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Okay, okay, late to the party and nobody cares anyway, but these commentaries amused me. Spencer Hall, at SBNation, on “the most unbelievable movie script ever made“:
… This Swiss guy is named Sepp Blatter. He somewhat stereotypically got his start at a watch company, and then turned his sights to running a corrupt sports nonprofit named FIFA that sold a giant soccer tournament that only happens once every four years, but involves the entire world…
The tournament (and a few others sponsored by the soccer organization) are popular enough to suck in money from everyone and everything imaginable: shoe companies, airlines, sports beverages empires, possibly evil giant Russian gas conglomerates, and television networks small and large. The Swiss guy made it all fantastically profitable at little cost to the soccer organization, often by getting host countries to build and run most everything for them. He made money.
The Swiss guy made a lot of money. He made a million dollars a year by his own accounts, though that number is believed to be much, much higher in reality. He made enough money to fund a feature-length movie about this organization, and to pay Tim Roth to play the corrupt Swiss guy despite bearing no resemblance to him whatsoever. He paid out bribes to maintain power, exacted bribes from those sports companies and countries desperate to host that huge tournament, and used all that solidarity and momentum to win elections, build bigger tournaments, and construct other things like a giant scary meeting room that looks exactly like the war room in Dr. Strangelove…
It goes on really well until someone gets very, very mad.
Correction: It goes well until a former United States President gets mad about one of those giant tournaments. The Swiss guy gives the giant tournament to a tiny desert nation named Qatar, which despite being tiny, infernally hot, not a traditional soccer power in any sense of the word, and covered in sand, is otherwise perfect for a giant tournament… One of those countries not in the running was the United States, and when the former American President hears this he reportedly breaks a mirror…