Check this out… https://t.co/3nc4SpR9jD
— Ice Cube (@icecube) April 26, 2018
Not to jinx the fellas, but sometimes I wish one or another of our soccer-expert front pagers had a little more time to talk about the World Cup here, because the international politics involved seem to be even more gross and twisted than those of the Olympics Committee. This year’s competition is in Russia, starting in mid-June — the U.S. didn’t qualify, probably just as well. The World Cup after that will be held in Qatar in 2022, a controversial choice which doesn’t look to be getting any less controversial…
Charles P. Pierce, for Sports Illustrated“Why Tom Brady Has No Business Promoting Qatar”:
… Back when I was scuffling around among your friends and family, I devoted an entire chapter to how discerning you were about endorsements, which were just then beginning to come your way in earnest. It was one of the things that I liked best about you, truth be told. You didn’t grab for every soft drink and pizza account that came blowing past you. You didn’t go shilling for reverse mortgages or auto insurance. You went for a few high-end products and you were very careful about the ones you picked. If I recall correctly, you made a decision early on to be careful about products to which you attached your name. You guarded your brand before most people knew what a brand was…
Times change. People change… What caught my eye was what you were doing with the time. You and your family were being wined and dined by the Emirate of Qatar.
Tom, what in the hell are you doing?
See, I got there before you did, almost 25 years before you did, as a matter of fact. In the fall of 1993, as the United States was gearing up to host the World Cup in ’94, I spent 13 days in Qatar covering the Asian Zone qualifying…
I wasn’t there long before I concluded that the main job of every successful Qatari was hiring enough foreigners to do all the real work; the bartender in my hotel was a Filipino teenager who hadn’t seen his passport in a year… I came to be revolted by the ostentatious wealth earned on the backs of people who were trapped there and paid poorly, when they were paid at all, and by the distance between all the sleek sheikhs and that teenager behind the bar. By the end of two weeks, I was ready to swim home.
Late Night Sports-Adjacent Open Thread: World Cup Sales PromotionPost + Comments (65)