“Peace Football” Tournament AnnouncedNOBEL COMMITTEE AND FIFA AGREE DEAL

“Peace Football” Tournament Announced

NOBEL COMMITTEE AND FIFA AGREE DEAL

Following the awarding of the first “FIFA Peace Prize – Football Unites the World” to US President Donald J. Trump, it has been confirmed that FIFA and the Norwegian Nobel Committee have agreed a bi-annual “peace football” tournament to further combine their roles in promoting both world peace and the beautiful game. While the decision to award the FIFA Peace Prize to the former host of TV shows The Apprentice and Celebrity Apprentice was seen by many as an insult to the annual Nobel Peace Prize, and a stunt to both please Trump and garner publicity for the 2026 World Cup draw, with the tournament taking place in the USA, Canada and Mexico, the new tournament seems to suggest that this was all part of a grander plan to promote peace.

Details of the tournament, and it’s format are to be announced later, but some of the qualification rules and some interesting innovations regarding team selection and match rules have been sketched out, with speculation suggesting that the tournament might be used to test out ideas that would later be introduced to the wider game. One of the more controversial ones is that any physical contact between opposing players, other than hugs and kisses, is deemed a bookable offence for both players, although it will require five yellow cards to receive an orange card, which would trigger five minutes in the ‘understanding bin’, another innovation, and then three orange cards leads to a pink card, which entails a further ten minutes in the understanding bin. No player is ever sent off, but can receive multiple spells in the bin. During these spells, the player is inside a ‘cocoon’ that cuts them off from the game entirely, while they are subjected to soothing music, aromatherapy, and are joined by a ‘peace pal’ – a specially trained dog, who will assist in bringing the player to a state of calm before they return to the game. It has been reported that these understanding bins have been tested with the assistance of former professionals Roy Keane, Joey Barton, and Julian Dicks, and were an amazing success, although one insider refuted this and claimed that “dozens” of the cocoons were destroyed in the testing phase.

The most interesting aspect of the new tournament is the proposed qualification process, which will not involve any actual extra matches; instead a new committee will be appointed jointly by FIFA and the Norwegian Parliament (who appoint the Nobel Committee), and they will be tasked of sifting through a list of professional football teams provided by A.I, that assesses all the teams in the world’s disciplinary records during the qualifying period using a complicated algorithm. The A.I, nicknamed Pierluigi, after the legendary Italian referee Pierluigi Collina (see video below), will present the forty teams with the cleanest record to the committee, which they must whittle down to 31, with the final place going to Norway under the agreement struck between FIFA and the Nobel Committee. It is widely thought that Norway will be odds on to win almost every tournament, although another innovation is that betting on the tournament will be completely banned.

Both FIFA and the Nobel Committee have had harsh criticism in past, being accused of both financial and political corruption, and have seen their reputations diminish in the eyes of many people in the public, most notably with FIFA when they have awarded the hosting of the tournament to what many consider to be unsuitable places, either due to weather conditions, the scheduling of the tournament, the conditions that workers constructing stadiums and related infrastructure face, other human rights issues, or just straightforward bribery allegations, sometimes all of the above for a single tournament, with the most recent tournament in Qatar attracting heavy criticism. This criticism also spread to those attending the tournament who proclaimed to be strongly in support of human rights yet took up lucrative jobs as ‘expert’ commentators, hosts or pundits, such as Gary Lineker and Gary Neville. Lineker is rumoured to be in line for next year’s FIFA Peace Prize.

One final expected innovation for the actual tournament is that all the officials must be from what is regarded as a minority or oppressed group, and every country belonging to FIFA can put forward their own list of officials for consideration. This has generated lots of discussion as people speculate what the makeup of these lists will be for different countries; for instance, the majority view is that the USA will put forward largely Native American, Somali and trans-women candidates (preferably all three); Australia’s list is expected to be dominated by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples (with a sprinkling of Sheilas), China is thought to be likely to nominate Han males, Sweden are trending towards beautiful blonde females who haven’t been sexually molested, while the UK are strong favourites to put forward native born Londoners who haven’t been stabbed or had their phone stolen, and don’t drive electric cars or ride bikes.

Featured image: Artists impression of the trophy that will be awarded at the tournament

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