Right off the bat, may I say that my own preference is for all World Cups and all Olympics – summer and winter – to be held in perpetuity in Switzerland. Switzerland, after all, is the country in which both Fifa and the International Olympic Committee are headquartered, and whose adorably idiosyncratic financial infrastructure presumably does so much to assist them in managing their opaque affairs.
A permanent home for these mega‑events is a theory that has gained traction with so many in recent years – bar any of the people who make decisions on where to award them, any of the people who make decisions about whether to bid for them and any of the people who stand to gain financially from them. So yes, I’ll level with you: that’s a little less traction than I’d like.
But whenever another host nation spends gazillions it can’t afford and the locals revolt against the cost, or massive corruption is revealed with apparent impunity for those involved, or indentured slaves die in the construction of the infrastructure, many people wish the World Cup and the Olympics could end the rolling clusterfuck by finding a permanent home. Here, each event could return every four years, saving a whole load of international heartache and unimaginable money.
The sporting industrial complex would be overthrown and Corinthian ideals would reign once more. Or something. Look, it couldn’t possibly be worse than it is now.
We are pretty much moving toward the day when, as my colleague Barney Ronay has remarked, Isis are going to get a World Cup. Oh, I know it seems unthinkable now, what with their day jobs and the fact that they are (to my knowledge) alone among the Qatar World Cup detractors in having pledged to bomb the event into oblivion. But look at the direction in which Isis are travelling. They’ve already announced plans to introduce their own currency and it just feels like an inevitability that at some point they are going to come to the realisation at which most horrors arrive eventually: namely that they fancy hosting a sporting mega-event to announce their international coming of age.
Something to bear in mind, anyway. Yet all of this and much more could be avoided were Switzerland made the permanent home of both the Olympics and the World Cup. If three mega-events were held in the country every four years under the aegis of two of Switzerland’s least appealing domiciles– and that really is saying something – then I can’t help thinking the experience would soon crystallise the country’s thinking on the succour it affords these two most ghastly of governing bodies. It just wouldn’t be allowed to continue (and I do hope we all know what I mean by “it”). The resulting reckoning would do the world of sport – and indeed the actual world – a massive favour.
Unfortunately we aren’t quite there yet. And so it is that Monday saw the prime minister of Italy – Italy! – announce that Rome would bid for the 2024 Olympics. A piece of WTF-ery to which the only reasonable response is: are you completely insane? No, but seriously: are you stark raving bonkers, with a side order of crazy and a doollally chaser? What are you thinking? WHERE IS YOUR CARER?
A rundown of Where Italy’s At is perhaps unnecessary, but for those requiring a brief refresher course, it is mired in its worst recession since the second world war, in the grip of a corruption scandal massive even by its own exacting standards, with Rome itself only just saved from bankruptcy this year. The very idea that Italy would announce an Olympic bid against this backdrop is like some living satire on late-stage capitalism.
Clearly we haven’t got to the place where a permanent home for the Olympics or World Cup is a prospect with any chance of success. But have we not reached the stage where wildly unsuitable nations bidding for the Olympics or the World Cup immediately triggers a formal intervention from the International Monetary Fund? A proper, massively concerned third-party intervention in which the country in question is invited to the IMF headquarters in Washington under the pretext of attending a cocktail party or a cyberterrorism summit or something, only to find itself surrounded by well-meaning allies and sat down to hear it like it is.
I like to picture the IMF chief, Christine Lagarde, leading the process, saying all the classic stuff like: your behaviour is harming you. You are hurting yourself and the people who love you. If you continue down this path there can be no more rescues. In the immortal words of Chris Rock: “ATM machines are open 24 hours a day ... have you ever taken out three hundred dollars at four o’clock in the morning for something positive? Shit, when you press that machine at four o’clock in the morning, I think a psychiatrist should pop up on the screen and go: ‘C’mon, man, save your money, man.’”
You are at that metaphorical ATM at 4am. Please, stop. A car is waiting outside to take you to a treatment centre where you will detoxify from the idea that you are anything other than basically broke, riddled with corruption and among the last state-type on the planet to be indulging in this sort of behaviour.
Or as the Italian prime minister, Matteo Renzi, declared this week when announcing the bid: “Our problems shouldn’t stop us from dreaming.” I’ll leave you to fill in the retort as you see fit.
