I Love Soccer. I Hate FIFA

In the early summer of 1998, when I was thirteen, my family decided to make an unusual upgrade to our rural British Columbia home: bolting a satellite dish to the side of our house. The specific reason? To be able to watch the FIFA World Cup in France. For weeks, we gathered around the TV, cheering and gesticulating, to watch the tournament held on the other side of the world. For as long as I can remember, mine has been a soccer family. The idiom about growing up “with a ball at one’s feet” is probably accurate, but picture less ambition and much more dribbling between pellets and patties in our lumpy sheep field. The first goals I scored on were made by my dad with glued PVC pipe and old fishing net.

My first formal experience was a mixed age, mixed gender, rag-tag team named after the rural road we all grew up along, playing in a club league against other hodgepodges from other corners of Salt Spring Island. Later on, I played on Metro teams, at the highest club level for kids in BC, which involved taking a ferry and driving for hours every Tuesday and Thursday for practice and more than a full day’s travel to Vancouver every second weekend for games. When I was thirteen, I travelled to the Czech Republic with my team to train with FC Baník Ostrava and play a tournament and exhibition games; two years later, I travelled to England with another team to train with Bristol City FC and play a tournament in Newcastle. Every year, my team earned a spot in the provincial championships.

All the while, I watched and watched: my sisters’ games, my friends’ games, professional games in person, and on TV, the big international tournaments every four or so years and weekly games in the Premier League, England’s top-flight league. Over the years, I’ve woken up with the bats and raccoons to watch games held on the other side of the world so many times it’s become a ritual. I’ve found myself in cramped cafes and bars from South Korea to South India with people who share little except for devotion to a team very far away from where we all had grown up. I’ve trekked through countless pre-dawn, minus thirty Celsius snowstorms in Toronto to the little pub that opened early to catch games with a friend. I’ve been a die-hard supporter of a single team since I was fourteen.

And twice I’ve made the pilgrimage to England for the explicit and sole reason to watch as many games as possible in a short period of time. (Six games in eight days the first time; seven games in eight days the second.) I navigated the complex ticketing and membership systems for every game; travelled by plane, train, tube, bus, and foot around the country to stadiums that predate the twentieth century; rose and fell in joy and pain with crowds of the most random of teams purely for the love of the game.

None of this is to show my credentials or my history, but to demonstrate a capability, a profound willingness to put forth great effort to be a fan of this sport, to show that when a World Cup finally comes close, I should absolutely be ready. I should be planning watch parties and researching the best bars to catch a game. I should be amping up my kids for how special and rare this moment is, buying them jerseys to wear and flags to wave. I should be camped out first in line at ticket offices, waking up early and staying up late to smash my cursor on a webpage button only to nervously watch as my virtual place in line ticks down and down. I should be there, at Toronto Stadium, dressed in red and white in a sea of red and white, pinched into a row of hard plastic seats, alongside my wife and kids, screaming and cheering and participating in the first World Cup on home soil.

But I’m doing none of these things. I’ve purchased no shirts; I’ve secured no tickets. I’m neither excited nor prepared for the greatest tournament on Earth.

The FIFA World Cup is the easiest sporting event to bandwagon. It’s easy to plumb the depths of a family tree to find a single Scottish ancestor and suddenly feel a connection to a group of eleven cleat-wearing frontmen of a country you’ve never visited or thought all that much about previously. It’s easy to feel that Olympic-like international spirit well inside you where you find yourself cheering for a team or an athlete purely because of the badge on their chest. It’s easy to don colours and join the crowds, fill the bars and cheer your voice hoarse. That’s what I’ve been drawn to all my life, that the World Cup has so often represented on the field: the beautiful game writ global, the sensational drama of minnows defeating whales, the misery and the rapture that this tournament can produce in such unparalleled rapid fire.

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But here’s the thing. The problem is not with the game but with the World Cup’s governing body.

FIFA is an organization so corrupt its Wikipedia page has a category devoted to “Corruption”; so greedy that it tries to crush as much money as possible from the fans of its tournaments; so thin-skinned that it threatens copyright lawsuits against tiny bars and restaurants simply for writing “World Cup” on a chalkboard; so possibly criminal that the attorneys general of New York and New Jersey are investigating it for artificially inflating ticketing prices, calling the system “a gauntlet of confusion, fake scarcity, and impossibly high prices”; so careless that basically none of the $1 billion in federal, provincial, and municipal funds Canada has spent to host thirteen games will trickle down to local cities or communities for sport development; so gluttonous that it forces host countries to sign tax exemptions so the “not for profit” can take home as much money as humanly possible; so unprincipled it has been found to break its own human rights rules in host countries and to force those countries to sign contracts that destroy workers’ rights; so irresponsible it is named a reason for a travel advisory issued by the American Civil Liberties Union “in light of the deteriorating human rights situation in the United States and in the absence of meaningful action and concrete guarantees from FIFA, host cities, or the U.S. government”; so brazen that it has been said to behave “like a mafia family”; so deceitful that it has been accused and found to take bribes so many times I’ve lost track; so crooked that its 2022 World Cup simply would not have taken place in Qatar if not for key people within FIFA being paid for their votes; so bizarrely shameful that, for this year, it likely made tens of millions of dollars selling “tokens” that fans could later use to secure tickets, which became a scandal when fans realized the actual costs of tickets were way above the value of their tokens; so detached from average fans that it has done nothing to limit ticket prices being inflated so far above historical averages that they’re utterly unreachable for anyone but the rich (from around $1,800 for a ticket to the final game in 2022 to at least $14,000 for a ticket to the final this year, when the initial promise was that tickets to the final game would not exceed $1,550); so insatiable that it has encouraged the predatory secondary ticket resale market by launching its own platform and taking 30 percent of every ticket resold (15 percent from seller and 15 percent from buyer) with some priced at $2.3 million each; so cruel that it incredibly changed people’s seats after they had been purchased, in some cases downgrading tickets to less desirable sections; so cold-blooded that it tried to ban fans from bringing refillable water bottles into stadiums to clearly force them to purchase water at ridiculous prices on site; so short-sighted that it has designed a World Cup that has been called the “most polluting ever” and the “most climate-damaging” in the tournament’s history, with games spread across three countries and sixteen cities; so hypocritical it’s been billed as the “most inclusive” World Cup ever but can’t ensure a top-tier referee from Somalia, who was slated to work the tournament, isn’t denied entry into the US; oh, and so immoral that it handed out a make-believe “peace” award to an unabashed autocrat, racist, and convicted rapist.

FIFA’s expectation is that we will forget all of this when the first whistle is blown, that its glittering floodlights will shine so brightly that we won’t be able to see the shadows we all know are there. Over the next three weeks, it may be easy to be a fan, but the World Cup has become impossible to support.