Flo Balogun and the (Sort of) Disappearing Red Card

Curmie has a couple of essays already in progress, but he’s going to do something a little out of the ordinary: there are ways in which this piece will be passé within a few hours or so after it’s posted, so it’s quite possible that you, Gentle Reader, will know things that, as of this writing (morning and early afternoon of Monday the 6th), are still unknowable. 

It’s an interesting time of the year for sports fans.  If you narrow your vision to the major team sports in this country, there’s not a lot happening.  The NFL, NBA, and NHL seasons are over, and the MLB pennant races haven’t really shaped up yet: fans know who they want to win, but it’s unclear as yet what other team they want to lose to help their team’s chances.  But Wimbledon is heading into its final week, there’s the WNBA, horse racing (that dead heat in the featured race at Saratoga yesterday was pretty fun), golf… and above all, there’s the World Cup.

Tonight, the USMNT attempts to move on to the quarter-finals for the first time since 2002, and they’ll do so with star striker Folarin “Flo” Balogun in the lineup.  He has three goals in this tournament and no other American has more than one, so that matters.  Balogun received a red card for dangerous play in the second half of the Round of 32 game against Bosnia-Herzegovina; that carries with it not merely being sidelined (without being replaced) for the remainder of the match in question, but a suspension for the next game, as well.  Well, it did… for a while.  We’ll come back to that.

As the photo above shows, there’s no question that Balogun stepped on the ankle of Tarik Muharemovic in a scuffle for a loose ball.  That part is undeniable.  It’s also clear that it was completely unintentional, not malicious or even reckless; Balogun wasn’t even looking at Muharemovic.  Furthermore, it appears that the VAR (Video Assisted Referee) review of the play showed the referee only still and slow-motion images.  A full-speed version would have added important context; former English Premier league referee Andy Davies says the omission “does not align with VAR protocols.”  Anyway, a play that the referee didn’t initially even call a foul turned into a red card. 

Curmie’s own athletic career is, shall we say, rather undistinguished.  He never played in an organized league at a level above collegiate intramurals.  There was one incident, though, that’s pretty memorable, even over a half-century later.  Curmie was in goal for his dorm against our arch-rivals (the dorm just up the hill from ours).  I made a pretty good save (if I do say so myself), diving to my right, making the stop, and covering up the ball while lying on the ground.  One of the other team’s forwards proceeded to kick me in the left ear.  Was it intentional?  Maybe.  I think it was in that grey area: not really intended, but he could have jumped over me pretty easily. 

A moment later, there was a referee’s whistle.  Any thoughts I might have had about a delayed foul call against the guy who kicked me soon vanished.  That dude did get punished, though… just not in the way I’d contemplated.  One of my fullbacks, who happened to be a linebacker on the varsity football team, didn’t take kindly to seeing his friend and teammate kicked in the head, especially by someone from that team… so he body-slammed the guy.  Yeah, he got the equivalent of a red card.  I appreciated the gesture, but would have preferred not to have played the rest of the game a man down.  (To be honest, I don’t remember if we ultimately won.  I think so, though.)

Revenons à nos moutons…  It’s difficult to say whether the red card against Balogun was considered legitimate by objective and knowledgeable viewers.  The folks on Fox thought not, but it’s difficult to say where the line between neutrality and jingoism is drawn.  It’s worth noting that the British newspaper The Guardian described the play as “a seemingly innocuous challenge” and the red card as “widely condemned as extremely harsh.”  And the quality of the officiating in general has been, to put it politely, somewhat less than what would be appropriate for an event of this magnitude.  The France/Paraguay match may be the most egregious example, but it’s not alone.

Balogun, to his credit, reacted to the suspension about as professionally as he possibly could have: “It’s important for me to say, first and foremost, it was totally unintentional.  The choice of the referee was his choice. I don’t think it was the correct choice. I think a yellow card would’ve been fair, due to it not being intentional….  It’s something that happened; we have to move forward, and I have to accept it.”  Elsewhere, he says, “There’s still lots of people we’re inspiring, little kids, boys and girls who are watching, and we have to show them the correct way to handle things, even when you think it’s unjust.”  He’s a class act.

According to FIFA (the Fédération Internationale de Football Association) rules, such suspensions cannot be appealed.  Uh huh.  Yesterday, FIFA announced that the ban against Balogun had been suspended for a year.  The rationale was not clearly stated, at least not in any place Curmie has been able to find.  It’s presumed that the misuse of VAR was the determinant (fig leaf?).  If you put enough modifiers on the change of direction, it’s unprecedented.  It’s the first time since the next-game suspension rule was put in place that a player did not, in fact, have to sit out the next game for a red card in a World Cup game per se.  There was a case in 1962 (before that rule), and a number of players, including Portuguese star Cristiano Ronaldo, have been granted suspended sentences, as it were, for red cards in international competitions held before the World Cup got underway.

Needless to say, FIFA, the organization Curmie once described as “The perfect blend of corruption, arrogance, incompetence, sexism, and boorishness” bears a lot of responsibility.  The sexism isn’t as foregrounded in this Men’s World Cup (Curmie’s earlier comments were linked to the 2015 Women’s World Cup), but the other descriptors are certainly on display. 

The situation is complicated further by the intervention of Donald Trump into the whole business.  His phone call(s?) to FIFA Head Honcho Gianni Infantino may have been simply a political leader sticking up for his nation’s team, but you can be certain, Gentle Reader, that the rest of the world won’t see it that way, especially after that utterly bizarre “FIFA Peace Prize” nonsense a few months ago.  Of course, Trump felt it necessary to brag about his intrusion into the process, thereby intensifying the suspicions of everyone who isn’t, well, American... and plenty of us who are. It’s also worth noting the irony that Balogun wouldn’t be playing for the US at all except for the birthright citizenry Trump seeks to overturn.  La la, how the life goes on.

Even Sepp Blatter, the former Exalted Poobah of FIFA, and one of the most loathsome creatures ever to slither across the planet’s surface, argues that “Red cards are not overturned by political phone calls. They are overturned by rules, evidence and independent bodies.  If a U.S. President intervenes with the FIFA President—and a player is suddenly cleared before a World Cup knockout match—the question is unavoidable: Quo vadis, FIFA?  Football must never become a playground for political power.”  True, Blatter is not the best spokesperson for such an argument, but he does have a point.

Tonight’s US match is against Belgium, whose coach, Rudi Garcia, and the Royal Belgian Football Association [RBFA] aren’t thrilled that their team will now face an American squad at full strength instead of one missing its greatest goal-scoring threat.  Garcia brought out the snark: “I didn’t know that 5 July was equal to 1 April at FIFA.”  Part of the Belgian complaint sounds whiny, however much they say they’re protecting the sanctity of the game rather than their own interests.  They do have a point, however, that they prepared for three days for tonight’s game with the assurance that Balogun wouldn’t play, so their entire defensive strategy has to be revised on short notice.

UEFA (the Union of European Football Associations) issued a statement which pulls no punches.  Here’s part of it:

Sometimes rules are open to interpretation. In this case not. A minimum automatic suspension of one match following a red card is not a discretionary option and does not require the decision of a competent body to be enacted. It is a principle embedded in regulations, which cannot be made subject to exceptions, let alone in the middle of a tournament where several other players have been in the same situation and regularly served their suspension…. We express our disbelief at such an unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable decision.

Tell us how you really feel, guys…

Former England star Wayne Rooney calls the reversal “an absolute disgrace” and “wrong in every way,” but he makes the further point that had FIFA lifted the red card altogether, which he calls “probably the right decision,” things would be different.  But leaving it while postponing the suspension is sort of the worst of both worlds.

There are plenty of other expressions of dismay, but… as a dear friend and former colleague was wont to say, “What is, is.”  Balogun will almost certainly play.  It would be a display of extraordinary sportsmanship were he not to do so, and that Instagram post with Michael Jackson’s “Bad” playing over the top certainly suggests that he’ll be in the lineup.  He will no doubt be booed by opposing fans for a situation he didn’t create.  Previously neutral fans will flock to whoever is playing the US.  Belgium will seek to appeal, but will almost certainly be unsuccessful.  Should the US prevail over Belgium, especially if Balogun plays a significant role, it and any subsequent success will be tainted.

Curmie finds himself agreeing with ESPN’s Mark Ogden that, as the headline says, “Nobody benefits from FIFA letting Balogun off the hook—not even the USMNT.”  The integrity of the competition is compromised, and “Who wants to win if victory becomes tainted by murky interventions that take place without any explanation or transparency?”

As US soccer fans, the best we can hope for is for an American victory in which Balogun is a non-factor—that we get goals from Christian Pulisic or Tim Weah or Weston McKennie or whoever… or a 0-0 draw going to a shootout the US wins despite Balogun missing his shot.  Not that Curmie wouldn’t be happy to see Flo get a hat trick, but it would be weird.

EDIT: It’s now Tuesday morning, and the US team got convincingly thumped last night.  Belgium was probably the better team.  They were certainly smarter, better-coached, and more prepared for the moment.  One suspects that the fact that they felt aggrieved by the FIFA reversal added to their resolve.  Would the US have fared better had the Balogun suspension not been reversed?  Probably, as they would have been the side that had been wronged by a bad call instead of the one benefitting from political interference.  

Would they have lost, anyway?  Probably.  But they’re unlikely to have been that sluggish, sloppy, and stupid.  It was embarrassing.  One of Curmie’s friends wrote that “Everything Trump touches turns to shit.”  Let’s just say there is little evidence to the contrary.

Pussy Riot Returns for Some Global Face-Time

It’s been a while since Pussy Riot were making headlines, and nearly six years since Curmie wrote about them except in passing. Curmie watched the documentary “Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer” a while back, but had otherwise all but forgotten their existence. Well, they never went away, and they just made headlines again, although the linkage between group and event came rather after the fact.

The best moment of the World Cup?  Just maybe.

Those of us who watched the World Cup final between France and Croatia also saw Pussy Riot at work, although most of us didn’t know it. The group has claimed responsibility for the pitch invasion early in the second half of the match. 

Television cameras cut away from the events on the field and the announcers muttered about the intrusion into the game (Curmie will hope it was only because they assumed the four people who ran onto the pitch were quotidian attention-seekers), especially as Croatia was mounting a counter-attack which just might have turned into a scoring opportunity. (And given that both of France’s first-half goals in a 4-2 victory were at least arguably the product of bad refereeing, that lost opportunity must have been especially galling for the Croats.) Olga Kurachyova, one of the protesters, apologized for interrupting the game: “It is a pity that we disrupted the sportsmen,” she said, but added that “FIFA is involved in unfair games unfortunately. FIFA is a friend of heads of states who carry out repression, who violate human rights.”

Indeed, two things need to be noted here. First, FIFA (the Fédération Internationale de Football Association) may be the only organization in the world as corrupt as the Russian government. Second, coverage of the Cup, at least in the several games Curmie saw, mentioned nary a word about how repressive the Russian régime really is, but there was plenty of ooh-ing and aah-ing about what a great tournament this was and how magnificent the facilities are. Coupled with President Trump’s clinging to his bromance with Putin despite increasing evidence that Russia did indeed meddle in the last US Presidential election, this whitewashed view of a country, or rather of a political machine run by a former KGB apparatchik, is more than a little disturbing.

Of course, few if any spectators knew that the pitch invaders were actually political protesters until after the fact. The four protestors didn’t fit with our (or at least with Curmie’s) presuppositions about Pussy Riot. Contrary to what Curmie had come to expect, they weren’t masked, they were wearing costumes (police uniforms), and there was a man included in the quartet of pitch-invaders. Turns out he’s Pyotr Verzilov, described by ABC (that’s the Australian Broadcasting Corporation) as “one of the group’s most prominent members,” not least because he is the husband of Nadya Tolokonnikova, one of the three Pussy Riot members sentenced to two years in prison for the protest at the Moscow Cathedral in 2012 (she was released after serving about 17 months).

On the other hand, the World Cup final is always one of the world’s most-watched events. Curmie can’t yet find final viewership numbers, but recent history suggests that once you add everyone watching at home and everyone watching in a bar or a watch party, close to a billion people are likely to be watching at any given moment. And whereas some television networks cut away as soon as the disturbance was noticed, others apparently did not. Moreover, Pussy Riot’s claim of responsibility seems to have made headlines around the world (well, not so much in the US, which cares little about soccer and less about how foreign governments treat their citizens).

Lest there be any question about what Pussy Riot was up to, here is the video released by the group upon announcing their responsibility. Since they (or someone) was kind enough to supply subtitles, Curmie will transcribe their commentary:

Dear friend! Perhaps you know that there is no rule of law in Russia, and any policeman may easily break into your life for no reason. FIFA World Cup demonstrated really well how good Russian policemen may behave. But what will happen once it ends?

The conclusion and the solution is the only one—you should fight for preventing fabrication of criminal accusations and arresting people for no reason. In order for this to happen you need one thing called political competition. A possibility to participate in your own country’s life and be elected—for everyone. All of these are very simple things. But you should decide for yourself what you personally can do, so that *your* Russia would become much more beautiful. 

And one more thing. Today is 11 years since the death of the poet Prigov. And he became part of Russian Culture with a cycle of poems about a policeman. Read about him.

Well, our guys are waiting for us on the football match, where we should tell everyone about the heavenly policeman and about the earthly policeman. And also a couple of important demands that you will see at the end of this video. Something about these two policemen is written in this video’s description below. [You can see the translated text of this statement here.]. Well, see you later, my friend. [Curmie has regularized some of the punctuation, but tried to keep everything else unchanged.]

This is the first half or so of the whole video. It is very strange, indeed. The three speakers, presumably the three women who stormed the field, are wearing police uniforms and sitting in an apartment with stuffed animals in the background; all three talk, but they’re all reading from a prepared script. One wears a balaclava; a second puts one on in the middle of the message; the third spends a good deal of time preening for the camera. Color Curmie confused by all of this, but what they say shouldn’t get lost in the clutter of other images.

The video then moves on to an extended clip of the group’s on-pitch activities, including a double high-five (high ten?) between Pussy Riot’s Veronika Nikulshina and French striker Kylian Mbappe (more on this later) before she was literally dragged off the field by security personnel.

Finally, an animated cat (get it? pussy?) appears on the screen with Pussy Riot’s demands:

When the earthly policeman enters the game, we demand to:

1. Let all political prisoners free.

2. Not imprison for “likes.”

3. Stop illegal arrests on rallies.

4. Allow political competition in the country.

5. Not fabricate criminal accusations and not keep people in jail for no reason.

6. Turn the earthly policeman into the heavenly policeman.

These objectives are, as might be expected, simultaneously noble, idealistic, romantic, and naïve. More importantly, they are chilling. Far too many of the problems these goals seek to remedy are creeping into American life. OK, I’d like to think we have few if any political prisoners. But whereas liking a Facebook post might not get you arrested, it could get you fired (and have that firing be upheld by the courts) or suspended from school; these would seem to be first cousins of actual arrest.

“Illegal arrests at rallies” is a loaded term, but I suspect that a lot of objective people would say that something very akin to that has happened not infrequently—Curmie is thinking of the #Occupy movement of a few years ago; those on the other side of the political fence would no doubt cite other, no less relevant, examples.

As for political competition… The Electoral College has gone in a different direction than the popular vote in two of the last three Presidential elections that didn’t involve an incumbent. California has one electoral vote per roughly 720,000 inhabitants; Wyoming one per roughly 190,000. Of course, if you don’t live in one of the dozen or so states which legitimately could go either way in a Presidential election, you have no real say at all. N.B., this is not to suggest that the elections of Presidents G. W. Bush or Trump were tainted; their opponents knew the rules. The Electoral College may be anachronistic and ultimately undemocratic, but it is the way of the world, and candidates need to plan and campaign accordingly. Both Al Gore and Hillary Clinton were bad candidates who ran bad campaigns; they, and the party bosses who ensured their nominations, bear full responsibility for their defeats.

Gerrymandering is endemic, to the point where in 2012 Democrats got 1,400,000 more votes than the Republicans for the House of Representatives but still had a 21 vote deficit in actual elected reps. Competitive elections still happen, but the odds are often stacked, and the results aren’t necessarily an accurate representation of the electorate’s wishes.

We in this country are seldom jailed “for no reason,” but you’re likely to be jailed longer for the same crime if you happen to be poor or black or Latinx or Muslim. Meanwhile, lying little shits like the Brock Turners of the world whine about how abused they are. We’re not Russia, but we’re closer than we should be.

Pussy Riot’s complaints are real, and they served as a useful reminder that Russia is a much uglier place than their government, or FIFA, or indeed Fox Sports, would have us believe. As Masha Gessen writes in The New Yorker,

… Pussy Riot became the only people to make a meaningful statement about Russian politics during the World Cup—and it came on the eve of Vladimir Putin’s triumphant meeting with Donald Trump. They also created, on one of the biggest stages in the world, an image of unjust and arbitrary authority, the sort with which a hundred and forty-five million Russians live day to day.

Before we close, though: the moment that several have called the highlight of the Cup. During the charge onto the field, protester Veronika Nikulshina swerved and headed towards French star Kylian Mbappe. Mbappe was named the tournament’s best young player after becoming the first teenager since Pele 60 years ago to score in a World Cup final. He is widely believed to be the sport’s next global superstar.

But while most of the players on both sides ignored the interruption and Croatian defender Dejan Lovren actively assisted in apprehending the protesters, Mbappe made eye contact. Was Mbappe curious? apprehensive? foolish? Did the fact that Ms. Nikulshina is a very attractive young woman matter? Did she know she was approaching a budding international celebrity? Did he know she was a protester rather than a garden variety hooligan? Or did they both somehow sense that they were granted a huge opportunity to help each other out? Curmie has no answers. But he does know this: that moment, the one you see in the photo at the top of this piece, will remain an enduring part of this World Cup. Fans loved it, and Mbappe was widely cheered for his actions. He was already a hero in more ways than one—both for his heroics on the field and for donating his entire World Cup earnings—over half a million dollars—to charity because he doesn’t think he should be paid to represent his country. His double high-five with Nikulshina was the icing on his good-guy cake.

Meanwhile, the interaction with Mbappe got Nikulshina and her colleagues a lot more publicity than the pitch invasion per se ever would have on its own. There was another benefit: the increased publicity made it difficult for the Russian authorities to come down as hard on the protesters as they might otherwise have done. Seriously, check out the grin on Nikulshina’s face when she hears her sentence (it’s at about the 30 second mark in the top video): 15 days imprisonment and a ban from attending sporting events for three years. Given the sentence Pussy Riot members received for the event at Moscow Cathedral, it certainly could have been worse. She also notes that Mbappe was “fantastic,” and that she thinks the interaction “brought luck to his team.” Well, the French side did score two very quick insurance goals, one by Mbappe himself, in very short order after the encounter. Just sayin’.

It would require a flight of fancy to believe that Mbappe was thinking about anything but football when he sent a right-footed shot screaming into the back of the net only 10 minutes or so after high-fiving Nikulshina, and there was no suggestion that “this goal is for Veronika,” or anything like that. Still, whatever we may think of Pussy Riot’s tactics, their cause is just and their valor is unquestioned. And young Mr. Mbappe seems to be an exceptional person as well as an exceptional athlete. Perhaps a little karma just might have been involved. If so, here’s hoping that it continues.

UPDATE: In other Pussy Riot news today, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Russia was wrong to jail the three Pussy Riot women from the 2012 protest at the Moscow Cathedral, and ordered Russia to pay some $57,000 in damages to Maria Alyokhina, Nadya Tolokonnikova, and Yekaterina Samutsevich.

FIFA and the Women's World Cup, Part II: Incompetence, Arrogance, and Sexism

Another image we'd like to remember.

So, we scratched the surface of FIFA’s colossal array of sexism, incompetence, venality, hubris, and all-purpose criminality yesterday, concluding with the observation that the monumental prize money disparity between the men’s and women’s World Cups is actually well down the list of FIFA’s crimes against the sport, against women, and against any reasonable conception of either law or ethics.

So what’s higher on the list? Well, for one thing, more garden-variety corruption. As Jeff Kassouf explains, FIFA cheerfully stacked the deck for what it perversely calls “sporting reasons.” First, it put the Canadian and American sides in the biggest venues in the biggest cities, ensuring not merely larger crowds (which could be considered a pragmatically good and ethically neutral endeavor), but also bigger partisan crowds, giving even more home-pitch advantage to the two North American sides.

Secondly, FIFA arranged the seeds in such a way that—oh, so coincidentally, of course—the only two seeds who, assuming they won through, wouldn’t have to face another seeded team until the semis were (who’da thunk it?) Canada and the USA. FIFA says this was unintentional.  I believe them.  I also believe in the tooth fairy. Of course, Canada was seeded only because they were the host nation, and they were derailed by England (who, ironically, would—or at least should have been seeded had the top six teams in fact been the seeds) in the quarterfinals. Meanwhile, two of the three top teams in the world—Germany and France—met each other in the quarters. And the winner got the other Top 3 team, the US, in the semis. That is, the world’s #1 team would need to beat #3 and then #2 to even make it to the finals, whereas world #4 Japan wouldn’t need to play anyone ranked above #6 to get there. (Overall #5 Sweden wasn’t seeded because FIFA whimsically thought it would be kind of cool to seed #7 Brazil instead.)

There are two fair ways of working out the seeds. You can power-rank: have the top two seeds play the two advancers who were second in their group, with #3 against #6, and #4 against #5. Or you can do what the men do, and randomize the process, so that every team has an equal chance of playing against a particularly strong opponent… or against a relatively weak one.  FIFA, of course, chose neither of these strategies.

As it happened, #1 Germany advanced to the semis on penalty kicks over France, and French star Camille Abily made her feelings known: “At some point FIFA has to stop taking women for idiots. I’m sorry but if they did a real draw maybe we would not have played Germany or the United States after. Inevitably, it’s frustrating even if we knew this from the start.” FIFA, of course, unabashedly admitted its perfidy: “[Teams] are seeded and allocated into specific groups for ticketing and promotion reasons…. The allocation of teams to venues, the ticketing and promotion plan and the ticket price strategy are among the key factors for the overall success of the event.” That’s asshole-speak for “of course, we created an unfair event. We’re FIFA. We can’t help ourselves.”

Sydney Leroux released this photo of what her legs look like

after playing on artificial turf.

Then there are the venues. FIFA and the Canadian Soccer Association decided it would be just a peachy idea to have all the games played on artificial turf. This was widely and accurately regarded as a sexist decision: as Abby Wambach argued, “the reality is, the men would never play (the World Cup) on field turf, so for me, it’s a women's rights issue, it’s an equality issue.” Here’s USA striker Sydney Leroux on the subject:

Between men and women… this is not equal. For us to be playing the biggest tournament for women’s soccer on artificial grass is unacceptable. The game is completely different. It’s fake. So you don’t know how it’s gonna bounce. You don’t know how the ball is gonna run. It’s terrible for your body. The constant pounding. You’re running pretty much on cement. … We’re the guinea pigs.

FIFA knows all that, of course. They just don’t give a shit. They’re FIFA, and in their feeble and deluded minds, they rule the universe. A coalition of at least 18 players, many of them stars, from eleven or more countries sued FIFA and the CSA to have the World Cup played, as it should be, on natural grass. The suit’s argument is that:

CSA and FIFA’s decision to hold the tournament on artificial turf is inherently discriminatory and injures an elite group of female athletes in three significant ways: (1) by forcing them to compete on a surface that fundamentally alters the way the game is played, (2) by subjecting them to unique and serious risks of injury, and (3) by devaluing their dignity, state of mind and self-respect as a result of requiring them to play on a second-class surface before tens of thousands of stadium spectators and a global broadcast audience.

Characteristically, FIFA didn’t care. FIFA deputy director of women’s competition Tatjana Haenni said “there’s no plan B” and that the World Cup would be played on artificial turf. Why? Because FIFA said so.

Eventually, when it became clear that FIFA was going to do whatever it damned pleased regardless of the outcome of the lawsuit (the players had made it clear they weren’t going to boycott), and it became clear that some of the players were being threatened with reprisals, the suit was withdrawn. FIFA responded, as might be expected, by lying: “we are totally committed to providing the best possible surface to enable everyone to enjoy a great footballing spectacle.” That was FIFA Secretary General Valcke, by the way. One way you can tell he was lying is that his statement so obviously flies in the face of the fact that literally no one thinks an artificial surface is the “best possible surface” for soccer. The other way is recognizing that he works for FIFA and that his lips were moving.

A more accurate assessment comes from Hampton Dellinger, one of the players’ attorneys: “The players are doing what FIFA and CSA have proven incapable of: putting the sport of soccer first.” And the players did achieve something—apart from calling (further) attention to what a repulsive gaggle of goons comprise the FIFA leadership. Goal-line technology was introduced, apparently as a direct result of the players’ suit, and the turf at BC Place in Vancouver, the site of the final, was indeed replaced by something a little less horrible.

But yeah… about that finals site… it didn’t require the former goalie in Curmie to notice that at the beginning of the final match, one end of the pitch was in shade, whereas at the other end, the goalkeeper would not only be staring into the sun, but shots might start in light, disappear (in relative terms) into shade, then re-appear in bright sunshine. Seriously, did no one at FIFA or CSA even check out the site for the final… like, you know, what it would look like in late afternoon in early July? This is the level of incompetence that would be unacceptable for a high school regional tournament, let alone a World Cup final.

Even the Fox announcers proclaimed that it was a huge advantage to be heading in one direction (right to left on our TV screens) in the first half. Carli Lloyd’s hat trick was scored in that direction. There were seven goals in the game. One came after shade covered the entire field. In five of the other six, the goaltender was looking into the sun. And seeing goalkeepers of the caliber of Solo (on Japan’s second goal) and Japan’s Ayumi Kaihori (on Lloyd’s midfield bomb) look so flat-footed: was that a coincidence, the product of their being human, after all, or did they literally have trouble seeing the ball? The point is that we’ll never know, and the idea that unequal playing conditions even might influence the outcome of the most important match in the entirety of a sport for four years—well, that doubt ought never enter our minds.

And finally, there was that medal ceremony. Sepp Blatter may not have been there in person, but the guy whose solution to making the women’s game more popular was to have them wear tighter shorts (really!) was certainly there in spirit. The medals and trophies were brought ought by a phalanx of young women in slinky black dresses. Curmie can’t improve on this description by Rachel Bertsche, so he’ll just repeat it:

When models in skimpy tight dresses walked onto the field dressed like Robert Palmer girls, fans on social media let out a collective groan. “Sepp Blatter’s last middle finger to women’s soccer is medal-bearing, black-dress-wearing models from Robert Palmer’s ‘Addicted to Love’ video,” sportswriter Tom Reed tweeted about the president of FIFA.

Don’t get me wrong. Curmie likes seeing attractive young women in sexy outfits as much as the next guy, but let’s not be ridiculous.

Curmie talks in his theatre history classes about the evolving meaning of the ancient Greek word hamartía. In the archaic age, it meant missing the mark, as, say, in archery. By the time of Aristotle, the word suggested more of an error in judgment, a mistake. A few centuries later, it became the word for “sin” in the Greek New Testament. The medal ceremony didn’t just miss the mark. It wasn’t merely a mistake in judgment. It was a sin.

None of this changes the magnificent effort put forth by so many of the athletes from all over the world, or the joy that we Americans take in a well-deserved victory by “our team.” FIFA did their level best to destroy their own sport, and they failed. Just as the demagogues and charlatans who gravitate towards political office in this country do not represent the spirit of the nation, neither do the petty despots of FIFA represent soccer (men’s or women’s), its players, or its fans. Despite all the chicanery, all the incompetence, all the arrogance of FIFA, our memories will be of this:

  

And that is how it should be.

FIFA and the Women's World Cup, Part I: Money, Fans, and Ethics

This is the way we’d like to remember the Women’s World Cup:

celebrating with Carli Lloyd.

[It turns out that even beginning to talk about the corruption, incompetence, and sexism of FIFA with respect to the Women’s World Cup takes a lot of space.  This is, then, a two-part essay.  More tomorrow.]

Like a lot of other folks, Curmie watched the finals of the Women’s World Cup a week or so ago. Unlike many of the others tuned into that match, however, Curmie also watched both semi-finals, and would have watched many of the preliminary games had he not been pretty much cut off from television access at the time.

The fact is, the women’s game is simply more fun to watch than the men’s, and not merely for the jingoistic reason that the US women are perennial contenders for whatever title they seek, whereas the men (to put it politely) are not. The women’s game is more team-oriented, more reliant on passing and positioning, more (dare I say it?) intellectual without being any less athletic. It’s a cleaner game, too, with fewer fouls—not just fewer fouls called, but fewer fouls, and if a female player goes down and doesn’t get up immediately, it means she’s really hurt, not faking paroxysms of agony to try to influence the referee. The respect for the game, for the opponent, for tradition, and for teammates is all considerably higher.

Witness the fact that Carli Lloyd, the very deserving Golden Ball recipient whose hat trick 15 minutes into the final was nothing short of incredible, handed over the captain’s armband to fading star (but still team leader) Abby Wambach when the latter entered the game with the victory no longer in doubt. And who actually hoisted the trophy after the award presentation? Lloyd? Nope. Golden Glove winner Hope Solo? Nope. Wambach and 40-year-old Christie Rampone, the only active member of the 1999 team that won the Cup in such dramatic fashion: Wambach and Rampone are the links to heritage, the veteran leaders; the best players on the team right now will, one hopes, have another opportunity. (Wambach also passed the captain’s armband on to Rampone, who was apparently selected to raise the trophy by herself, but insisted that Wambach join her.) Respect, tradition, team. Not to mention the utter casualness with which everyone associated with the team regards the fact that Wambach and fellow veteran Megan Rapinoe have both been out of the closet for years. Ah, if only all sports were like that.

Except…

Alas, there is a darker side to the feel-good stories. There’s the fact that the US’s star goalie Hope Solo is alleged to be a violent criminal, yet has not been subject to the same backlash as, say the NFL’s Adrian Peterson or Ray Rice. (Curmie’s netpal Jack Marshall does his usual excellent analysis here and here.) Because she’s white? female? Because her variation on domestic violence isn’t perceived as being symptomatic of a larger problem? If Solo were black and/or male, or a little less accomplished (or even a little less beautiful), would she be trotted out as one of the faces of the team, or even allowed to stay on it? All over America, little girls are hoping to grow up to be Hope Solo, and their parents (not to mention their sisters and nephews) are hoping they… uh… don’t.

There’s also the frankly rather sketchy officiating. (Yahoo’s Graham Watson agrees.) There were a total four penalty kicks awarded in the two semi-final games. You could make a pretty good case that none of them were merited. And apparently (I missed this game) the third-place game between England and Germany was an officiating disaster. Part of this is the fault of the referees themselves, of course, but part is also on FIFA (the Fédération Internationale de Football) for not insisting on replay for calls that have the potential to change the direction of a match in a heartbeat.

Ah, yes. FIFA. The perfect blend of corruption, arrogance, incompetence, sexism, and boorishness. Needless to say, the world’s governing body for soccer/football had been making the headlines for all the wrong reasons coming into the Women’s World Cup. There was the corruption scandal involving many of the organization’s most powerful officials. There’s the mounting evidence that not only was the awarding of the 2022 (men’s) World Cup to Qatar almost certainly the product of bribery, but that the facilities for that tournament are being constructed in hazardous, often deadly, conditions by what amounts to slave labor. Please note, Gentle Reader, that this is an entirely different set of allegations from those that led to multi-count indictments (and three convictions already) against over a dozen current and former FIFA officials, sports marketing mavens, and a broadcaster. Self-styled “Godfather of Women’s Football” Sepp Blatter (yes, that is indeed a name worthy of a James Bond villain), who was re-elected in May because of despite being one of the most contemptible creatures ever to trod the planet, resigned in the wake of that scandal, but who is still in charge until a successor is named several months hence, didn’t make the trip to Vancouver amid speculation that his absence—and that of his minion, Secretary General Jerome Valcke—was under the advice of his lawyer.

So what FIFA really needed was a well-attended, effectively administered, competitive, Women’s World Cup with good TV ratings—something to take the edge off, at least, until at least some of the brouhaha died down. They got it, at least to hear them tell it. The reality was a little different. This year’s version set total attendance records, but there are two problems: first, the comparison is between a 16-team, 32-game tournament in 1999 (the previous record-holder) and a 24-team, 52-game tournament in 2015. So, in 1999, attendance averaged over 37,000 fans per game to reach a total of about 1.2 million, compared to over 1.35 million this time around. But whereas 2015 version drew more fans, total, it averaged over 10,000 fewer fans per game. 

If this is a sell-out crowd,
a lot of people came disguised as empty seats.

And—problem #2—that’s after massaging the numbers. Early round games were sold as double-headers, and FIFA, ever the paragons of dubious virtue, double-dipped. Fans who bought a single ticket to see two games were counted twice, whether they saw both games or not. For example, some 32,716 people—a sell-out(!)—bought tickets to the Australia-Nigeria and USA-Sweden double bill. The latter game was in fact pretty close to full. The earlier game was half empty. FIFA consulted its magic pixie dust and declared that all 32K+ folks had attended both games: total attendance, therefore: 65,432.

The television numbers, which FIFA couldn’t control, were at least honest, and were certainly encouraging, at least in North America. The final, for example, was watched by some 26.7 million viewers in the US, eclipsing the old record of 26.5 million Americans who tuned in to the Germany-Argentina final in the men’s World Cup last year. But how many of those viewers would have watched had the US not reached the final (or even if it had not been a re-match of the 2011 final, a heart-breaking loss for the American side), and how many more would have watched the US men’s team had they advanced to games of real significance?

Still, as the New York Times article linked above points out, it is unquestionably significant that viewership for the USA-Japan final outdrew Game 7 of last year’s World Series and the clinching Game 6 of the NBA playoffs. There’s certainly interest. Here. As might be expected, countries whose teams didn’t fare as well didn’t stay tuned as much after their side had departed the competition. Still, the television numbers were generally pretty good all over. I can’t find final world-wide figures for the final, but the semis averaged over 12 million viewers world-wide, with about 2/3 of those viewers coming from the US. Assuming that same ratio for the final (global TV ratings haven’t been released, or at least I can’t find them), then we’re talking about a total television viewership of perhaps 40 million or so. That’s a lot of folks… until you compare it to the estimated 1 billion (yes, “billion” with a “b”) who watched last year’s men’s final. More importantly, whereas the women’s final this year probably attracted a few million viewers from countries other than the two participants, last year’s men’s final attracted a few hundred million audience members from elsewhere than Germany and Argentina.

And that’s an important statistic. Because whereas there is no doubt that FIFA is run by a cadre of sexist assholes, there is at least some economic sense to the disparity in payouts to the sides. Is there an outrageous disparity between the $2 million the US women won this year and the $35 million the German men brought home last year? Well, duh. But what ought that ratio be, and by what basis should we arrive at it? Is absolute parity the way to go? Could be. That’s what Wimbledon is doing, for example.

But a purely performance-based system also has a claim to being the fairest model. No one seriously suggests that the US women would fare well in a head-to-head contest even with the American men (who, by the way, brought home $8 million for getting knocked out in group play last year), let alone with a first-rate international squad. The women are at least as technically skilled, but high-end male athletes are bigger, faster and stronger than their female counterparts: that’s why there are separate teams for men and women (and there are few sports—wrestling, boxing, crew, weightlifting—in which smaller men get to compete only against each other, not against the big guys). If we’re really talking about some variation on equal pay for equal results, then shouldn’t a pedestrian men’s team make as much or more as a good women’s team they could still beat?

Or we could adopt entertainment value as our central criterion. Players who generate more income should be compensated according. That’s fair, too? Well, now we’re talking pure economics, and the more colorful (or sexy) players who attract a bigger crowd ought to get a bigger piece of the pie… regardless of outcome. And if we’re dealing with a strictly capitalistic model, then the fact that the men’s final generated a couple dozen times as many viewers as the women’s, both in the stands and in the worldwide television audience, suggests that they ought to be paid commensurately.

You know what?  Not really.  But at least there’s some rationale behind the disparity in prize money, which, it turns out, isn’t FIFA’s greatest crime. What is? That’s in part II of this post.  Watch this space.