Sweet FA

I don’t like the Mail on Sunday. It’s worse than the Daily Mail and I don’t like that either. You’d have thought the Sunday edition would give the right wing politics and their holier than thou attitude a rest for one day a week. Have a liberal, laid back Sunday. But no. If it’s not enough for them to go on and on about asylum seekers, dole scroungers and hoodies, now they’ve gone and buggered up any chance England had of hosting the world cup in 2018.

It was all going so well. The bid seemed to be moving in the right direction. On May 10^th, England’s eight and a half kilogram, seventeen hundred and fifty two page (what the hell is in it? Is it really large print? Are there lots of large photos? Is it like a bumper edition of The Sun?) 2018 world cup bid document and supporting materials (1752 pages were apparently not enough) left Wembley Stadium in a highly specialized vehicle (What? How specialized? Specifically designed to carry world cup bid documents? Is that financially viable?). The documents were secured in forty-two specially designed flight cases (is this some sort of joke?). Four days later, David Beckham (I don’t think he was driving the truck but who knows) personally delivered them to Sepp Blatter in Geneva.

(I’d like to say at this point that much as I’d like the World Cup to come to this country, I can’t help thinking that our priorities are a bit skewed. Government documents giving the names and addresses of every person receiving child benefit have been left on the top deck of a London bus and yet documents relating to a football tournament are “secured in forty-two specially designed flight cases” in a “highly specialized vehicle”.)

Anyway, having gone to all that trouble of making sure the bid arrived in Sepp Blatter’s (no doubt manicured) hands in pristine condition, five days later, on FA Cup final day, we learnt from The Mail on Sunday that the chairman of the bid team Lord Triesman had been secretly taped by a woman, making scurrilous remarks about the corruption of the Spanish and the Russians (Russian corruption. I’m shocked to my very core). All hell broke loose and he promptly resigned.

Don’t get me wrong. I find the FA intensely annoying. These are the people who paid almost one billion pounds for a football stadium with an arch that, if you’re driving on the North Circular at night looks very nice, but has a pitch that you can’t play football on. These are the people who’ve put the England team in a hotel in South Africa costing one thousand pounds per room per night while the five-times world champions Brazil are staying in a hotel costing just over one hundred. It’s not like the England boys will be entertaining (well perhaps John Terry when the players wives turn up but not the others). All they’re doing in there is sleeping and playing the playstation and you can do that in someone’s spare room.

And Lord Triesman definitely should have chosen his friends more carefully. Yes he got royally shat on by the young woman who taped their lunchtime conversation. I have nothing but contempt for her. People say things in private that they’d never say if they knew a microphone was switched on. As Gordon Brown found out to his cost not two weeks ago. But did anyone who loves football look at Lord Triesman and think ‘he’s the man who we want to represent our national sport’?

So like I say, I’m no fan of the FA. But if I had to spend eternity in an FA board meeting or one day in an editorial meeting with The Mail on Sunday, it’ll be the football for me. By breaking this story, The Mail on Sunday may have handed the 2018 world cup to Spain, a country with a great football team but the most racist fans in Europe. Who probably all read the Spanish equivalent of The Mail on Sunday.