FIFA summary of Qatar World Cup bid investigation is both tricky and slick

About two-thirds of the way through a summary of the FIFA ethics committee’s report on the most recent round of World Cup bidding, the summary being all anyone outside the organization’s walls will be permitted to see, there is this declaration: “The potentially problematic facts and circumstances … regarding the Qatar 2022 bid were, all in all, not suited to compromise the integrity of the FIFA World Cup 2018/2022 bidding process as a whole.”

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In the realm of human self-reflection, this would appear to rank somewhere in the vicinity of “I am not a crook” and “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

Come on, now – you expected the truth?

If you expected the truth, you can’t handle the truth.

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The truth is FIFA does not give a damn what you think or what you want.  It will place the World Cup in a nation dabbling with the invasion of another sovereign FIFA member. It will place the World Cup in a nation abusing the human rights of immigrant workers to such an extent 246 suffered “sudden cardia death” in 2012 and another 35 died in falls, according to London’s The Guardian; in constructing or refurbishing the 12 venues for World Cup 2014, Brazil had eight workers die.

FIFA will do all of this and expect you to watch, and expect the players to play, and expect the leagues whose seasons will be interrupted and damaged to live with it, because this is the World Cup and there is no other sporting event on Earth to match it.

As well, its executives will continue the farcical attempt to position this as a noble exercise in which placing the World Cup in unexplored territories will serve the best interests of the game.

The summary FIFA released Thursday of the investigation was such balderdash the United States 2022 bid was criticized for “discrepancies in the documentation and contact reports” submitted by the bid committee to FIFA. And yet in nearly four pages of text exploring the various concerns that developed regarding Qatar’s successful bid for the 2022 Cup, there is not a single mention of the abject fantasy that its proposal promised “environmentally friendly cooling technologies” that would make possible holding the World Cup in the customary months of June and July.

Use of “environmentally friendly cooling technologies” obviously was never a serious plan, because FIFA president Sepp Blatter has been agitating to move the 2022 World Cup to the winter since a month after Qatar was awarded the tournament.

Once it became apparent in recent months FIFA had no intention of releasing the full investigative report to the masses – hey, even the NCAA puts the text of an infractions committee report into the public domain – the remote possibility of its veracity became extinguished.

The only real surprise to emerge from all this was the action of the lead investigator, former New York DA Michael Garcia, who had spent 18 months examining the actions of the nine countries that bid on the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. He savaged FIFA’s condensed version of his work.

“Today’s decision by the Chairman of the Adjudicatory Chamber contains numerous materially incomplete and erroneous representations of the facts and conclusions detailed in the Investigatory Chamber’s report,” Garcia said in a statement released to media members. He promised to appeal to the FIFA ethics committee.

Most likely Garcia does not expect much of anything to come from that appeal. Whether or why he expected his work would not be hidden or disguised or distorted – that is Garcia’s secret, for now. But FIFA reminded us again through this process, just as it did when the winning bids for the next two World Cups were revealed, how it operates.

FIFA does not care what you think. Only that you watch.   

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