With the 2014 World Cup kicking off later this week, John Oliver set out to educate viewers on how “appalling” FIFA truly is on Sunday’s “Last Week Tonight.”
For 13 minutes Oliver ripped into the “cartoonishly evil” nonprofit, which one commentator suggested goes hand in hand with bribery “like peanut butter and jelly.”
As Oliver pointed out, no example of bribery within the organization was more brazen than the awarding of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, where migrant workers will toil building stadiums for slave wages and summer temperatures will be almost unbearable for athletes to play in.
“You are hosting the World Cup somewhere where soccer cannot physically be played,” Oliver said. “That’s like if the NFL chose to host the Super Bowl in a lake.”
“There are now allegations that some FIFA executives took bribes to put the World Cup in Qatar,” he added. “And I hope that’s true, because otherwise it makes literally no sense.”
Watch below, courtesy of HBO:
Watching the players collapse in the heat might be the only thing entertaining about soccer. Hopefully none of the players will be permanently injured or killed playing there. It really is an insane decision.
The asshole sportscaster known as Jim Rome, whose entire livelihood depends on the Bigmouth Demographic, once said soccer is not a sports, it’s an activity., like bowling or croquet.
This means two things:
A, The adage about a stopped clock being right twice a day is even more true.
B. Jim Rome is STILL an asshole
Man, I just want to see the size of those air conditioners!
Yeah. Only the single most popular sport in the world (and even the US is catching on)
Along with the bribery the Qataris insisted the matches would be done in domed stadiums with “space-age” air-conditioning systems – and then the stadiums would be dismantled and donated to poor countries. That is not snark, people! That was their actual presentation, and the only way a proposal that ridiculous could have passed is if money changed hands.
BTW I am a rabid football fan (It’s not soccer, it’s football, and they were calling it that long before the NFL was even around), and I would be horrified to watch what will surely be deaths from heat exhaustion – kind of like the deaths suffered by the slave labor who are building the stadiums.