Badfellas: Fifa Family at War

Inquisitive, eye opening and informative...owned it, read it, shared it, and lost it in the process. A must read for a big picture understanding perspective.

Imagine a government monopoly in ten-pin bowling where prospective bowlers must first apply with their local government council for a permit to play on a government-sponsored team. That would certainly be a bad idea. Similarly, in most countries government is a problem for the sport of soccer football. Exacerbating the problem of government are corporations - themselves creatures of the state. It remains a story of how government and their offspring - the corporation, has been a tool for greedy elites to enrich their pockets at the expense of the powerless. Soccer football has become a victim of corporate statism, pure and simple. John Sugden, an investigative sociologist at the University of Brighton in England and author of the award-winning "Boxing and Society", has teamed up with colleague Alan Tomlinson to apply the methodology of participant observation to the study of soccer footballs' governing body - FIFA. Sugden and Tomlinson are not only creatures of Britain's socialist society, but prisoners. Their progressive leftist views are fruitful in discerning elite behavior but ill-serves them when trying to arrive at solutions to the problem. The British duo advocates more government for a problem generated by government in the first place, which is absurd. Government and their corporations are the problem, not the solution. Beginning with a preface on page 7, the authors' saga runs for 277 pages ending on page 284. There is no bibliography and no index. It is a story more than it is a sociological or ethnographic account of an investigation of FIFA governorship and corruption. Despite these shortcomings, the authors are great storytellers and know how to write for story. This book is well-crafted and easy to read. It's 15 chapters are : Chapter 1) Blattergate; Chapter 2) The Blazer-and-Slacks Brigade; Chapter 3) Goodbye, Colonel Blimp; Chapter 4) The Big Man; Chapter 5) The Predator and the Protégé; Chapter 6) The Bounty Hunter; Chapter 7) The Big Boss; Chapter 8) A Rumble in the Jungle; Chapter 9) From Protégé to President; Chapter 10) The Politics of the Belly; Chapter 11) Tout Heaven; Chapter 12) The Best Club in the World; Chapter 13) Bidding Wars; Chapter 14) The Terminator; and Chapter 15) Fifaland. The problem of government is give ample treatment by the authors. They tell us that FIFA leader Joseph Blatter "reeled in the face of accusations of administrative malpractice, financial mismanagement and outright organisational [sic] deception and fraud" by the media against "the FIFA president and his network of cronies, crooks and charlatans who have made personal gains from their lofty positions" (pp12-13). When Blatter was reelected double the margin from his previous election, it revealed that most governments "were worried about what would come out if Blatter lost, for so many had done well over the years out of him"(p13). Another example of government as the problem is "When football emerged from colonialism as o