Beautiful Game Ruined by Ugliness

The World Cup is fixed.

But in the outrage from the illegal handball seen 'round the world (but not by the referees) Wednesday by France's superstar Thierry Henry, which earned the French team a plane ride to South Africa over Ireland for next summer's global soccer scrum, the small fact about the manner in which world soccer's governing body has arranged its grand quadrennial championship has been overlooked.

That is understandable given the implications of the missed call for as blatant a touching of the ball with a hand -- the ultimate no-no in futbol -- that has been witnessed in a major soccer match in sometime. Thierry, who all of us on this side of the pond know from his Gillette commercials with Tiger Woods and Roger Federer, not only touched the ball once with his hand, but twice.

He appeared to guide the ball to his foot. He then passed the ball to teammate Williams Gallas, who booted the winning goal. It was overtime. The game was done and the luck of the Irish was exposed as several on Ireland's side looked to scream at the ref, "Handball!"

As Europe's continental pastime, soccer is even more Neanderthal than our one-time national pastime, baseball. Indeed, it has continued to scoff at the notion of employing video technology to right outrageous wrongs like Thierry's, or even minor ones.

When Italy's national television network developed a replay system as the host broadcasting company for the 1990 World Cup finals in Italy, FIFA, the game's global governing body, summarily dismissed it.

What is so wrong about getting it right?

"If a camera sees a situation differently, or sees a foul the referee did not see, the game has to go on," said Hermann Neuberger, then-chairman of FIFA's organizing committee, in the New York Times. "We cannot heat up the atmosphere against the referee and destroy the match."

Ironically, soccer has done exactly that by allowing the world to see an error of grave sporting consequence that the game won't allow to be corrected. The France-Ireland referee is being pilloried everywhere and the games is being called a sham.

But the dirty little secret in the Thierry thievery is that the World Cup is sort of like the BCS. It's a cartel run by the traditional powers of Europe, powers that favor each other and frown on wannabes.
FIFA won't even replay the game, as it has done before, because replay isn't allowed for – no matter how counter-intuitive this sounds – an error a referee failed to spot. When soccer allowed Uzbekistan and Bahrain to re-do a World Cup qualifying match in 2006 it was because a referee misapplied rules on a score he witnessed.

But the dirty little secret in the Thierry thievery is that the World Cup is sort of like the BCS. It's a cartel run by the traditional powers of Europe, powers that favor each other and frown on wannabes.

France is one of the traditional powers, or "old Europe," as deposed Bush defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld infamously said. So is Germany. So is England. So is Spain.

Not Ireland, once one of Europe's poorest countries and oppressed.

The governing body that can't change its rules on the fly to video review Thierry's goal, and disallow it, did change its World Cup draw rules on the fly to the benefit of European pedigree and the disadvantage of European peonage. At the end of September, FIFA announced there would not be an "open draw" between the eight nations that made it through to November to what it calls two-legged knockout ties, which is what France just topped Ireland in. That meant there was no chance top-rated teams like Germany and France would meet with a chance of eliminating one or the other. Instead, they were seeded.

It wasn't the first time FIFA acted so imperialistically. It did so in 2005 when it seeded the highest-ranked teams and left Spain to play Slovakia, which was the weakest of six teams in a playoff.

Ireland was one of the weakest teams in this playoff for the World Cup, a tournament it made last in 2002 and only twice in history before that.

Ireland wasn't like France. It hadn't won the World Cup before. It wasn't stacked with international superstars like Thierry with roots in an old French colony. It wasn't some pretty thing that would attract eyes and travelers to Johannesburg, where FIFA remains concerned its centerpiece event could be marred by disinterest on its maiden voyage to the African continent.

The Boys in Green, which is what Ireland's team is nicknamed, knew as much.

"I think it's pretty disgusting, to be honest," Ireland goalkeeper Shay Given told ESPN.com early last month of FIFA's decision to seed. "Before a ball is kicked, these things should be made clear. Now they change it because some of the big nations are struggling."

He was referring then to Germany and Portugal as well France, all of which were in danger of being left behind while the rest of the world played soccer in South Africa. Only Germany wound up securing an automatic qualification while France and Portugal were left to a playoff. But the thought to FIFA of Portugal and France knocking out one or the other was like Florida, Alabama and Texas going at each other only to leave a title game featuring some less-revered team like TCU. So FIFA changed the rules.

"It's beyond belief, if you ask me," Given continued. "It's pretty disgusting because we are a smaller nation, and for them to move the goalposts a few weeks before the end of the campaign is pretty poor. The smaller nations should maybe put up more of a fight because it is not fair."

What it meant was that Ireland was left to put up its fight on the pitch against France, where for most of Wednesday it outplayed Les Bleus before getting tripped up by what should have been a goal waved off.

Irish eyes are crying for Ireland. Much of the rest of the world's eyes are bloodshot with anger that France was awarded a World Cup berth on such an obvious mistake.

But this was what FIFA wanted all along. It doesn't like underdogs with no-names anymore than the folks who run the BCS do.