FIFA Paper Next 600 Words

FIFA, short for the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, was born in Paris on May 21^st, 1904. It originally governed most of the major leagues in world soccer except the English league who joined later. It has now risen as the most powerful organization in the world of sports with the biggest money maker, the FIFA World Cup. The first World Cup was held in Uruguay on July 18^th, 1930 and has now become the most popular event in the world of sports, so popular that even Americans feel forced to watch it, every once in a while. The two most recent World Cups exemplifies the terrifying power that FIFA has over the host countries.

The 2014 World Cup was hosted in Brazil a country that produces the biggest soccer fans and many of the best players in the world. Naturally they would be ecstatic for the upcoming World Cup to be hosted in their home nation, right? Wrong, Brazilians responded to the news of hosting the 2014 World Cup with mass rioting across the nation. They also set a lot of things on fire and not just because setting stuff on fire is fun, they actually had a good reason. The Brazilian government was spending over eleven billion dollars on preparations for the World Cup because they are held to a certain standard of excellence by FIFA.  Eleven billion dollars is a whole lot of money, but when you think about it that price is justified, the FIFA World Cup is the biggest sports event in the world and something as big as that should bring in just as much money in tourism, taxes, tickets, and a multitude of other things but here’s the catch. Brazil does not make the money, FIFA does. FIFA’s criteria for letting a nation host the World Cup is exemption from all taxes at any level that means local, state, and national taxes (Oliver). This is absolutely baffling and really gives a taste of what FIFA is like. Someone really should not be allowed to compare a nonprofit organization to the mafia and be very convincing, comparing FIFA to the mafia should be like comparing a pineapple to a paper towel, it just should not make any sense. Because of this the only reason to host the World Cup is the prestige of it. At least for a little while that host country is brought on to the world stage. Going back to FIFA the mafia like tendencies do not stop at tax exemption. FIFA actually forced Brazil to make a new law for them. In 2003 Brazil banned alcohol from soccer stadiums because of the enormously high death rate among fans, which in all honesty seems like a pretty good idea (Oliver). This changed because of FIFA, one of FIFA’s sponsors is Budweiser and to make more money FIFA wanted to be able to sell beer. Brazil was then pressured into creating the Budweiser Bill, which allowed stadiums to once again sell beer. FIFA’s secretary general had this to say on the, “I’m sorry to say and maybe I look a bit arrogant, but … we have a right to sell beer.” The implication of this law is potentially deadly, but it is really all about money in the end so who cares? In the 2010 World Cup in South Africa we can see another example of FIFA’s ridiculous power. FIFA forced the creation of the World Cup Court, which first of all sounds completely ridiculous but nonetheless they prosecuted with striking speed to the point where there was barely a trial. After two Zimbabwean men were arrested for the robbery of two journalists they were sentenced to fifteen years in penitentiary in less than a day (Oliver). That is not enough time for a trial to a fifteen year jail sentence and is very unsettling.

                

Intros

                The summers in Qatar are hot, really hot in fact the temperatures can reach up to one hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit this weather is not safe to be walking in much less play soccer in. On December 2^nd, 2010 FIFA, the world governing body of soccer announced that the 2022 World Cup would be played in Qatar. A country with no soccer history and incredibly dangerous playing conditions in summer when the World Cup is traditionally played. Not only that, but the country is known to have very little rights for migrant workers and by 2022 by two conservative estimates say there will be at least 4,000 dead migrant workers from working on building the stadiums. People across the World were flabbergasted by the decision, but that quickly turned to outrage. The decision made absolutely no sense so why did it happen, where did FIFA go wrong? The fact is that FIFA did not go wrong, FIFA is rotten. FIFA was and still is aware of the huge problem that the Qatar World Cup brings, but that does not matter all that matters to FIFA and its executives is money and there sure was a lot in this. It is painfully obvious that FIFA executives voting for the upcoming World Cup host were bribed and despite major outrage across the world FIFA has remained in support of Qatar as the 2022 World Cup host. For years it has been clear that the governing body of soccer across the world is corrupt, so how do we know this? Where did it start? And what is being done to stop it?

                When he was young all Sepp Blatter wanted to be was a footballer. The soccer fanatic had a chance too, he worked hard every day for hours to become the best he could be and eventually went to a trial for a local club and was offered a contract. Not soon after young Sepp’s dreams were crushed by his father who told him, “No son of mine will be a footballer,” and refused to sign Blatter’s contract. Sepp Blatter did not give up on his dream and found a way to have a life filled with soccer ironically though the little boy who loved soccer so much has become the man who is ruining it. Sepp Blatter is now seventy nine and the president of FIFA. FIFA is the nonprofit, world governing body of soccer with over one billion dollars in the bank. FIFA under Blatter has faced countless scandal and seems to have drawn up a business model designed after the mafia’s. Under Don Blatter bribery seems to be a common affair in the inner workings of FIFA and that is really just the tip of the ice burg. FIFA itself may be responsible for the deaths of over 4,000 people in Qatar and its executives have broken countless laws in multiple countries as they seem to think they are above it. Now if this is all true what is being done about it? Why is Blatter still in power and why is FIFA allowed to continue operating like this?

                Alexis Sanchez grew up in the Chilean mountain town of Tocopilla and he was dirt poor. Alexis had nothing, his father left him when he was a toddler, and his mother worked several jobs to support her four children, but Alexis did have one thing soccer. While soccer was his love and his escape from the world that he lived in he could not focus on it as from the age of six he had to get a job to help support his family and also attended school. Despite these obstacles Sanchez played and he practiced every day and he got good, real good. Sanchez was signed by a local club at the age of sixteen and was seen as a nobody there, the players didn’t understand who this kid was until his first game. The team was down 1-0 and struggling so the coach decides to put in Sanchez in as a second half substitute. Sanchez went on to score eight goals and proved what he could really be. From there it was smooth sailing all the way up to FC Barcelona and now Arsenal FC. Alexis Sanchez’s story is repeated all over the world, but it might not be so easy for some kids. Recently FIFA, the world governing body of soccer, has banned over four hundred children from playing soccer because they are foreign in the nation that they play in. FIFA is a corrupt nonprofit organization that cares more about making money than trying to fix the problems in the world of soccer. It has been surrounded by scandal and bribery for years and is ruining the game loved by billions of people around the world. 

FIFA Research

                In my paper I would like to fill it with information on three things what FIFA is, the multiple scandals it has had and the players in that, and how the FBI has messed all of FIFA’s corruption up and just generally been awesome while also managing to strengthen my faith in the American legal system. While there has always been scandal surrounding FIFA there has never been proof until an American FIFA official named Chuck Blazer gave it all up. I plan to use Blazer’s claims in my paper. On top of this there have been a few authors on the NY Times who I have found who have been following the FIFA indictment story since the beginning named Stephanie Clifford, Matt Apuzzo, and William K. Rashbaum. All have a few stories on the investigation that will be helpful to my paper. I can also focus on FIFA’s biggest scandal, the Qatar scandal, which by conservative estimations will be the cause of over 4,000 deaths of Qatar migrant workers by 2022. There is also the incredible number of bribes that the FIFA executives have taken from biding nations to get their vote for the host World Cup nation. On top of that FIFA executives are huge idiots who have said and done a multitude of things worth talking about to make the story more interesting and funny like Chuck Blazer getting an apartment complex in Trump Tower for the use of his cat. Then there is the FIFA president, Sepp Blatter, he is a Swiss man who has allowed the corruption of FIFA to go on since he has been in office, which has been a very long time. Blatter has won almost every election under very shady circumstances that scream bribery. Finally I would like to talk about the role of the FBI and how they made the whole world a little bit happier that the United States is around, which is good considering that most of the world doesn’t like us very much. The FBI is in the process of taking the corruption out of FIFA and they are doing a good job of it. They are working on getting Blatter and once they get him that will be a huge step towards eliminating the corruption from FIFA.

America’s Wandering Families Analysis

America’s Wandering Families by Loretta Schwartz-Nobel is an emotional piece about the growing number of homeless families in the United States. I really enjoyed this article because it is very human. While many articles that we’ve read focus greatly on statistics this article was very emotional and made you feel for the people; they were more than just numbers on a page they had faces, names, and stories like the rest of us. This kept me incredibly interested throughout the article and was a great strategy to keep Nobel’s readers engaged. This great deal of emotion meant that the article was filled pathos catered to anyone who sympathizes for people going through hardship making it a pretty good use considering there aren’t many who don’t sympathize with that. In this sense I think that the author really did a great job of making a one-size-fits-all article. She made an article that can be understood by most by most people and she gets them to see her way of thinking not so much by stating a multitude of claims and proving them, but simply by getting her readers to feel for the homeless in their community and all across the U.S. Because of the mass use of logo in this article there is not a lot of room for logos. While this is true and for many can be crippling when convincing a reader towards your way of thinking, it does not seem to matter as much for this article. The emotion in this article is heartwarming at times, but turns on a dime to absolutely crushing because it really makes you feel for these homeless families and a great amount of facts and statistics would just take away from that, it would leave the reader feeling desensitized to the whole ordeal to a point.  

The author adds herself as a character in this article as well, which adds to the way that she convinces her reader. This is the ethos part of the argument. We see the author researching and really making and effort to get to know the people that she meets, which makes the reader feel as if she knows what she’s talking about.

                

One Thing They Aren’t: Maternal Analysis

                One Thing They Aren’t: Maternal is an article by Natalie Angier about the different ways that animals take care of their young.  Angier’s article is challenging to decipher. The article’s original purpose seems to be something informative and fun at the same time, but it has an underlying theme to it. It starts by praising mothers, the article speaks of how great mothers are and the praise that they deserve, but from there she almost seems to refute her claims. She moves on to talk about the way in which so many other species of animals are not very motherly. For instance pandas are not as cute and cuddly as we might like to think; the majority of the time a panda mother gives birth to two babies and then only takes care of one using the other as a backup in case the favored child gets sick, damaged, or dies. Facts like these are very interesting and are useful tools that the author uses to keep her reader engaged, but why does the author contradict herself taking it the complete opposite direction from mothers are to be worshipped to they are awful creatures? The thing that we must pay attention to is this, the author never once mentions the human mother except in the first paragraph when she is praising them and while she still ends on the bad note of rabbit mothers who barely spend any time with their young it is still a significant occurrence. The author wants us to appreciate our own mothers because our mothers never left us in a dark nest to only see the light for two minutes every day and our mothers never pitted us against our siblings for a fight to the death. She wants to stress the importance of our own mothers by comparing them to truly terrible ones so that we know just how lucky we are to have the mothers that we do. Angier’s article is engaging and informative, but ultimately teaches us of the importance of our own mother and makes us see just how lucky we are. 

Do You Want Lies with That? Analysis

                Do You Want Lies with That? by Morgan Spurlock is an interesting article about the dangers of overconsumption. The first thing that jumps out at you in this article is the creativity right out of the gate it gets you hooked with creative and humorous piece about eating a book. The author does an excellent job of using humor to keep his audience interested and engaged. Not only that, he uses the humor to make a better argument. The author uses humor in a mocking tone to make fun of a variety of different things, but all with the purpose of making the thing he is mocking seem ridiculous to the reader. Another tool the author uses is examples. His major example is the smoking industry as it began to die in the United States. It fought to make smoking seem cool and safe to the people of America, but ultimately it failed. The problem was that everybody was consuming the smoking industries products and it was killing everyone so the responsibility had to be put on something. Instead of the people who bought cigarettes taking responsibility it was the companies that sold them the cigarettes. The author uses this to call out the ridiculousness of our over consumption and how we cannot just blame ourselves for what we do to us. He then goes on to make this example have a little bit less sting by admitting that to some degree we don’t have control because of the huge power that comes with advertising. This advertising has made us consume, consume, consume, and it’s getting out of proportion. Spurlock then brings in facts to his argument by stating shocking statistics about the amount of consuming the people of the United States does compared to every other country in the world. Takes these facts and then uses a bit of pathos to get his point across. He points out that all this consumption that we are doing isn’t actually making us happier people even though that’s what all the advertisements say. He finishes by just saying simply, “Americans are eating themselves to death” another dangerous form of overconsumption and something that is incredibly scary. 

Related Article

                My research paper is about the corruption of FIFA, which is if you have not been informed the world governing body of FIFA. I am not going to try to emulate my paper around an article, but rather a video. In fact this video is the thing that actually brought my attention to the problems that FIFA has and as a result the entire world even the United States. It is a video on John Oliver’s Show: Last Week Tonight that is absolutely amazing and I highly recommend that you take fifteen minutes to watch it. Also if you have another fifteen minutes I recommend you watch the follow up video, which in my personal opinion is even funnier than the first. I do know that FIFA is an organization that many people do not actually care about in the United States and to be honest have probably not even heard of. I’m hoping to get my readers interested in the organization in the same way that Oliver does. He makes his viewers realize just how important the sport is and also constantly relates it back to things in the United States that are more relatable to us like football. While these are all very important tools that he uses his most important and most utilized tool is humor. Oliver is constantly making jokes to help get his point across and uses it very effectively. He mocks the thing that he is opposes to the point that it is absolutely ridiculous in his viewers mind just something that makes you wonder, “How is this even something that exists?” I know that I am not as funny as Oliver and that bringing it to the level that he does is likely out of my reach, but I can still do my best to engage the reader using humor. It is likely that I will end up using pathos like Oliver does at certain points in his article more often than I do humor because with FIFA there is no shortage of that. The story on FIFA still has not ended and it gives me plenty to write about in my article.

iGod Analysis

                Nicholas Carr in his article iGod is attempting to inform his readers about the future, specifically the future of technology and where that will take us. While Carr’s purpose is to inform us of the future he uses many relatable and present examples to keep us interested. He often uses the google founders in his examples, these examples are something that we can all relate to and something that we know very well. We may not know the founders themselves, but we do know the google the search engine and many of us know how incredible and inventive google can be. Carr’s examples are relatable, but they are also very informative and to a curious mind this can be a very powerful tool to engage his audience. The article is filled to the brim with interesting and engaging facts, but the problem with this tool is that it is double edged. The facts are interesting to a point and then from there they seem to get very repetitive, which makes them boring and could cause people to space out. I am only saying this because this is exactly what I did while reading the article at certain points. It at times was just too much information to handle, but Carr often found a way to rope you back in. When things started to get boring eventually there would come something that got the audience to pay attention once again. Carr did this with pathos, there are some predictions in his article made by him and others that are very worrisome to most humans because they imply huge changes. Most humans are afraid of change to some degree and predictions of machines becoming smarter than man can be very worrisome to pretty much anyone. Another way that he ropes his audience in is by answering questions. At times I found myself questioning what this prediction or that statement could mean for someone like me and Carr always related it back to the common man. He did an excellent job of answering the questions that came up in his article.

Casey’s Paper Reflection

                The initial thing that stuck out for me was just how relatable this article is. I found myself continually quietly snickering and thinking in my head, “Yeah, me too.” I think anyone who has a smartphone can relate to Casey’s paper even if maybe it’s a person who does not often use their phone. Another aspect that I liked is that because it is so personable the paper very enjoyable to read.  While these are all good things I felt that it was so personable as to take away from the research part a little bit. The narrative is very good but I don’t feel as though I’ve learned much from it. The quote about people gaining emotional attachments to their phones was something that I did learn, but I feel as though the rest of the information is commonly known. Another thing is that I felt the paper had no conclusion. This may be that Casey is still performing her experiment, but I still feel as though there should be more to it. Overall the paper is good and other than adding more research, expanding on it a little bit more and adding more to the conclusion I would not change anything.

Kelly’s Paper Reflection

                What I really liked about Kelly’s paper is how balanced it is. There is a good amount of information without it be overwhelming. While sometimes the transitions are abrupt I still find that the paper doesn’t get boring because there is not too much time spent on one narrative or piece of research. I also liked Kelly’s conclusion, it built up with the paragraph before by talking about the terrible day that Kelly had had and then was defused and ended on a happy note. The last thing I liked is the research itself. It was often very interesting to me because I can associate with social media and it is interesting to learn more about its functions and how it has affected society. As I already mentioned the transitions could use some work. The paper jumps from research to narrative and leaves me wondering how one has to do with the other. This is a problem, but there are only a few places where I found this, it is mostly very well written. Another problem I had is that the intro seems to set up a different paper it starts out very broad and stays broad, but never transitions into lower, it just kind of jumps in.

Experiment Findings, Research, etc.

                In my experiment, I am trying to figure out the best way to get motivated to do things that I have to do, but don’t necessarily want to do. The first thing that I found is that attempting to break this habit of lacking motivation is incredibly difficult and I still have not managed to find a way to beat the habit in a way that I would like to. While I have made minor progress by doing a bit of research on motivational strategies they have not really helped much. These strategies include, yelling at yourself like a drill sergeant, imagining the task completed, and imagining a big task as individual pieces. These strategies haven’t been working so I decided to look a little more into what causes a person to be motivated. There is a whole theory in psychology called behaviorism that goes along the lines that all living organisms get motivated to do things through stimulus, basically it goes like this you start to feel hungry so you’re then motivated to stop whatever you’re doing at the moment to get up and go get some food. According to the behaviorist theory this will work all the way up to incredibly complex decisions that humans have to make every day. I decided to try an experiment based upon this theory I would give myself rewards to help motivate me, the motivation mostly being cookies. My recent experiment has me questioning this theory though because I do often know what is best for me, running for example is very good for me. If I know this is good for me then why don’t I just do this immediately because I know that this is what’s best for me why do I need that extra incentive? It turns out that this form of extra motivation does not really help all that much for me. The behaviorist theory can be spotty at times and there are a few other theories that say that as a species we are above simple stimuli to motivate every single one of our actions there must be a better way to get motivated.