In the Land of the Blind

As the world sits agape at the porthole of a sports-washer and SBS raves about the magic of a planet united by football, which Australia must call soccer, it is time to look at the rules of the real game. Imperialism.

It’s played for keeps. As recently as 1782, due deference to the crown was enforced by death. But not just any death. Spoiler alert: the following barbarism is so grotesquely baroque in its offensiveness it can only be true.

The last man to suffer it in full was David Tyrie, a naval clerk carved up before a Portsmouth crowd of one hundred thousand in 1782, for aiding the enemy in the very war the American colonies had begun.

The offender was hanged, drawn and quartered, the disembowelling done whilst he was still conscious. Guts burned before him. Such was the law of the glorious British Empire on which the sun never set; it stayed on the statute book until 1870, and death remained the penalty for treason until 1998. So it is in not a few of King FIFA’s soccer-loving fiefdoms today, where the legendary labour-saving bone saw awaits the traitor.

Against that majesty, two hundred and fifty years ago today, thirteen uppity colonies, inflamed by Thomas Paine, Sam Adams, Ben Franklin and other ill-bred, well-read reprobates, rose up and published a manifesto. Their ugly insurrection took the form of a list of grievances against a mad king’s divine right to do whatever he pleased, the modus operandi of the robber barons and the uncrowned kings of Trumpdom.

King Donald of Florida, the colonies’ latest power-mad tyrant, hopelessly in love with himself, surrounds himself with a gang of inept lickspittles whom he reviles. Together, for they know no other way, the Floridians are marking their territory as much as the anniversary: a state fair, the biggest football tournament ever staged, and the Ballroom of Sanity, as the flunkeys christened it, where Reason has to sit out every dance.

Every old grievance waves its unkempt head. Never give a sucker an even break is King Donald’s motto.

Trump has obstructed the Administration of Justice. He cuts off US trade at the drop of a cap. He has excited insurrection amongst his people. And one world president has already given the other a prize.

A quickstep back to 5 December last, at the World Cup draw, in a Washington arts centre the President had renamed for himself until a court prised his name back off the building. Gianni Infantino, uncrowned King of the World, hangs a medal around King Donald’s bull neck and declares it the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize.

The gong is got up in a hurry after Oslo declined to oblige King Donald, whose risible claim to be a peace-maker is by no means the least of his grandiose delusions. He’s not just a chick-magnet; he has to impress St Peter somehow. A FIFA clip salutes the laureate’s services to peace.

Infantino assures him he could “always count” on his support. Then all hell breaks loose.

In a few short months the laureate is bunker-busting and Tomahawking Tehran. Today, Iran’s First Eleven, denied overnight digs in the land of the free, have been commuting to their own World Cup from a base camp in Tijuana. Of course, they were given a sporting chance. We all now how well that turned out for them.

All is never what it seems. George III once spoke to an oak at Windsor, mistaking it, as you would, for his cousin, the King of Prussia. So easy to confuse. Spoilsport historians, with their miserly fixation with the acorns of fact, contest the encounter. Yet nothing will dispel the story. Ben trovato, as the Italians say.

But nobody can doubt the Trump Kennedy Center; there are photographs.

“We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind,” quipped Sir John Robert Seeley. George mislaid the best part of it the same way. His heir, Donald John Trump, has acquired a World Cup in a fit of self-love, and anything else he can get his little hands on.

FIFA now keeps an office in Trump Tower. So handy. The organising taskforce is chaired by Donald in between naps. Infantino’s gift of $15,000 in match tickets appears in the presidential disclosures, filed among the season’s other tribute. On 19 July, King Donald is expected at MetLife Stadium to hand over the trophy himself.

Trump builds, too. In October, backhoes blitzed the East Wing of the White House, the first structural change to the building since Truman, to clear ground for a ballroom of 90,000 square feet: seating for 999, a glass bridge, and a price that rose from $200 million to $300 million between announcements, the bill met by Amazon, Apple, Meta, Palantir and sundry other “generous Patriots”.

A federal judge ruled that construction must stop until Congress authorises it. It continued, for reasons of safety and security.

The birthday party is also going well. Congress created a nonpartisan commission to plan the semiquincentennial. When Congress declined to turn the nation’s birthday into a rally, the White House diverted nearly $80 million of its funds to a friendlier, funnier, bunfight named Freedom 250, whose million-dollar donors are promised a private reception with the narcoleptic President.

The resulting Great American State Fair opened on the Mall, a marvel of plywood painted to fake marble, a very wooden replica of the triumphal arch the King proposes for the approach to Arlington, and acres of empty grass. Hapless, booked musicians of note orchestrated a mass exit in an arpeggio of sheer panic.

The power failed on day one and the ice cream melted in the food hall. The 110-foot Ferris wheel kept breaking down. A stage panel fell during rehearsal, narrowly missing slicing and dicing a rap-dancer.

The King, shown an aerial photograph of the empty fields beyond his podium, raged until his officials deleted their posts; for the Fourth of July address, tickets will be issued for the pen in front of the stage, so that television, at least, sees a crowd. Either Lear would have had a field day.

Meanwhile, the tournament goes on as tournaments now must. Iraq’s striker was detained for seven hours at O’Hare. A Homeland Security official told a security briefing he did a happy dance when Iran was eliminated.

Group-stage tickets run north of a thousand dollars, and FIFA stands to clear as much as $14 billion, very little of which will trouble the fans, the players or the game. Bread and circuses, with the bread sold separately.

But Trump knows he is only the guest star. FIFA rules the world and the main event is not this World Cup. It is the one after next.

In October 2023 FIFA resolved that the 2030 World Cup would be played across six countries and three continents: a scheme with no sporting logic and immaculate procedural logic, since under FIFA’s own rotation rules it disqualified Europe, Africa and South America from hosting in 2034. Only Asia and Oceania remained.

FIFA then gave interested nations 25 days to declare. Saudi Arabia declared within minutes.

Football Australia, the one conceivable rival, folded hours before the deadline. One bid.

FIFA’s evaluators then examined the lone candidate, most of its fifteen stadiums existing only on paper, and awarded it the highest technical score in the history of the competition.

The human rights assessment was commissioned from AS&H Clifford Chance, the Riyadh arm of the London firm. Its agreed scope omitted freedom of expression, discrimination against LGBTI people, the prohibition of trade unions and forced evictions. The crimes were removed from the audit before the audit began.

Confirmation came in December 2024 by acclamation: no ballot, just a lot of (mainly) chaps clapping. Human Rights Watch observed that FIFA “can never claim that it did not know.”

Know what?

In the Kingdom, the official charge is terrorism, or endangering national security. The real offences are these.

Jamal Khashoggi walked into his country’s consulate in Istanbul in October 2018 to collect his marriage papers and left in pieces. US intelligence concluded the Crown Prince approved the operation. The Crown Prince accepted responsibility, denied giving the order, and called it a mistake.

Three of the men convicted of the murder were later seen living in luxury villas in a government compound near Riyadh. The suspected mastermind never stood trial. Asked on Fox News about the accusation of sportswashing, Mohammed bin Salman said he didn’t care.

Raif Badawi wrote a blog. Ten years, a thousand lashes, and a travel ban that runs still. Waleed Abu al-Khair was his lawyer. He is in his twelfth year.

Salma al-Shehab, a doctoral student and mother of two, retweeted posts supporting women’s right to drive. Thirty-four years, cut to twenty-seven on appeal, served until a campaign shamed Riyadh into releasing her in February 2025.

Turki al-Jasser wrote about corruption in the royal family. On 14 June 2025 the Interior Ministry announced his execution: the first journalist put to death in the Crown Prince’s reign, timed for a weekend when the world was watching the missiles over Tehran.

The Kingdom executed at least 322 people last year, a record, among them two men convicted of crimes committed as children. This is the bid FIFA scored 4.2 out of 5.

There is nothing novel here except the price. Mussolini had the 1934 Cup. Argentina’s junta had 1978, the roar of the River Plate stadium carrying to the cells of the Navy Mechanics School.

Putin had 2018, and the photographs from the Luzhniki opener show him in the presidential box with Infantino seated at his side and Mohammed bin Salman completing the row: the past and future of the franchise, arranged for the camera. Sixteen weeks later Khashoggi kept his appointment at the consulate. Qatar had 2022 and its uncounted dead.

The tournament circulates through the periphery of the petrostate empire, wherever applause is guaranteed and questions are not. Schumpeter called the engine of capitalism creative destruction. FIFA has refined the division of labour: the creation is billed to the marketing department, the destruction is outsourced to the security services. The scholars call the effect cultural anaesthesia. The rest of us call it the group stage.

Norway abstained from the December acclamation, its federation president explaining that the process could not be squared with any sound system of governance. Football Australia had folded fourteen months earlier, hours before FIFA’s deadline, having explored the opportunity and taken all factors into consideration. Its statement looked forward instead to a “truly golden decade for Australian football.”

Norway stood in the road and said no. We checked our watch and crossed to the other side.

This article was originally published on URBAN WRONSKI WRITES