Are they insane?
Yesterday, or quarta feira or tomrorrow, it doesn't matter, the 2015 Copa America, Brazil, changed its name to 2015 Copa America, Chile. It won't be until 2019 when what was to have happened in 2015 actually occurs, but by then it may be too late for Brazil 2015 to have happened in the first place. Like that sentence, it doesn't make any damn sense at all.
Are we so dead that this goes unnoticed?
Here's a nutshell of events that led up to Chile 2015. That nutshell is stuck in your throat, so read quickly.
FIFA elections in 2010 pit the Havelange-Texeira clan against Blatter. Blatter, Havlelange's criado, had learned the master's game too well, using his own involvement in the ISL/FIFA scandals to twist the arms of the Brazilians, who had thrown their lot in with Quatar's bin Hamman. Bin Hamman gets a life ban for corruption, Texeira is damaged but not out. Meanshile, his cozy assocation with Lula meant nothing to Dilma and R.T. was suddenly like a dog begging for attention after being shut out of the master's house. Without political coverage at home or in Switzerland, Texeira gets peptic as Brazil 2014 unfulrs into a three sheet shite storm. Say that five times while you're thinking: Russia 2018, Quatar 2022. Huffing and puffing, Texeira organized his pill box more than the Local Organizing Committee. Sick, tired and longing for an endless series of injections in Miami, Texeira gets a unanimous vote of confidence form the 27 federations, supposedly with the promise that he would not resign. The next week, Ricky claims sicky, resigns from the CBF and the LOC, replacing himself with a 78 year old patsy where he could very have well done with a clown, with apologies to Ronaldo. The following week, he resigned from the FIFA Executive Committee, redeeming himself by putting a clown where he could have put a patsy. The week after, the "new" CBF president, after meeting with Texeiras friends at CONMEBOL, calmly announces that the 2015 quadrennial, already scheduled to take place in the non-World Cup cities of Goais and Belem, will not bring unending streams of tourist money, solve poverty, eradicate pollution, resolve transportation ills or cure any dangerous tendiencies to clarity of thought and action until the last year of Brazil's twinkling teens.
The official reasoning for the shift was that the interminable sequence of mega-events would interrupt the Brazilian football calendar four consecutive years. Instead of opening the possibility of a calendar reform which most commentators see as the primary mechanism to give clubs more autonomy and reduce the deprecations of the European transfer market on Brazilian players. When there is no posibility of re-thinking, other things need to happen. When there is no accountability, no mechanism of interaction what can we reasonably hope for? Change the Brazilian football schedule and the argument for changing the Copa America disapepars, leaving this as yet another arbitrary decision that perpetuates the status quo.
No one is willing to recognize the right of the fan to have a voice in the running of fooball, or sport in general. Even Carta Capital, which published an expose on the recent change of powers at the CBF, giving some god insight into the new power players, only ever keeps the discussion at the level of institutional big-wigs. Yet, even if those possibilities were there, would people use them? In Rio, not if it's raining.
It is difficult to tell how large these shake-ups in Brazilian sport are. It may be like the 2008 financial crisis when Obama decided to restore to full health and replicate with even more nitidez the nearly collapsed banking system instead of using the moment to make meaningful reforms. It may be that some of the older thoroughly rotten fruit is falling of a tree whose roots are ever more intertwined. This tree is certainly a jaca, which may be why all of these guys look so good.
100,000 formigas to the stadium!
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