World Cup soccer in Brazil this summer! I’m hoping that, if Randinho can’t come back to keep us up to date, Richard Mayhew will fill in for BJ’s football fans.
Trash talk is warming up already:
… Brazilian sports minister Aldo Rebelo admitted the World Cup faces “serious” security problems and then, in an attempt to play down those concerns, pointed out that the country was not a war zone like Iraq or Afghanistan…
“We all have our tragedies and challenges, serious problems relating to security,” said Rebelo as he embarked on a spirited defence of Brazil, which is racing to be ready to host the World Cup from June 12 and has had to deal with years of negative press headlines.
That includes drafting a huge security force of 150,000 police and 20,000 private security agents for a tournament expected to attract some three million Brazilians and 600,000 foreign tourists.
But calling for perspective, he said: “I don’t think the English will confront greater threats in Manaus than in the Iraqi provinces or Afghanistan, where they recently lost hundreds of young soldiers.”
He did though concede that in Rio in particular, which hosts seven games including the final on July 13, there is “day-to-day civil violence … but we are taking precautions”….
And then there’s the next Cup, scheduled for 2022. Per The Wire:
In rare moment of diplomatic honesty, FIFA president Sepp Blatter has confessed that the selection of Qatar as host of 2022 World Cup was a “mistake.” In a Swiss television interview on Friday, Blatter was asked if FIFA was wrong to hold the biggest soccer tournament in the world in one of the hottest deserts on Earth in the middle of the summer. “Of course, it was a mistake,” Blatter responded, adding, “You know, one makes a lot of mistakes in life.”
The World Cup, of course, is a month-long summer tournament for a sport that is traditionally played outdoors. Qatar, being on the Arabian Peninsula, is extremely hot during that time of the year: Temperatures often reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit during the day in June and July. That is not ideal weather for playing soccer, which means that Qatar had to promise to build air conditioned stadiums and a transport system to let players and spectators arrive at the venues without melting…
Blatter said that the decision to give Qatar the tournament in the face of those concerns came down to “political” considerations, but he denies accusations that the World Cup was “bought.”…
Which gives me the chance to recommend, once again, David Roth’s five-part Qatar Chronicles at SB Nation:
Well, it’s complicated. Just because it’s FIFA and it’s the World Cup and so of course it’s complicated. But a short version I guess would be that FIFA is FIFA, which is to say it’s this sort of smuggo mafia of puffy, predatory globo-elite males in suits, all of them dedicated to extracting some sort of rent from the world’s totally helpless and justified love for soccer. And FIFA being FIFA, it has all these wildly un-transparent internal processes — everything done by design in secret, endless dodgy handshake deals between men whose handshakes are mostly worthless — that seem almost to incent lawlessness.
And so the result of this is that the very fact that the World Cup is awarded in the way that it is, by the people that award it, creates this ambient sense of corruption. It’s just very difficult to imagine this bunch of crooks using the system they built to make a reasonable decision for the right reasons. And this is true even if they make the right decision!…
***********
The Preakness Stakes tv coverage has just started. I assume that there’s also baseball / hockey / other sports stuff happening as well, but I’m gonna leave that for Cole or one of the other frontpagers, because we’ve got another garden center to visit.
Baud
The British survived Dunkirk, they can survive Rio!
c u n d gulag
HOCKEY!
“LET’S GO RANGERS!
STOMP! STOMP!! STOMP-STOMP-STOMP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Elizabelle
And them horsies are running.
As you mentioned.
Beautiful, crisp sunny day for those drinking in the infield.
Villago Delenda Est
“It’s not like we’re craaazy Muslim fanatics who object to shorts or collarless shirts or anything”, he did not add.
As for Qatar 2022 being a “mistake”? Uh, no shit, Sepp “Sherlock” Blatter! When did you get hit by the cluetrain?
Roger Moore
That’s actually the Cup after next. The next one is in 2018 in Russia. I hope they have some good contingency plans in place.
Roger Moore
@Villago Delenda Est:
After the bribes had been thoroughly laundered and put into safe investments.
Mudge
Not to mention all of the construction workers that have died building those stadiums.
raven
The Braves couldn’t hit their hat size.
Villago Delenda Est
@Roger Moore: Oh, great. 2018 in Russia, home of freedom and rainbow tolerance.
It doesn’t get much better than this. FIFA really is a racket. I’m surprised the Five Families haven’t taken these mooks to court for business model infringement.
Mike E
@c u n d gulag: Sweet salchowing Santa but that was an ass-kicking of the “Yankees of hockey”…break up the Rangers!
dedc79
@c u n d gulag: In past seasons, the Rangers would follow up this kind of performance by getting shutout. Hoping this is the season where they change that.
Amir Khalid
Ahem. The next FIFA World Cup is scheduled for 2018, and is to be hosted by Russia. (Which, by the way, will present an interesting situation for the international community if Vladimir Putin is still in power and causing trouble with Russia’s neighbours. You might remember the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, in the wake of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan.) The 2022 World Cup in Qatar is the one after that.
That said, awarding the World Cup to a country where it’s way too hot to play football is utterly preposterous in so many ways. I’m still a little surprised that even FIFA’s legendarily corrupt ruling clique would do it. I was expecting them, being what they are, not to worry overmuch about the labour abuses in Qatar’s massive stadium-building project. But the tech needed to air-condition entire football stadiums without consuming frightening amounts of electricity hasn’t been developed yet, and they risk some of the world’s most valuable sporting talents dying of heatstroke out there.
SRW1
Screw Sepp Blatter and the whole corrupt bunch at FIFA.
Cacti
The local D’backs have hired Tony La Russa in a front office position.
Certainly couldn’t make the team any worse.
pseudonymous in nc
Yeah, the 2022 decision was a bribe too far: the old FIFA approach at least had plausible deniability on top of the backhanders.
Was odd to watch the title decider in Spain today and see Atletico (sponsors: Azerbaijan) play Barcelona (sponsors: Qatar Airways).
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Amir Khalid:
Not quite true. Chase Field, home of baseball’s Arizona Diamodbacks, has fought back nature. The roof is closed three hours before the game, and the HVAC drops the temps by 30 degrees by game time. Also, there’s plumbing in all the railings there that spritzes out streams of water that cool the fans and players in the dugouts. I suspect it ain’t cheap, though.
Bobby B.
EAT MY GOAL
THAT WAS LIQUID FOOTBALL
[Alan Partridge]
John O
Since California Chrome was the 3 horse, I put $20 down on my traditional birthday trifecta bet. C’mon, 3-1-7!
(My first bet on the ponies in probably 5 years. Needed something to keep me interested during the interminable 2 hours of pre-race coverage for a 2 minute race.)
HUGE longshot, huge payoff. I almost got it once at Arlington Park, with the 7 horse fading to 4th in the last 100 yards.
Amir Khalid
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
I bet it consumes an enormous amount of power (and water) to cool the Diamondbacks’ stadium for home games. Water is terribly expensive in the desert parts of the Middle East. There will be 64 matches played in the 2022 World Cup over four weeks; some of them will need to be played simultaneously. Do the Diamondbacks play at the same time as another team in their city?
I stand by my assertion that without new tech, cooling the stadia in Qatar will require frightening amounts of energy, maybe even more than the electricity grid can hope to deliver. And because of this, FIFA has been considering having the World Cup there in the (Northern Hemisphere) winter — which would royally fuck up the playing season all over the planet.
Elizabelle
@John O:
Yea California Chrome!
Wasn’t paying attention to the 1 and 7 horses.
Does that make you a St. Paddy’s Day baby?
Or merely 107 years old?
burnspbesq
Alas, we have seen the last of The Thompson Show. Notre Dame came back from five goals down in the fourth quarter to beat Albany in OT.
Lyle will be back for one more year, but Miles and Ty are done (and both are graduating on time, no small feat for Rez-educated Native kids). It may be a very long time before the lacrosse world sees anything like this again.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Amir Khalid:
Well, they do play 81 home games there every season, so I’ve got to figure they found a way to keep the costs down.
As it is in Phoenix.
There are probably times when the D-Backs home schedule has overlapped with that of the Suns (NBA) and Coyotes (NHL) in the spring, and with the Cardinals (NFL) and Arizona State University Sun Devils (NCAA football) in the fall. And when you add the power use then to that all across a metropolitan area with a population of over 4 million people, most of whom are running their own air conditioning…But I’ll concede this: Phoenix’s power grid has grown to facilitate that much power usage, where Qatar will have to get their grid purpose-built for the WC.
Just as it does to MLS and the Russian leagues when held in the summer. Can’t really play footie in Moscow, NYC, Chicago and St. Petersburg from December through March (or November through April, really).
2liberal
re: randinho / mayhew and SOCCER / FUTBOL
whoever takes up this burden i hope they stop trolling this board and start using the correct name for the sport in the USA in their headers
Amir Khalid
@2liberal:
It’s not trolling to call football “football”.
Amir Khalid
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
MLS plays in the summer because, as I recall, the normal August to May season is already taken up in the US by other, longer-established sports. I think the reason for summer football in Russia is that in much of the country the winter is far too cold. The US and Russia are very much in the minority here. In the rest of the world, particularly the big-money markets of Europe and South America, it’s August-May.
burnspbesq
@Amir Khalid:
If the US were to play August – May there would be severe weather in many MLS cities both early in the year and in midwinter. Temperatures of 35 Celsius or more are common in Miami, Houston, Dallas, Denver, Kansas City, and Los Angeles from August through October. Conversely, temperatures of minus 15 celsius or lower are common from December through April in Montreal, Toronto, Boston, Columbus, Chicago, Kansas City, and Denver.
It’s a big continent, and the weather nearly always sucks in at least a couple of MLS cities. We had temperatures of almost 40 Celsius in Los Angeles this week.
Facilities are much less of an issue than they once were. IIRC, only two MLS clubs (New England and Vancouver) ground-share with a NFL or CFL team.
Larv
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
There’s also a huge difference between playing baseball in that kind of heat and playing soccer. In baseball you only run in short bursts, and you have breaks after every half inning. In soccer at some positions you’re almost always running, and the game doesn’t provide much in the way of breaks for rehydration.
Do you have a link for the Diamondbacks stadium info? You say that they’re able to bring the temp down ~30 degrees by gametime, but I’m wondering if it stays there. Can they keep it there once all the fans are in the stadium radiating body heat, or does it climb back up? Even if they are able to bring the temp down 20-30 degrees, in Qatar that may only get them to 80-90 for a daytime game. That will make for very umcomfortable, in not outright dangerous, conditions. I think it’s almost guaranteed that they’ll see at least a couple cases of serious heatstroke (at best).
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Amir Khalid:
If the MLS played in the winter, there would be no games played in NYC (okay, New Jersey), Chicago, Boston, or Philadelphia due to frozen pitches. Probably none in Kansas City or Columbus, either. As far as conflicting with the other big sports here, MLS’s schedule overlaps with the end of the basketball and hockey seasons, the beginning of the (American) football- pro,college and high school- schedules, and the entirety of the baseball schedule.
What strikes me as funny is that football is traditionally played in late August through early May because the Brits thought that their summers were too warm for the sport. The summer heatwaves they’ve been experiencing over the past decade or so have been typical summer days in the northern tier of the US since there’s been a US.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Larv:
First, a link. Sorry, but it doesn’t address how much the temps rise once the stadium is filled. My experiences at the Silverdome in early Septembers inform me that, yes, the temps will go up- but the Silverdome never had the rails with plumbing in them either.
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/2011-07-12-all-star-game-heat_n.htm
If they get the temps down into the 70s, that’s cooler than playing conditions are for outdoor MLS games throughout the league during the summer. And it’s a lot cooler than those group-round games the US will be playing in the humid, equatorial part of Brazil next month. Cooler than all of those outdoor games played at the Spanish WCF in ’82, too.
Bob In Portland
I guess this is considered a sport.
Larv
And even if they are able to pull off the actual Cup with minimal trouble, will it be worth the thousands of guest worker deaths they’re on pace for? It’s just a shitshow all around.
I suspect the next three Cups will be problematic for various reasons – Brazil is having trouble getting ready in time; Russia 2018 is going to be a festival of corruption, plus there will be serious pressure to use the Cup to punish Putin if he continues his attempts to destabilize eastern Europe; and Qatar 2022 is going to be the Furnace Cup. At least it may spur enough outrage to force FIFA to change it’s opaque, corruption-friendly ways. But that’s probably wishful thinking on my part.
Bob In Portland
It’s how the game is played.
Larv
@Bob In Portland:
Nice try Bob, but no, that has nothing to do with sports. Find another thread to infest. Or, even better, another blog.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Larv:
And that’s reason #1 that I think it shouldn’t be there- and I don’t think it should.
Amir Khalid
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
When I was a kid and watched English football on TV, I saw winter matches played with a bright orange ball on pitches covered in snow. Football clubs there, and I guess wherever else it snows during the season, now play on pitches with undersoil heating, and snowy pitches are a thing of the past. So frozen pitches shouldn’t be a problem for winter football in America.
Linnaeus
Arsenal are FA Cup champions!!!
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Amir Khalid:
You know what’s less expensive than planting heating systems? Playing in warmer weather. ;)
Do you know the difference between winters in the UK and the northern tier of the US? We call their winters April- cool and rainy. I’m not too far northeast of Chicago, and this winter we had a few stretches of weeks where it didn’t get above 15 degrees Farenheit. On more than one occasion this winter I considered sacrificing children to please the ice and snow gods.
pseudonymous in nc
The ’94 World Cup in the USA had problematic heat in some southern venues, partly because it used open college stadiums (Rose Bowl, Cotton Bowl, Citrus Bowl) as opposed to tiered / roofed stadiums that are built to fend off the rain but also shade the playing surface to some degree in warmer weather.
The 2022 bid had a similar selection of venues, which was meant to demonstrate that the US was “stadium-ready”, but that might have worked against them even without considering the favours that Qatar called in. The US has far more and far better dedicated stadiums now, but none have the capacity to host a World Cup match. Only Seattle’s dual-purpose stadium has both the capacity and the architecture to be a good fit, and it lacks a grass surface.
Australia’s bid had similar problems because the high-capacity venues are a combination of cricket/AFL ovals and rugby stadiums, and the bosses of AFL and NRL in particular made it clear that they weren’t happy about giving up access during June and July.
2liberal
@Amir Khalid:
MLS is Major League Soccer and it is trolling to call soccer “Football” such as “National Football League”
Amir Khalid
@2liberal:
You’ve really got a bee in your bonnet about this, haven’t you?