Fifa should be using its new streaming service to address its grubby legacy-Josh Stephenson-Entertainment – Metro

Why FIFA should be admitting football is more than just a game (Picture: Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)

This is exactly what Fifa is hoping to achieve: football without context.

A Netflix for football. It’s an idea that has lingered since the advent of streaming. A place where classic matches sit alongside the latest live action to be a one-stop hub for the beautiful game. It’s not a bad idea – but why did Fifa have to be the ones who did it?

Fifa+ has been on the market for a few months now. It’s a free-to-watch, ad-supported, online platform where you can stream old World Cup matches alongside the best live matches from the nations that Fifa can afford (which, amusingly, caps out around the Danish Superliga) all in one place.

It also includes original documentaries like Ronaldinho: The Happiest Man In The World (hmm, I’ve seen happier) and Dani Crazy Dream, which follows Brazilian footballer Dani Alves’s hopes of getting a World Cup call-up despite the obvious stumbling block of him being 39 years old.

The latter shows the problem with the platform. Alves, who is black, was racially abused by a section of Villarreal fans when he played for Barcelona and a banana was thrown at him on the pitch. He proceeded to pick it up, peel it and eat it – a glorious middle finger to the morons who thought they could get to him.

Far be it for me to decree if these things should bother Alves but it certainly sticks in my craw that Fifa, which awarded Russia – with its gangs of hooligan fans notorious for racist abuse – the World Cup in 2018, is given the chance to tell the next chapter in his story.

Dani Alves is among the stars getting their own content on the dedicated new streaming service (Picture: Fernando Bizerra-Pool/Getty Images)

But this is in many ways exactly what Fifa is hoping to achieve. It’s football without context. Want to watch the best matches from Russia 2018? Here they are, just the football, don’t worry about how Vladimir Putin used the event to increase his soft power on the world stage despite already invading Ukraine at that point.

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No mention that Sepp Blatter, who was forced to step down in disgrace, accepted an invitation to attend the tournament as Putin’s guest.

A similar story will play out in Qatar. We’ll see the best goals but mention of Qatari’s ambassador for the tournament describing homosexuality as a ‘damage of the mind’ will be conspicuous by its absence. So too will the allegations of corruption that let it be awarded the tournament in the first place, documented so well in Netflix’s Fifa Uncovered.

But these stories are important. Fifa may want to focus on the football but until it’s willing to engage with its own culpability and tell the full story, it should never be trusted to present itself as the home of football in a streaming age.

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