Hypocrisy leaves FA/FIFA battle meaningless"

The latest battle between the FA and FIFA has, once again, quickly degenerated into nothing more than a bum fight whose participants both possess serious problems when it come to credibility and morality.

For the second time in a little over a week, the FA has taken FIFA to task over an issue close to its heart. Last week, it was the rejection by football’s world governing body to allow England to have poppies on their shirts. This week, it is the stunningly out of touch comments regarding racism from FIFA President Sepp Blatter. I’m sure there will be a new point of contention next week.

However, dealing with the present in the aftermath of Blatter’s comments, in two separate interviews, which both made the general point that racism has been pretty much eradicated from the modern game and, should an incident of it occur, a friendly handshake at the end of the game is the required tonic.

In response to the moronic, misguided, woefully out of touch, wrong, condescending, patronising, stupid, foolish, misplaced, unwise, erroneous comments … wait, where was I going with this.

Oh yeah, for all the right reasons, the FA has criticised Blatter for this latest offence to come out of his mouth (it isn’t a gaffe, misguided comments on racism or sexism are more important than that). Whereas many other European countries, from players and management to football officials and the press, tend to ignore Blatter’s comments, the English don’t tend to let it go by. Whether it’s to be a pain to FIFA or for genuine, moral reasons is neither here nor there.

And, just as rightly, albeit slightly tartily, Blatter pointed out that the most senior on pitch representative of the FA, England captain John Terry, has an investigation into allegations of racist abuse from him toward Anton Ferdinand hanging over him as we speak. He also took to Twitter to show a picture of him with a black man called Tokyo Sexwale to ‘prove’ that he isn’t racist which is the Internet equivalent of saying in the real world “I have a black friend so can’t be racist”.

Blatter has also since apologised for his comments, but refused to resign using the bemusing reason that his projects regarding racism have yet to be completed.

From both parties, it’s all a case of throwing stones from inside one’s own glass house and political point scoring with each side having a terrific soft underbelly, ripe for attack by their opponent, in terms of their own hypocrisy.

A cynic would even say that the FA charging Luis Suarez for racist abuse a few hours after Blatter’s comments emerged was a way of highlighting their own campaign against racism to build a platform from which to launch an attack on Blatter.

The worst part of it all is that it essentially trivialises an issue as important as racism in football as by the end of next week, the whole sorry saga will be forgotten and the pressure built up on Blatter will be lost. Credit where its due, Blatter is a superb politician and anyone who genuinely thought he would be out of a job as a direct result of this affair is deluded.

The last week or two has made both the FA and FIFA look a combination of hypocrites and petty and, to be honest, the only winner out of both the poppy and racism affairs is David Cameron and his PR point scoring policy of “wearing poppies good, racism bad”, otherwise known as “Operation state the fecking obvious”.

Dan Whiteway @Dan_Whiteway