I hear you! I almost managed to not watch the last World Cup at all, plan to keep it up. I have cancelled all subscriptions to all channels that pay FIFA or EUFA and only watch YouTube post match goals and some documentafries about Messi. I mean, he was/still is fantastic.
I am starting to enjoy it when my (former) teams lose. It makes it easier not to watch. Weird reverse schadenfreude. Fuck Mafiantino. Fuck trump. Fuck Čeferin. Fuck Tebas. Fuck DFB. Fuck them all.
On a tangentially related note, Slavia Prague requested that the Pride flag usually displayed at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium be removed for their Champions League game, claiming their fans would be so offended by it that they would likely riot. Apparently it’s standard procedure for teams to accede to any security-related request from visitors, but I wish they had made an exception in this case.
Are Czech people particularly anti-LGBT?
Per Wikipedia, they have same-sex marriage and legal protections against discrimination, so no, I think the problem is just with Slavia Prague supporters.
There is quite the amount of bigoted and racist football supporters, in every country, but that doesn’t mean they represent the majority of their population or the official politics of their respective governments, not even the majority of all football fans in their country. They’re just the loudest and most aggressive assholes.
Sure, but in my experience the official position of football clubs is always that they oppose bigotry and racism. They may not always crack down on their problematic supporters as strongly as one might like, but this is the first I’ve heard of a club actively supporting their Neanderthal fans’ “right” to not be offended by the visible existence of minorities. And I’m surprised that it’s not a club from some backwater, but from the capital of a European democracy. Clearly most Prague residents (Praguematists?) don’t share these prejudices, so it appears that Slavia’s marketing to the knuckledraggers is a deliberate choice.
Sure, you’re right, I hadn’t heard of that story, and if Slavia really asked the Spurs to put down the rainbow flag, and they concurred, that’s a multiple shame in my opinion. A good reaction would have been if the Spurs fans themselves brought a lot of pride flags and waved them during the game, but I don’t know how invested they are in the issue.
Oh my God, you couldn’t ask for a better draw. Dear God, please please please let Seattle successfully protect their Pride match.
If Iran or Egypt doesn’t like it, they can forfeit.
This will put the Trump administration in a big quandary. Succumb to the demands of those unholy Muslim countries, and join them in another oppression of civil rights, or letting the queers have their way?
Is this even up to the Trump admin? My understanding is that cities are allowed to put cultural events around FIFA matches at their own discretion. FIFA can’t tell Seattle not to hold a pride festival outside the stadium.
Likewise, what is Trump gonna do? Threaten Seattle’s federal funding? He’s already tried, over Seattle being a “sanctuary city”, and the courts shut him down. He might bloviate about how he’ll do this or that, but I doubt Seattle is going to back down on this.
Just about the only thing FIFA could do to avoid this, IMO, is swap the Iran-Egypt game with a different group stage match. But I hope they won’t open that can of worms, because if they do, it will open the door to every team on Earth demanding similar treatment in the future.
Which is why I think what would be fair is telling them to suck it the fuck up, and if they don’t like it, they can forfeit.
If either team forfeits, they automatically are considered to have lost 0-3 and may or may not be removed from the rest of the tournament. If they both forfeit, FIFA should just kick them both out and give the other two teams in their group 0-3 wins against both Iran and Egypt.
I’m pretty sure Trump/MAGA would come down on the side of Iran and Egypt. They dislike gays more than they dislike those nations.
Obviously Trump doesn’t actually have the authority to cancel the Pride march, and I suspect that if he somehow coerced the Seattle authorities to do so, the march would go on nonetheless, larger and louder than it would otherwise have been.
He has threatened to move matches from cities whose leaders displease him, but I think he has vastly underestimated the logistical difficulties involved in doing so.
In this political climate and with still more than a half year to go until the WC, I’m not sure that city rights will still be respected. Especially if FIFA agrees, who have always operated in a legal vacuum.
Is this some Pride event specifically linked to that soccer match, or is it that just the regular annual Pride parade happens to coincide with the date of the match?
Looked it up myself: It appears to be both, kind of. It’s during Pride weekend, but there is a specific observation planned at the stadium.
Well, the precedent set in Qatar 2022 is that everyone has to respect the host nation’s cultural attitudes about homosexuality (fans weren’t allowed to display rainbow flags there). Obviously FIFA would never be so hypocritical as to change this now, so I guess the Iranians are out of luck. /S
I believe this is correct. A quick google-fu tells me that Pridefest occurs on the last weekend of June each year.
The match in question is schedule for June 26. Pridefest is June 27-28. So those teams can play the match and then get the hell out of town right afterward so their pride won’t be hurt.
I didn’t know that. I hope the activists pre-schedule the Pride March a day earlier, just to troll the bigots on all sides.
Pride in big American cities, at least in gay neighborhoods, is basically a month-long festival culminating in the parade. There will be lots of “horribly offensive” things going on the week before, don’t worry.
That’s good to hear! 
Yes, this. And fuck, even if Trump tries to move the game to a different city, I’d hope there are enough decent Americans in any city (with a large enough stadium to actually hold a match) to just hold another Pride rally there.
I’m not counting on Trump to respect the cities and their rights, I just don’t see what cards he has to play that could actually force Seattle to back down.
In this context, the term is “Haram”.
Even if they weren’t already planning on that, and as ThingFish points out they probably were, Iran and Egypt’s complaining is likely to induce a Streisand Effect here…