In a new article sponsored by Qatar Richard Foster offers a terrifying glimpse into football’s future.
This is a peek into the future of football and it comes with a health warning. For those who are of a nervous disposition or prone to breaking items of furniture when angry, please look away now. So if everybody is sitting uncomfortably, let us start our journey into the future.
20th – 30th October 2022 – The last round of Premier League matches is underway. Manchester City reserves are playing Chelsea Under 19s in a mid-table clash that will go some way to determining which of these teams will be playing in the Asia-European zone cup in January. The game kicks off under the lights at City’s Home #5 ground in Singapore and the digital crowd have gone mad as their iPads flicker into life.
We are only five minutes into the game but the mathematical extrapolations are already showing the game is pretty much over as the City players have expended less than 3.23% of the energy of their counterparts and their pass ratio quotient is edging ahead by a pretty significant 0.345, so the writing is on the wall. Literally as the LED wall surrounding the pitch is currently showing the final score and a 3-1 victory for City is now only eighty-five minutes away. The betting app is offering the latest odds on who exactly will score those goals and when but it is all over bar the betting.
Meanwhile back in England, there are those rather quaint Football League round robin games going on, which will determine the sixty-two clubs who will contest the Anglo-Scots Cup with Celtic and Sports Direct Rangers. It may have taken four months to eliminate the ten English clubs that are not going to the end of season Play-Offs but the heat is really on for those final places.
But this year the Anglo-Scots Cup will not be the centre of attention with that big showdown at Motherwell’s Fir Park playing second fiddle to the World Cup in Qatar. Of course there will be a sadness amongst the Scots that they were pipped on Gross Domestic Product by Liechtenstein, as this would have been their first qualification for the tournament since gaining independence four years ago. Still it has now been over twenty years and they will just have to wait a bit longer and hope that their economy can improve.
Meanwhile excitement is mounting in the Middle East as the arrival of Sepp Blatter is announced. The 86 year-old, in his eighth term as President of FIFA, sponsored by Qatar, may have been on a life support machine for the last two years but nothing is going to stop him from attending this moment, his crowning glory as he is brought into the stadium on his four poster bed carried by dozens of under-nourished children, all orphaned during the construction work that went to building this gleaming edifice, which is still not quite finished.
The tournament starts proper in two weeks time by when Blatter has assured everyone that each stadium will be finished and furthermore he has personally guaranteed that all the migrant workers will be ferried out of town so the show can begin in earnest and the watching world cannot wait. So once the ceremony honouring Sepp as the Vice-emir of Qatar is over, the stage will be set and we can all rejoice in the coronation of Blatter the Imperious.
Richard is the author of the brilliant A-Z of Football Hates and can be followed on Twitter here
