ABSTRACT
We look skywards and gasp as a laser-guided reball lights up the Nevada night. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen,’ a disembodied voice booms around the packed auditorium, ‘welcome to Fifaland Las Vegas where Players Win and Winners Play!’ More fanfare. ‘Welcome to the Championship Game of the 2024 World Soccer Series!’ We had made our pilgrimage to Montevideo to visit the site of global football’s beginning. Now, in our dotage, we were in the pleasure capital of the world to witness its end. FIFA Incorporated had grown out of the rubble of its crumbling, amateur parent. This tainted body had nally collapsed after shenanigans and controversies that surrounded the awarding of the World Cup to Germany in 2006 and Saudi Arabia in 2010 were made public. Then, when two German journalists nally proved that presidential elections had been rigged, its very latest president was forced to step down. An American lawyer was installed as caretaker president. He at once abandoned FIFA’s charitable façade and oated the organisation as a limited company on the world’s stock markets. He raised billions of dollars, mostly from the media and marketing industries which already had a huge stake in making sure international football, in one form or another, survived. One by one the confederations, which were by now totally dominated by business interests, followed suit and were themselves gobbled up by FIFA Incorporated.
