How delicious: Sepp Blatter has kicked off Fifa's Arab Spring in Brazil

by Marina Hyde

Even now, you just know some Nike executive is storyboarding a World Cup advert which begins with some lovable little favela urchin kicking a ball to his barefoot friend, who in turn offloads it to someone whom football makes equally carefree about their lot, and 87 passes later – via everyone from Pelé to Gisele Bündchen – it ends up in the Maracanã with Neymar chipping it sublimely into the net. Everybody wins. Don't they?

 The ongoing civil unrest in Brazil disputes this reading most inconveniently. Bizarrely, many citizens in this carefree, barefoot samba nation appear to be discomfited by such minor irritations as disease, corruption, and their inability to get from A to B.

 Romário has posted a YouTube video attacking Fifa as an entity that sets up "a state within a state". (Without wishing to pull up the striker-turned-politician on his political science, the classification isn't perfectly accurate: Fifa is more of a parasite state that seeks a constant supply of host states – or host nations, as it prefers to refer to them. Like the IOC, it is a supranational body which attaches itself to such lesser organisms for its own enrichment, before departing in search of fresh meat.


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How delicious: Sepp Blatter has kicked off Fifa's Arab Spring in Brazil | Marina Hyde | Football | The Guardian: