“The FIFA World Player of the Year gala in Zurich today will look like a Jay Gatsby house party in overdrive,” writes Sam Wallace. He says that the award is unnecessary given that we already have the “perfectly adequate” European Footballer of the Year award. The only disadvantage of that award, “in FIFA’s eyes, is that it is not controlled by FIFA. It is the ‘World’ part of World Player of the Year that is misleading — it has never been given to a footballer playing outside of Europe. FIFA did not even nominate anyone from Ecuador’s Liga de Quito, who came second in its very own Club World Cup.”
All the world’s governing body cares about the ceremony is that “it will look fantastic on the television. The message will be clear. There are no other organizations that can summon [Cristiano] Ronaldo, [Lionel] Messi, Fernando Torres, Kaka and Xavi Hernandez in the middle of the season to sit in a room on the off-chance that they might win an award. But FIFA can. It is the organization that transcends national governments, that can bring anyone in the game into line simply by excluding them from the great, raucous banquet that is modern football.”
All very well, but will FIFA be able to guarantee security at the 2010 South Africa World Cup? The body can “breathlessly dish out its meaningless awards at glitzy ceremonies and debate whether Ronaldo or Messi is the better player. But when it comes to the 2010 World Cup, it all turns a bit more serious. There, dissembling will cost lives.” People need to know whether the country where stadium corruption whistle-blower Johnny Mohlala and former Austrian pro Peter Burgstaller “have been murdered really is safe to hold the biggest sporting occasion on earth. The trouble is, when you look around the people in Zurich today [Monday], would you trust them to tell you the truth?”