Image: FIFA
At the moment there seems to be a few people having a good moan about a football game being played near Christmas. I think you’ll find that a few of the teams taking part in the World Cup 2022 don’t believe in Christmas.
Anyway before this posts gets too serious it is not a primarily a political post.
Of all the perceived problems of moving the World Cup to December English supporters are mainly concerned about the excruciating decision that will need to be taken on December 18th; whether to go on a shopping expedition, stay at home and watch a football match or go down to the pub to join in with the rabble as they shout at a large screen on the wall.
Then there is the very real moan in England about having to venture out in the middle of December like Scott of the Antarctic, dressed in fifteen t-shirts and four sweaters (unless you live in Newcastle where one t-shirt will suffice). You will hear in households up and down the country a refrain of Scott’s famous last line, ‘I am just going out to watch France v Brasil, I may be gone some time.’
Fear not, I have a compromise.
The BBC could record all the matches but not show them. Record the matches then stick the recordings into the BBC Library. Keep them there and transmit later in June, 2023.
Using this unique approach to deferred broadcasting it would simply be like any previous World Cup tournament. Brits could watch in their traditional time slots, during a warm spell in the weather; it would also still enable overweight men to continue the time honoured tradition of ripping off their shirts to stand in city squares looking like Mel Gibson on an off night.
Of course, for the BBC to pull off this meddle with time the whole nation would have to go into a worldwide media blackout from December onwards so that all the matches could then be viewed as ‘live’ at a later date.
None of the results or news about the tournament as it is played in December 2022 would be leaked.
The entire English football squad would have to swear to keep their performances and results secret. MI5 and MI6 could help out with that. Though if one should see an England team member at a British airport kicking ten bells out of a luggage trolley in December one could assume that the tournament did not go well.
All right, I hear you say, how do you stop the Tabloid newspapers ( I use the term newspapers loosely) from leaking results and the winner of the tournament? You do a deal with FIFA that all press releases are in Arabic. By the time the Red Tops have worked their way through the translation we’ll be into the middle of June.
Should a leak manage to get out into the public domain (all journalists will break embargoes if the cheque is large enough) I can confidently write now, six years before the tournament, that it would say, ‘Germany win final against France 2-0.’
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