THE CONSPIRASPHERE

Caught up in the excitement, NOEL ROONEY unleashes his inner John Motson and offers readers his conspiracy commentary on the the 21st FIFA World Cup

WORLD CUP CONSPIRACIES

I have to start this column with a confession; I have, for many years, harboured the pipe dream of being a football commentator. I’m that irritating viewer who utters the appropriate cliché a nano-second before the person who’s actually being paid for the phrase gets to it and, yes, that is my only qualification for the job. So, when this column coincides with the sporting farrago that is the FIFA World Cup, I cannot but explore the footling footie conspiracies that have accompanied the dribbles, dives and desperate drivel that calibrate civilisation into leap-year segments. Oh, and Paul Sieveking’s dad invented football commentary as we know it (see FT317:49), so it’s clearly a fortean subject.

The 1958 World Cup saw the first appearance of the great Pelé, helping Brazil to win the tournament in Sweden: or not. A documentary film, Konspiration 58, made and released rather belatedly in 2002 (by which time Pelé was reduced to doing ads for erectile dysfunction treatment) claims that the 1958 tournament never happened; the whole thing was filmed in a Los Angeles film studio, part of a CIA experiment in sporting psy-ops. The film turned out to be an elaborate didactic hoax of sorts, designed to illuminate the dubious process of postmodernist revisionism on which most of the Internet is now based. But it’s a good shot early doors, in the parlance.

The 1970 tournament in Mexico featured England as defending world champions (not a phrase that slips easily off the sporting tongue). The team’s iconic captain, Bobby Moore, was accused, just before it all kicked off, of stealing a bracelet studded with emeralds from a Colombian jeweller; it later transpired that the accusation may have been part of a sting operation by the Colombian secret service to undermine the England players, though on whose behalf it is not clear. A bit of an own goal, given Colombia’s failure to actually qualify for the tournament.

Ronaldo, another Brazilian great, who would go on to score the winning goals in the 2002 event, was less effective in the 1998 final, won by hosts France. He had apparently suffered some kind of fit on the morning of the final, and was declared too ill to play. But come the kick-off, a pale, wobbly Ronaldo duly played for Brazil, who duly lost. Conspiracies of the corporate kind circulated within minutes of the final whistle: Nike, then sponsors of the Brazil team, were rumoured to have forced the player to appear, despite his illness; or alternatively, they put undue pressure on the Brazilian management to make him play, all for the televisual treat of a few more ticks on a few more famous boots. Foul, obviously.

The current tournament is hosted by Russia so, naturally, there are conspiracies afoot. In this case, the remarkable early success of the Russian team (the lowest ranked side in the whole tournament) is causing a few whispers of ‘fix!’, but their unforeseen form pales into insignificance before the Plague of Flies that has excited some commentators (no, not that kind of commentator) into speculating that Putin is engineering the biblical blip to put more fancied sides off their stride. Given that insects the size of Mothman were regularly caught on camera in Brazil in 2014, this theory may not have legs.

But the world champion of football conspiracies has to be the claim, made by Syrian football pundits (yes, that is apparently a thing) that the El Clasico match between Barcelona and Real Madrid in 2012 featured sequences of passes that were in fact coded messages to the rebels in that war-torn land, mapping out the best routes to smuggle arms into the country. Some TV commentators provided maps, overlaid with the passing grids, to prove the point. Talk about a game of two halves.