“Just as the Moneyball era produced a generation of baseball fans who talked like Nate Silver, soccer’s age of decadence has turned fans into current-affairs obsessives. Sovereign wealth funds, sanctions, and debt seep into Saturday-morning chatter with the same frequency as counter-pressing or expected goals. The forces shaping modern soccer into something bigger, better, and more morally bankrupt than ever are the same ones that have blown up everything else. Following the sport is an education in oligarchs, oil, corruption, media, partisanship, politics, and the financialization of everything. You don’t even have to like soccer to learn from it—because in a lot of ways, the story of the sport’s last two decades hasn’t been about soccer at all.” Tim Murphy in MoJo: How the Story of Soccer Became the Story of Everything.

+ Everything includes endless corruption, but not a lot of ethics. A Beginner’s Guide to Everything Wrong with the Qatar World Cup.

+ Dua Lipa denied she will be performing at the World Cup and said, she will “look forward to visiting Qatar when it has fulfilled all the human rights pledges it made” when it became host.

+ With that attitude, it’s safe to say Dua Lipa won’t be joining the governing committee at FIFA anytime soon. For some background on the organization’s epic corruption (and an explanation of how the World Cup ended up in Qatar), check out the Netflix doc: FIFA Uncovered. Of course, we know how corrupt FIFA is and we know what we’re dealing with in Qatar. Yet, the games will be played a we’ll watch. Corruption, sadly, often works.