Alert! The London Review of Books‘ resident SouthAfro-pessimist, RW Johnson, has struck again – this time in a lengthy piece on the 2010 FIFA World Cup that will be published in the review’s 17 December edition.
In Africa, soccer has “collapsed under the weight of corruption”, says the author of South Africa’s Brave New World, who paints a pre-apocalyptic picture of Cape Town and other cities with new stadiums.
It seems everyone’s on FIFA’s soma but Johnson:
As one observes this huge event being put together one realises that soccer has become a matter of trying to defy gravity. Everything about the event – the expenditure on the stadiums, the players’ enormous wages, the vast sums for the TV rights, the glitz and glamour of all the WAGs and celebrities, and even the reasoning behind closing key city roads for Fifa or Blatter – indicates that extraordinary concentrations of wealth and power are involved. Everything we know about human behaviour when it is subjected to such powerful pressures and incentives leads us to expect that cheating and violence will become virtually inevitable. Not just handballs and diving, but crooked referees, crooked draws and all the rest. Yet we also know that it’s vital that the TV commentators are able to enthuse about ‘the beautiful game’ with at least a margin of credibility: think how disastrous it was for cricket when match-fixing was exposed, or how badly the Tour de France has suffered from all its doping scandals. In most countries in Africa and Latin America such pressures have led to the ruin of local leagues, while the match-fixing scandal currently being investigated in Germany suggests that the results of hundreds of matches in Central and Eastern Europe were also fraudulent. The number of countries in the world where a game of soccer is still a fair contest may be quite small.
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Photo courtesy the Guardian
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