Interesting turn up for the books from the top man. So here he is defending the Qatari regime and their human rights abuses of almost everybody in the country, from women to gays and lesbians and migrants too.
Infantino, the boss of world soccer’s governing body, looked on glumly as he addressed hundreds of journalists in Doha, Qatar, Saturday.
“We are taught many lessons from Europeans, from the Western world,” he said, referring to criticisms of Qatar’s human rights record.
“What we Europeans have been doing for the last 3000 years, we should be apologizing for the next 3000 years before starting to give moral lessons.”
Despite the opening match kicking off on November 20, Infantino barely spoke about soccer and focused his attention on what he called the “hypocrisy” of Western criticism.
Yes well I have just seen a documentary about the corruption of the voting. Half the FIFA Delegating committee is wanted by the FBI as there are warrants for their arrest.
The US Gov has issued legal proceedings against FIFA. Australia has also started legal proceedings and chasing over 100 million dollars in damages. both US, and Australia had bids - the Australian bid costing some 60 million.
I do know that Australia was debating sanctioning FIFA completely. The argument from US and Australia is that the voting was rigged.
The only person that came out clean was Platini, who was ordered to vote for QATAR by Sarkhozy in order to sign a gas deal. There was a warrant against Platini as well, but he is now in the clear.
The Cyprus FIFA Delegate, Marios Likavitis, was allegedly paif 27 million Euro from QATAR to buy some vacant land. I am not sure if Marios is wanted by the FBI, but he should not ever travel to the US ever just in case because according to the FBI, he is a man of interest and that's FBI code for "wanted".
All the African and South American delegates were paid 1.6 million Euro for their votes.
Some other European delegates were also offered the same. Even the Oceania Delegate was bribed, but that phone conversation was tapped by the Americans and released resulting in his vote being banned. This guy, from NZ was going to vote for QATAR instead of Australia which would be the norm.
So this has been very damaging to FIFA.
It would have been better for the World Cup to be hosted by either US or Australia, because both countries are massive growth markets for Footbal. These are the new frontiers for FIFA to expand into and the sporting market in both countries is massive. But in the end, it has become a real mess.
In my opinion, both Australia and US need to withdraw from FIFA. Pay no fees, and ban all FIFA events from the US and Australia, and also ban telecasting rights of TV Rights of the World Cup, and FIFA Tournament or event from US and Australian TV. That would result in annual TV revenue losses of tens of millions per year to FIFA.