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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Sport
Barney Ronay

States of Play: making sense of football’s descent into the morass

Gianni Infantino at the 47th Uefa Congress in 2023
Gianni Infantino, president of Fifa, or one of the ‘relatively random men’ running modern football. Photograph: Patrícia de Melo Moreira/AFP/Getty Images

Stick to football. It doesn’t really work does it? The big problem with sticking to football is that football doesn’t stick to football. Instead, football keeps sticking to other things, such as nation building, geopolitics, contrived Hollywood bro-ship vehicles and cruelty.

Before that football stuck to European industrial wealth and colonial governance. In the future football is promising to stick to rootless global product, the unceasing scream of the digital hive mind, and everything else. Tricky isn’t it. Does anyone just want to talk about VAR?

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