10 years ago today, FIFA made a decision which reverberated around the world, and stuck two fingers up at everyone. It gave the 2022 World Cup to Qatar.

I wrote this article in May 2015 which explained how that had happened. It was Europe who did it. https://web.archive.org/web/20150725124044/http://www.lacelesteblog.com/?p=12001

In fact, the very day of that disgusting decision, I called up Five Live to vent at FIFA kickbacks - because two rounds of those kickbacks (build new stadia in Qatar, take them down, build them again in the countries of the corrupt FIFA ExCo members) was why they voted for Qatar.

I'd learnt all that from the utterly brilliant @AAndrewJennings, investigative reporter par excellence: who'd exposed disgusting corruption in the IOC under Samaranch, and went even further in FIFA's case. He's not tweeted in well over 2 years; I hope he's OK. He's a genius.

On the bright side - not that there's much of one - giving the tournament to Qatar woke so many people up to FIFA's grotesque realities that it started the process of bringing Sepp Blatter down.

On the bleak side, there are no boycotts planned for 2022.

In fact, nothing sums up modern European club football more than the associations and leagues' complaints about the *timing* of the tournament - not that it's being held in a modern slave state.

Money doesn't talk. It swears.

Are things better in FIFA now? Well, everything's relative. Gianni Infantino's in an ongoing war with UEFA for future control of the game - and his dreadful vision just involves even more games, even more worthless tournaments, even less rest for players.

All the while Europe's biggest clubs continue to plot what my article above discussed. An effective takeover of the sport: which is only a matter of time. Ditto, a European Super League.

Every time the Champions League TV rights are renegotiated, said clubs demand even more.

When the day eventually comes when UEFA have nothing more to concede on, QED. Super League ahoy.

Scroll down this archive of news reports from the last 22 years. It's been going on and on and on.

https://kassiesa.net/uefa/news.html 

Too many people assume that, as calls for a Super League are nothing new, there's nothing major to worry about. But there is.

The clubs use it as a negotiating strategy to take them closer and closer to a Super League. And big changes WILL happen. https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/55131356

Blatter is long gone now... but in practice, it's "meet the new boss. Same as the old boss".

And football moves ever further away from what it's supposed to be. Which is partly why, I think, so many were deeply affected by Maradona's death - because he represented another world.

A world in which football wasn't pre-packaged, plastic, corporate, sanitised of all raw emotion - but in which kids from the street could actually play like that on the pitch and inspire whole peoples and whole countries.

We'll never see his like again.

And football will never return to what it once was. It's business now. Massive global business. A multi-billionaire's urinating competition.