Sepp Blatter and the Case of the Footballing Slaves
When much maligned FIFA president, Sepp Blatter came out this week with the astonishing statement that most footballers today were “slaves” to their clubs, it was met with widespread criticism, amazement and downright disbelief!
This has all come about from the long-running Cristiano Ronaldo affair and his “will he, won’t he” move to Real Madrid. How this man (Blatter), who proclaims to be the “king” of football, can come out and make such remarks is totally beyond our comprehension. Is he seriously of the opinion that footballers, who are earning stupid amounts of money (in Ronaldo’s case, up to 120K per week!) and are also afforded the most favourable contracts of any business, are “slaves”? The guy is talking absolute rubbish!
And we are not the only ones to think this either. The PFA (Professional Footballers Association) in England, the League Managers Association (England) and even UEFA have either criticised outright or have played down, the comments.
The PFA demanded he retract his statement, the League Managers Association fear the long-term repercussions of the statement and UEFA, rather tongue-in-cheek, reminded the FIFA president that slaves were in the unfortunate position of never having earned any wages! (This is probably the first statement ever come out of UEFA that we happen to agree with).
The ridiculous thing about the whole episode is that the only person in the world that seems to agree with Blatter is the person who the comments were centred on, Cristiano Ronaldo. This in itself suggests, to us anyway, that he has made up his mind as to where he wants to play his football next season, no matter what other people try to say! And to back this up, how about this for a quote, which came out of an interview Ronaldo gave to Portuguese television:
“I agree with the comments of the president of FIFA. What he said is right.”
“At the moment there is no agreement with Real Madrid. We have to wait for the next few days to see, but I do not know where I will begin next season.
“This is all I have to say at the moment.”
We rest our case…
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