“Fifa is planning to sell a roughly 20 per cent stake in a new commercial entity valued at about $20bn, as the governing body’s president Gianni Infantino seeks to capitalise further on this summer’s lucrative and controversial World Cup.”
I know this is an energy blog and I urge patience, as I open today’s rant with the admission the above was not a piece of news I could have ever imagined reading. Reported by the Financial Times, FIFA’s brilliant new idea is to complete the transformation of a sport into a product to be packaged and sold to whoever pays the highest price.
I will not dwell on the strong Trump motif that runs through the story because there is some dirt I will not touch. What I will dwell on is the stunning tone-deafness of the world football federation and the fact it is a reflection of a much broader tendency towards tone-deafness in a context that strongly invites brilliant pitch.
In a nutshell: after FIFA treated the World Cup as a playground toy in the hands of a bully, it completely ignored the criticism, the social media backlash and the massive petition to kick a certain team out of future Cups, it went a hundred steps further by effectively declaring it now plans to become a business enterprise, and to hell with the idea of sports in general. (Yes, it is a business to all intents and purposes but it’s registered as a nonprofit.)
Meanwhile, in a galaxy not all that far away, the European Commission — this is our energy angle for today, in case you’ve drifted off — announced “New EU energy rules: cleaner, more secure energy and stronger consumer protection”.
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