#soccery

I hate sports. I abhor it as an institution and think they’re boring as fuck anyway.

For one, I think they’re a major distraction for working people to misdirect their anger and waste their organizing potential over. Why be mad about capitalism when your team lost the sports ball? People spend way too much time talking about and getting invested in sports to care about politics or world affairs.

Two, sports are a toxic presence in society when they benefit from tax money, period. I mean, do you really think sports are necessary? The same way schools and hospitals and roads and safety nets are necessary? If you want to watch people throw balls far, then pay for it with private money. I understand that major sporting events are paid for in part by sponsors, but cities and countries also use a lot of their own resources to help build stadiums. That is money that could be used to end poverty in the cities they’re building in.

Three, they’re boring as fuck and probably indicative of character flaws, but that’s not what I’m going to try to argue right now.

Instead, I want to calmly and intelligently bitch about the World Cup and how you’re probably giving it a good name (which is a bad thing).

To start off, Brazil has already spent seven billion reals on the World Cup. That’s around $3.1 billion in U.S. dollars. That’s money that hospitals, schools, and a combined population of Brazilians who live in slums that exceeds the entire populations of London, Birmingham, and Manchester, will never see.  

Brazillian congressman and former World Cup ball kicker, Romario says the costs will be much larger, saying that the value of all works for the World Cup will reach $100 billion, or $46 billion in U.S. dollars. Romario viaesportes.r7.com:

So I wonder: a country that will spend $ 100 billion on an event like the World Cup could not spend at least 20% of that money, which would be feasible, and put in our public hospitals, our schools, and in institutions such as Apae Pestalozzi Association, who need? Need not even be 20%. With 10% of U.S. $ 100 billion you solve, perhaps 80% of the problems of these areas in each state. Yet another thing. When it comes to urban mobility works, I do not see anyone talking about accessibility. Accessibility in Brazil is only for those who are wheelchair-bound, one speaks only of ramps and an elevator. Only having blind, deaf have, have dumb, obese, has several other deficiencies that ramps and lifts will not help. FIFA asks, in the specification, which is made ​​accessible in stadiums. But FIFA does not speak it at airports and in the cities or in the works. Finally, we will spend $ 100 billion and will not help many in need. 

Building the stadiums are also forcing around 250,000 out of their homes to make way for the construction. That’s 250,000 who are being forcibly evicted from their homes so men can kick a ball around and so you can watch them do it.

Brazilian architect, Anthony LIng, explains in The Daily Caller:

The large majority of them live in informal communities that happen to be in public land instead of private land. That detail eliminates their legal right of homesteading, which had it been private land, they would have earned long ago. Most of the mass evictions aren’t in recent communities, but in real neighborhoods that should have been formally recognized a long time ago. After a century of not receiving their property titles or any public investment, the oldest of them – and possibly the first Brazilian favela – Morro da Providência in Rio de Janeiro — is now getting R$ 75 million to build a cable car to serve tourists. Instead of trying to solve their problems, the city will create a spectacle for the elite, removing people and houses that stand in the way.

Now, a lot of people will say that sports a point of pride for a nation, but what is better to be proud of? Hosting ball games, or treating your most vulnerable, desperate, and unfortunate people with dignity and respect? I don’t know about you, radical readers, but if I were president of a nation, I would be far more proud of my country for erasing poverty than hosting the world’s biggest waste of money. 

Controversy over the stadium’s construction doesn’t end with the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of Brazilians. During construction in November 2013, two workers were killed when a crane crashed into the stadium. Daze Zirn reported to In These Times: 

When I was in Brazil, I spoke with workers who were deeply concerned about the rush to build 12 new “FIFA-quality” World Cup stadiums. Their concern did not stem only from the fact that this country already has no shortage of well-equipped fields. They were also concerned about the round-the-clock hours, the exhaustion of those operating heavy machinery, and the unsafe working conditions. Then, in November 2013, a crane collapsed into Arena Corinthians (Corinthians Stadium) in São Paulo, sending an avalanche of newly cemented concrete to the earth below. This tragedy, which took the lives of two men, Fabio Luiz Pereira and Ronaldo Oliveira dos Santos, could have been far worse. One of their coworkers, José Mario da Silva, said, “I walked right underneath the crane on the way to lunch. If it hadn’t collapsed at lunchtime, a lot more people would have died.”

Weeks after the accident, we also learned that the crane operator had been working for 18 straight days, just another cog in Brazil’s 24/7 sprint to complete stadium construction. Brazil’s sports minister, Aldo Rebelo, said nothing after the tragedy about confronting fatigue or labor abuses on work sites. Instead, he assured the media that “the stadiums shall be built on time.” As for the dead, Rebelo sent a tweet expressing “solidarity with the families of the victims.” The only true solidarity that the government has shown, however, has been with FIFA—to get the stadiums done, no matter the cost.

Finally, Zirn also reported on the damage the World Cup is doing to the rainforests of Brazil:

The environment is an extremely sensitive subject in Brazil, home to the “lungs of the earth.” The World Cup—which is a national operation, as opposed to the Rio-centric Olympics—means greater stress on this critical ecosystem. This can be seen most sharply in the efforts to build a “FIFA-quality stadium” in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. Brazil spent $295 million, about 25 percent more than the original estimates, while uprooting acres of the most ecologically delicate region on the planet.

The government is looking for options for the stadium after the World Cup that seem fiscally sound. One idea being floated is to turn the entire stadium into a massive open-air prison—a use with a notoriously bloody echo in Latin American history, one not lost on those protesting the priorities of both FIFA and the Brazilian government.

Let me remind you that these stadiums are going to serve their purpose once the World Cup has ended. After the games are over, they will have used all of their utility. Officials in Brazil are kicking around ideas over how to keep up their usefulness, but their only legitimate use after the games might be to be converted as housing for everyone who was evicted and the country’s poor. 

So, considering all of the human rights violations, the misuse of public funds, and the environmental damage the World Cup has been responsible for, it should be pretty obvious that endorsing it or participating in any of the discussions or comments about the games or events is willfully engaging in something whose operations have had massive human costs. If that’s not obvious, maybe I can clarify:

When you participate in conversations about the World Cup over twitter, facebook, tumblr, or any social media site, what you’re doing is contributing to the narrative that the World Cup is nothing but a sporting event that everyone should be happy about and celebrate. You’re helping spread an image of the World Cup that comes without the death, the environmental devastation, the corruption in public spending, the forced homelessness on hundreds of thousands of people, and the fury and rage that Brazilians are demonstrating in reaction to all of this collateral damage that the World Cup is responsible for.The World Cup is abound with controversies, and mindlessly commenting on the last save or goal helps paint an incomplete picture about everything the World Cup has wrought—everything from the hype to the hell. 

So instead, get educated about the human costs of the World Cup and take to your social media sites. Instead of updating everyone’s newsfeeds about the latest “ball stoppage” or “ball in net point,” provide links to articles that investigate the controversies surrounding the World Cup and proliferate the damage it has done.

This goes double to lefty journos like David Zirn who have power and influence and shape what authoritarian liberals think based on what they tweet or write—so if their journo heroes and harbingers of truth are apparently just enjoying a soccer match without also talking about the calamitous consequences of building the stadium that the match took place in, then any possibility of a discussion over the illegitimacy of sports in our society or as a benefactor of public money is just wasted, because if lefty journalists—whose job it is to report on and discuss issues of human rights abuses (see: World Cup)—aren’t combating the widespread masturbation of how cool the World Cup with facts about how deadly and cruel it is, then it kind of seems like the stories out there about the World Cup controversies are really only for the news sites and magazines, when they belong in public discourse with a far greater urgency than the dangerously distracted hootin’ and hollerin’ of literally mostly everybody babbling about how their country failed/”made them so proud” in the last ball round.

People like to consume news and digest world affairs on very strict schedules. Reading about worker deaths during the construction of the stadiums or the evictions of hundreds of thousands of Brazilians might be a big deal and even make them think—that is until the article is over. After that, sympathy and critical thinking stops and life resumes—and since the World Cup is such a big part of peoples’ lives nowadays, they resume their participation in it the only way know how, which is celebrating it rather than criticizing it or even boycotting it based on what they read this morning before work.

If this is hard to understand, please try to imagine that Walmart has been exposed to have been donating money to several organizations that all have neo-nazi ties and have been in trouble in the news recently over racial violence and other discrimination. Now wouldn’t that rob Walmart of their basically bankrupt ethical credibility? Say you read that article and say “wow, this is atrocious! What an evil company!” and then throw the newspaper into the trash outside the Walmart vestibule and proceed to go inside to save back on those sweet, tasty rollback deals. Isn’t that kind of shitty to, at the very least, ignore Walmart’s unethical doings and even lend an implicit gesture of forgiveness by continuing to shop there? That’s exactly what people do when they participate in the World Cup aware of the controversies behind it. 

And this isn’t a complicated case like with Walmart where you may be compromised to shop there because you’re on a budget and it’s close to your home and you have no gas in your car. You are in no way compromised to participate in World Cup events or gimmicks. You just do because you love sports more than human rights violations.

The bad news about the World Cup is really bad news, and if you know that and fail to even engage in the laziest form of boycotting by just not discussing it on social media to stop lending legitimacy to it as a worthy world wide event, then your ethical system is shit.