should we stop ignoring the corruption and start ignoring everything that benefits from it, including the tournament set to begin Saturday with the Canadian national team taking on China at Edmonton’s Commonwealth Stadium?
No, I for one am not going to do that. First of all the Women’s World Cup is seemingly of little importance to FIFA’s leaders. President Sepp Blatter, who was not one of the nine FIFA officials arrested Wednesday, infamously let his opinions about women’s soccer be known in 2004 when he argued that players should “play in more feminine clothes,” adding that “they could, for example, have tighter shorts.”
A successful women’s World Cup in proper soccer attire seems like a wonderful way to stick it to the old boys who are finally getting called out. Secondly, ignoring this World Cup would mean turning our backs on the players who have worked all their lives for this chance and who are most definitely not getting filthy rich through the sport.
Last week I interviewed Canadian starting goalkeeper Erin McLeod who now lives in North Vancouver and recently struck up a small sponsorship deal with a local car dealership that has loaned her a Jeep for a year. She told me it was “her dream car,” which is actually understandable when you learn that the car it replaced had manual window rollers and no air conditioning.
“It’s the small things, you know,” she said with a laugh. She did not sound like a fat cat.
The mere fact that this tournament exists is a testament to countries like Canada, the United States, Norway and Germany that promoted women’s soccer long before FIFA even cared enough to tell them to wear sexier shorts.
Maybe Canada will never win a men’s World Cup. Wait, that’s a terrible misuse of the word “maybe.” More accurate: Maybe one day we’ll make the men’s World Cup again. But maybe we’ll win the Women’s World Cup one day. That’s a legit statement. Maybe we’ll win it this year.
And maybe by the time it’s all over FIFA will be a smouldering pile of ash. Investigators said that last week’s charges were the tip of the iceberg. Maybe the iceberg will sink this rotten ship, and this World Cup might be the last onboard entertainment before titanic FIFA slams into its demise and sinks to the bottom of the ocean.
Now that would be a tournament I’d love to see.
Andy Prest is the sports editor for the North Shore News and writes a biweekly humour/lifestyle column. He can be reached via email at aprest@nsnews.com.
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