Blatter era in world soccer ends. Will he be missed?
This weekend's Women's World Cup final threatened to get awkward for Sepp Blatter, the longtime FIFA strongman who's slated to step down next year.
Once the U.S. women's team beat Germany in Tuesday night's semifinal, a trip to Vancouver would have meant that — no matter whether the Americans won or lost — Blatter would have had to present medals to the representatives of the nation whose law enforcement authorities helped force him out by investigating widespread corruption in the soccer establishment.
Instead, Blatter's lawyer announced Tuesday that the president would miss the final Sunday 'for personal reasons.' That means the post-Blatter era in international soccer will start this weekend; it'll be the first World Cup final without him presiding in 20 years.
And while many fans of the women's game won't be sorry to see Blatter gone if it means the end of his remarks that the likes of Carli Lloyd and company should be wearing tighter clothing or his insistence on artificial playing surfaces in Canada that men would never be forced to put up with, it's worth pausing for a moment to wonder if the sport, worldwide, really will be better off without him.
After all, the future of soccer is now up for debate in a way not seen since 1974, when the iron grip of Europe over FIFA was broken. Up until then, FIFA had been run as a club for big powers like England, France and Germany. The FIFA president between 1961 and 1974 was a patrician Englishman, Stanley Rous, a supporter of apartheid who fought to protect South Africa's membership in FIFA when every other African and Asian nation wanted it expelled. Africa only got a guaranteed spot at the men's World Cup in 1970 after boycotting in 1966. The coalition that eventually defeated Rous was marshaled by the Brazilian João Havelange and subsequently by Sepp Blatter.
International soccer hasn't always been inclusive, and there is no guarantee it will remain so if the rich countries who've been loudest about Blatter's sins regain control.
It's worth remembering that women's soccer was banned by the English association for half a century until 1971. Times have changed, but perhaps not as much as we'd like to think. Soccer's pluralism is vulnerable to unchecked commercialism — just ask the players and supporters of the Brazilian club Santos' women's team. In 2010, they won the Copa Libertadores and were crowned the best women's club in all South America. Just two years later, the team no longer existed. It was closed down in a cost-cutting exercise to pay for superstar Neymar's hefty salary on the Santos men's team. Neymar has since transferred to Barcelona, under murky financial circumstances; the Santos women's team has not been revived.
That inclusiveness is what makes the game today a culturally rich and remarkable thing, and those who grouse that only elite soccer is worth watching are quite wrong. In an ever more polarized world of haves and have-nots, soccer is one of the few things the have-nots still possess.
For example, there has been much grumbling that the Women's World Cup expanded to 24 teams for this year's tournament. Germany defeated the Ivory Coast 10-0 in the competition's first week and better not to have a place for teams like Ivory Coast, they said. But in their very next game, Ivory Coast won an enthralling 3-2 tussle against another 'small' soccer nation, Thailand, in a match that will be among the peaks of the tournament in terms of sheer human drama and enjoyment.
Soccer in its glorious variety needs to be cherished and sustained. The new arrangement for the government of the game after Blatter must ensure that the commercial boom at the elite level is leveraged to benefit people right around the world who love the sport.
Otherwise, the cures for the alleged corruption Blatter presided over risk also ditching the all-too-easily-overlooked upside to the global boom in soccer that the whole mess helped facilitate: It's made a fun game even more so.
A few years ago, I was sitting in the bleachers at Estádio do Zimpeto in Maputo, Mozambique, watching the local favorites, the Mambas, trying to get the better of neighboring Tanzania in a tense Africa Cup of Nations qualifier. (The tournament is a venerable competition that was first staged in 1957, three years prior to its European equivalent.)
I got chatting to the guy next to me, a postman from New Zealand. He'd just gotten off a lengthy bus ride to Maputo, having attended Zimbabwe's match in Harare and a club match in Johannesburg that same week. This, he explained, was a typical holiday for him. When he wasn't doing his rounds delivering letters and packages around suburban Christchurch, he liked nothing better than to fly halfway around the world to catch international matches in Africa. He scheduled his vacations meticulously in order to see as many matches as possible and had attended games in a staggering number of countries.
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