It’s like he wants to discourage any and all tourism to the US.
I can’t imagine how many people (probably including some competitors/team members) that are going to sit this out instead of risking being in the US. I hope it’s enough to move the needle. Maybe it’ll be enough to get FIFA to move it out of the country.
Nah, that’s not it. He just doesn’t think the most popular sport in the world is real football, American football. I wonder how he’ll react when he finds out our football is just a later and simpler version of Canadian football.
That’s funny!
If there’s any organization even more corrupt than the current Administration, it’s FIFA. The IOC is up there, too.
I mean, I know they’re not actually going to move it elsewhere at this point, but corrupt or not, they still need to fill the seats. I suppose what would make more of a point is if athletes, or entire teams, boycotted the games. Again, I know it’s not likely to happen. Though I do suspect a non-trivial number of people (fans/players/staff etc) will sit this out, not because they’re boycotting it but because they have real fears of being turned away or arrested when they try to enter the US. Even if it’s just for things like shitting on Trump on twitter.
Up to a point.
The IOC had a winter Olympics at Sochi. Both FIFA and the IOC did Brazil (and those facilities weren’t safe or even completed for their respective events and are now mostly collapsing).
They really don’t care, as long as they get theirs. Of course, that assumes they are convinced the US, or whatever US proxy, will continue to play ball.
No one (teams) boycotted Qatar, despite thousands of migrant worker deaths building the stadia. They ain’t boycotting the US.
Given the current circumstances, I can see the Trump administration allowing or disallowing entry to players in order to affect the teams and make money on the betting markets.
Or just to fix it so the US win.
I know it’s not actually going to happen, at least not enough to make any kind of difference. However, (not) boycotting Qatar over migrant deaths is different, at least IMHO, than boycotting the US over fear of getting arrested for being in the US.
Would people have boycotted Qatar if Qatar was randomly arresting and jailing white, or otherwise light skinned, people the way the US is randomly arresting and jailing brown people?
- Republicans could not care less about soccer, or the US men’s national team. They wouldn’t lift a finger to “fix” a U.S. win, even if they could make bank on the result - they’d prefer to troll the libs.
- The U.S. just finished fourth in the CONCACAF Nations League. They have less chance of winning the Cup next year than Panama.
Next year Panama might be part of the US team.
Glad I didn’t say “Canada”…
There were some fears for homosexual fans prior to the Qatar tournament because homosexuality is illegal there. So that could have resulted in arrests. I’m not aware of anything high profile happening though.
In terms of fixing it so the US won, I was thinking more along the lines of a Trump propaganda win, because you know he would be front and centre if they managed it. Hell, I wouldn’t put it past him presenting the trophy to himself.
Yes, “Under my presidency the country is winning so much in so many ways. They won the soccer things for me!”
Given all the effort he went through to try to buy an NFL team (the other owners said “hell no” and he had to settle for a brief USFL team ownership), I would not be surprised if he’d enjoy seeing “his” team be champions in a sport.
(He’s the POTUS so clearly he can take credit for Team USA, I could see him rationalize that.)
A recap of Trump’s pro football dreams:
Football And Donald Trump: It’s A Long Story
Small Potatoes , which is available to rent on streaming services, provides some interesting additional context — along with his flirtation with buying the Buffalo Bills shortly before his 2016 presidential campaign began — for Trump’s recent condemnation of NFL players who kneel during the national anthem to protest police brutality and racial inequality. Trump has gone so far as to proclaim via Twitter that owners should prohibit these protests and should fire anyone who engages in them. It’s worth remembering that his history with the NFL is long. (So, in fact, is his history with ESPN, which made this documentary he greatly disliked, and with whom he also got into it recently over ESPN commentator Jemele Hill calling him a white supremacist.)
Tollin’s thesis in Small Potatoes — which later earned him a public feud over the film with Trump that did take place on Page Six — is that the USFL was killed by Trump’s stubborn insistence on the doomed idea of moving USFL football to the fall to compete directly with the NFL. Players interviewed for the film, including stars like Jim Kelly and Steve Young, say they had a feeling the push to the fall was a bad idea. The USFL was small but growing. Why throw yourself against the incredibly powerful NFL? But Trump didn’t want to coexist as a smaller league and wait to see what happened. He went after a bigger prize.
Trump became the public face of a lawsuit against the NFL by the USFL in 1986, arguing that the NFL constituted a monopoly that, among other things, prevented the USFL from getting fall television contracts. Ultimately, the jury believed that the monopoly existed, but not that the USFL had been damaged by it in the way it claimed. It awarded the USFL $3. One possible explanation for the lack of damages? The NFL had argued that the USFL had planned not to actually play separately in the fall, but to force the NFL to merge with it and adopt at least some of its teams. That could mean the USFL wasn’t really harmed by not getting TV contracts it never intended to get.
The verdict was for $3 plus interest, actually — a check for $3.76 that Tollin has on hand and gives to Trump during the prickly 2009 interview. The tiny verdict — the arguably empty victory — quickly led to the USFL folding altogether.
Because political lenses can be so disorienting, it can be worthwhile to look back at documents from before politics really dominated a person’s image. Here, Tollin makes an argument in 2009 that Trump was impatient and overeager for a confrontation with the NFL. And no less a figure of the 1980s than Burt Reynolds, who was also involved with the league, says in an interview that Trump’s “dream was to be in the National Football League. And they didn’t want him.”
I don’t want him, either.
The USFL episode was when I first became aware of Trump beyond tabloid TV. I was a high school football player who watched the USFL and even at that age I could see he was a pompous asshole.
Nobody better tell him the team was put together and trained long ago so credit truly belongs to Joe the President.
Yeah but see, only the best people joined back then because they knew Trump was going to be president again and wanted to win for him. The same way the stock market doing well under Biden was because investors knew Trump was going to be taking over the next year.
That lacks style. I’d have gone with
“Congratulations, Donald. Got change for a five?”
It almost could have happened that way. IIRC, when the damages were announced in court, the son of the New York Giants owner pulled a dollar out of his wallet and handed it to Trump.
(The damages awarded by the jury was $1 but tripled due to anti-monopoly penalty adjustments or something; IANAL.)