Article: Football would be better if run Honestly

Beautiful game, dirty business


Article

They mostly ramble about how evil Blatter and other institutional heads of football, how there should be more clarity in the distribution of major events, how there is a need for increased use of technology, and how it isn't truly global because it isn't popular in the US, India and China (though in the latter two, I'm not sure it's a valid point - football, in terms of viewership, is at least the second most popular sport in both countries)

Nothing particularly original, but a decent overview of the game's institutional issues.

However, I did think this was an interesting proposal:

The hardest bit of the puzzle is the host-selection process. One option would be to stick the World Cup in one country and leave it there; but that nation’s home team would have a big advantage, and tournaments benefit from moving between different time zones. An economically rational option would be to give this year’s winner, and each successive champion, the option of either hosting the tournament in eight years’ time or auctioning off that right to the highest bidder. That would favour football’s powerhouses. But as most of them already have the stadiums, there would be less waste—and it would provide even more of an incentive to win.

Would you be comfortable with this selection proccess? I wouldn't mind it. Only issue is that it limits the World Cup to about the 6-8 Countries that have any real chance of actually winning it.

I haven't really heard alternative proposals or ideas, just people, like the majority of this article, complaining.

In the Copa America we have a rotational system which works alphabetically (ie: Argentina - Brazil - Bolivia- Chile - Colombia - Ecuador, etc) and no scandals, but the federation is only 10 countries strong. I don't think this could work in a larger scale because people would never agree to which countries would be the 6 or so pre-selected hosts. And I don't think it would be very good to rotate per continent either. If we use all 6 continents, would Europeans really approve only one cup in their home continent every 24 years?

I think the solution is to increase transparency and the number of people voting so that it would be very hard to bribe the large majority. Additionally more weight needs to be given to social issues and risks. But these large projects will always come with corruption, even in developed countries. And that's an uncomfortable fact that needs to be accepted.