In the past week, I've read about two separate (but thematically-related) issues in soccer. The
first involves the very controversial
6+5 rule adopted by FIFA (and currently being vehemently opposed by the EU). I really am not sure if this rule will end up being passed, because the rule does sound at the very least borderline-discriminatory. What interests me is the exact motivation behind the rule. Purportedly, the rule will preserve the connection between country and club team while at the same time limiting the difference in talent between the richer and poorer clubs. I think it makes sense, in a sport with nothing like a salary cap, to try and maintain some sense of parity between clubs, especially since there isn't even a draft system where the poorer-achieving teams get higher picks. However, the idea that the players on a club team should reflect the nation in which the club teams plays seems somehow antiquated to me (and, when put this way, does really sound discriminatory). I'm also not sure this is the most effective way to create parity among teams, as the top English players would all be offered money to play for the best English teams, whereas currently this is less the case than I'm sure it would be. Thus, the best teams would probably lose some of their better foreign players, but to replace them they would just poach the better English players from the smaller English clubs. The rule might create parity among the best clubs from different leagues (which I'm sure will probably lead to anti-English claims about FIFA boss Sepp Blatter, as the Premiership is currently the most dependent on foreign players), but I still think the rule is more likely to accomplish more intra-club homogeneity than inter-club parity.
A
second article highlighted for me the massive racial (and nationalistic) issues that still exists in many European countries. I never thought much that, unlike America, many European countries have not had larger numbers of different ethnic groups until relatively recently. Spain and Italy (as well as Croatia I believe) have all been fined because of racist chants by their fans. It surprised me that even in countries that I think of as liberal (like France), racism is still such a divisive factor, although I also never considered that many European countries are much less racially diverse than the United States. I guess in the end though, it makes me happy that, despite a lot of the shit the U.S. takes for being ignorant, in race relations we are actually farther ahead than many countries. U-S-A, U-S-A.
