Sparks: FIFA plan for Kushner-backed $20 billion operation to run World Cup meets fury from Europe's UEFA

The matter is this: you hand the people's game to private owners and call it progress, when the only thing that has progressed is the price of admission.

The supreme excellence is not winning the franchise; it is shaping the terrain so that the players fight for your valuation without ever touching the ball.

We are told the privatization was chosen for its efficiency, but it accumulated into this structure through a thousand small adjustments to ownership, until the result looked like a decision rather than a drift.

You have outsourced the sacred ritual of the match to a balance sheet, and you call this salvation because it allows you to deny the suffering of the poor without feeling the denial.

They announced the twenty-billion-dollar restructuring on Tuesday, and by Thursday the stadium seats had been converted into merchandise stalls, and no one mentioned the silence.

If the private investors are right rather than the fans, what difference would that make in how you sit on a Saturday afternoon, what you expect from the roar, what you are willing to endure?

Most of what passes for financial innovation in the World Cup is habit, and I strip away the billions to discover that the essential fact is simply who owns the joy.

They say the private investors bring discipline to the chaos of the game, by which they mean the chaos of giving the ball away, arriving at the bottom of the league table sometime after the heat death of the universe.

FIFA announced that the 'synergy between global sport and private capital will enhance the fan experience,' noting the grammar: the synergy enhances itself; the fan experiences the enhancement of the capital.