If corporations are people, it's time for them to be the kind of people that reject FIFA

Like This, But Filthier

This is a pretty simple point to make, and John Oliver has made it better than me, with far more laughs in regards to men who keep luxury apartments for their freaking cats... but it still needs to be made.

FIFA's mind-boggling corruption is not a matter of First World privilege taking umbrage at not getting the rights to host the stupid World Cup. So long as the event is in a tolerable time zone that lets us watch the damned thing, and probably even not if the tournament is a snooze with limited scoring and/or unappetizing teams moving forward, we're more than happy to hold our noses and watch the thing, the same way we do with, well, on some level, every league now.

After all, it's 2015. If we are OK with watching sports, we're OK with wading through more malfeasance and misery than any previous generation has had to deal with. The NFL has domestic abuse and head trauma and its tacit support of CFB Slave Ball. NBA supports AAU and CBB Slave Ball. MLB supports corporate welfare stadiums and College Baseball Slave Ball. Every league has the scum of the universe owning the teams, and when ESPN is involved, televising it. If you can't control your mind to be just about the game, you can't watch game anymore.

But FIFA's malfeasance is so total (Astroturf for women, which is just a war crime, Russia with its Ukraine and homosexual purges, and the body count for Qatar's pop-up stadiums in inhuman conditions)... well, you can't just ignore it anymore.

The regional groups that feed into FIFA do not, well, need to do that. Nor do the countries that compete to get into the World Cup. But since no one in either of these groups is likely to grow a spine and pull away from this cash cow, the cow's got to die by other means. Which is, to say, the corporate sponsorships.

If a fairly agile and significant number of FIFA sponsors -- McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Visa, Anheuser-Busch and Adidas -- exert their influence, FIFA's bought and paid for rank and file will no longer be bought and paid for. If the First World nations decide to stand up for the rights of LGBT humans and not go to Russia, or for the rights of over half of the people on the planet by not going to Qatar, then those events will stop mattering as well. And massive and strong corrective measures would happen, with a fetid swamp being drained.

The only intolerable act would be to do nothing, and continue to just do business as usual. FIFA is untenable. Brands, as the only agents that can change this, need to. And if they don't, they need to be publicly shamed for failing to act.

Door, Ass, Etc.

Update -- And just like that, Blatter's resigned. You are welcome, world. Looks like Oliver's going to be drinking some Bud Light...