"Being honest is less profitable than being dishonest."
Plato.
If being crazy is, as Einstein said, doing the same thing over and over again expecting to get different results, I am. I take comfort in the fact that many share my particular dementia, the incurable habit of staying in front of the TV after the games to watch the interviews with the players.
We repeat the same thing over and over again waiting for grace, intelligence or light but always the same slug. That I owe everything to my teammates, that the season is long, that we are going to do everything possible to beat Madrid. The point is not to generate news, not to offend anyone. The sponsor markets are of all colors and you don't have to screw up. Nothing worse, nothing, than the possibility of saying something that risks limiting the chances of making even more money.
The coaches do not contribute much more but since once in fifty there is one who turns off the autopilot and says something that comes from the heart, staying to listen to them is still a symptom of madness, but of less gravity. If the coach, on the other hand, is the great Louis van Gaal, who has just revealed that he has cancer, it is always worth waiting. It has left us pearls.
"You are very bad! Your interpretation is always negative, never positive!" I'm the smart one and you're the stupid one." "Aznar has no knowledge of professional football. The president of the Government has to manage his land and not enter others."
Anti-Qatar World Cup banner unfurled by Freiburg fans last weekend
"I find it ridiculous that the World Cup is being held there," Van Gaal rightly said.
The best thing is what he said last week. He will travel to the World Cup in Qatar at the end of the year as coach of the Netherlands but he does not like it and does not hide it. "I find it ridiculous that the World Cup is being held there," he said. The argument of those who received fortunes to support Qatar's candidacy is that the sport will develop among its 2.8 million inhabitants, 313,000 of whom are Qatari citizens; the others, foreigners who do the work.
"That we are going to play there to develop football? you! said Van Gaal. "It's for money and commercial interests, which FIFA is interested in."
Van Gaal is absolutely right. That the World Cup is played in Qatar is the biggest shit of the thousand shits that FIFA and football in general have given us, followed closely by the also manifestly corrupt decision to give the World Cup to Russia in 2018. Great emotion last week when the World Cup groups were announced, as if nothing happened, as if it were normal to have changed the tournament to December because in June it is 50 degrees in Qatar, which did not seem any impediment to the masters of FIFA when it comes to voting.
Will it be too late to boycott it? Sanctions are fashionable. Today many regret not having imposed them on Russia and its criminal oligarchs before the invasion. Well, there is still time with Qatar. It won't be done, of course. Too many "commercial interests". But if he set out, Van Gaal would be the first to sign up.
Will it be too late to boycott it? Sanctions are fashionable…
He is consistent and says what he thinks because, perverse bug in professional football, money is not his religion. He was treated badly at Barça, he was treated badly in Spain, although if it weren't for his good eye Andrés Iniesta and Xavi Hernández might never have come out of the darkness. Borreguera orthodoxy demanded that Van Gaal always be given sticks and the press complied. What few bothered to see is that he was, and is, a man of integrity and, unlike Qatar and Russia, democratic.
Instead of waiting to be fired as Barcelona coach at the end of his first stint at the club, for which no one forgave him for winning two leagues in three years, Van Gal resigned, resigning without blinking at five million euros. He was not sympathetic to the Spanish; it was straight to the Dutch, which caused outrage in the media. But few bothered to notice how well the cleaning people and the other Barça employees talked about him because of the treatment he gave them, equal to or better than his superstar players. The deaths of thousands of employees working on the accelerated construction of stadiums in Qatar are a public relations problem for the sheikhs, nothing more. For Van Gaal there is the offense. He sees it and calls it for what it is. Shit.
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