Football beats to its own rhythm amid chaos of terror events

The world of football is to seal a record transfer fee very soon. Manchester United, under the tutelage of the irrepressible Jose Mourinho, is to pay Rs 970 crore for Paul Pogba to move to from Juventus besides Rs 180 crore to the agent who is making the transfer possible.

The move is bizarre even in today’s world and there is already talk in soccer circles of how this deal could be a dud, much as they say of Verizon buying Yahoo for about Rs 32,000 crores ($4.8 billion), although the stakes in commerce are way different, but also equally foolish sometimes considering how Yahoo had turned down an offer of $48 billion made by Microsoft in 2008.

It wasn’t long ago that the goalposts were shifted on soccer transfers with Juventus paying Napolis a phenomenal Rs 660 crores for the services of the not-so-young Gonzalo Higuain.

In fact, this transfer deal was signed only last month. The fees are so grotesque and bear so little relation to reality that we are left wondering where the world is heading. These transfer fees go from club to club, with possibly only a fraction going to the star, who will, of course, be richly compensated by the several hundred thousand pounds per week, which wage is about standard for the world’s stars.

The ease with which the soccer world accepted all these millions flying around in wire transfers is a lesson in human reactions to events. That so little disgust was expressed at such sums changing hands in sport — even if only in the definitive global game — is revealing of how insensitive the world has become to the worst of excesses in sporting commerce.

This is founded on people making a particular sport popular and paying for it both directly as team subscriptions and indirectly in the form of boosting television rights revenues to clubs by their sheer numbers and their ability to soak up the goods and services that TV advertising sells.

Here is a Europe torn asunder by bewildering events ranging from ISIS running riot in Paris or Nice where a lone wolf attack saw the mowing down of scores of people under a terrorist truck. They still can’t make head or tail of the Ansbach attack in Germany to know if the motive was terror or just plain new idiocy of the age in which everyone is aping everyone else in simply attacking people as if that would solve anything, either through the zealotry of their anti-West religiosity or their death wish in simply disappearing from this life while taking a few others with them.

The investigators are stumped in this world of hate run by ISIS and those who cash in on the wave of violence, playing and preying upon human vulnerabilities.

Fear is the key. It has been whipped up in Europe, Japan and USA by an array of attacks in just over two weeks involving weapons of all kinds, ranging from knives to a 20-ton truck and aimed at a fireworks festival, restaurant, train and even a church where an elderly priest was killed, but just one of about 100 innocent victims.

Not all attacks were by ISIS or inspired by the most notorious terror organization stalking world peace today. None of the attacks were as perfectly coordinated like the ones on Paris last year and Brussels more recently. The feeling is just beginning to sink in that such incidents are somehow a contagion arising from wide reporting of killers on the rampage.

A number of people with an axe to grind are deriving ideas from the attacks carried out and widely publicised. Tying events to ISIS is not the only thing that we have to learn from the string of incidents.

There is personal anger behind the creation of these extreme events in which the perpetrator loses his control in one mad blowout or brain fade. We can’t forget that the tools of the age are also helping this spread - Internet, camera phones, instant feeds into social media and so on.

Amid all this madness, the value systems of 21st century football beat to their own rhythm in enormous payouts. But then do we have a choice in ensuring that normal life goes on regardless of the events of terror?