Wednesday, August 30: One Kiss is All it Takes
The ongoing downfall of the Spanish soccer federation
Imagine the happiest moment of your career being stolen away from you by a thoughtless and creepy man. This is the fate that’s unfolding for the Spanish women’s soccer team after their recent World Cup victory. During the victory celebrations, Luis Rubiales, president of the Spanish football federation, shared a nonconsensual kiss (more commonly referred to as an assault) of star player Jenni Hermoso following the match.
Since this audacious and unwelcome assault, the women’s team and Hermoso in particular have been in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons. In a stunning move, FIFA, the morally bankrupt international body that oversees global soccer, has decided to suspend Rubiales from office, while investigating his conduct after the Women’s World Cup final. Instead of marveling at the remarkable story of Spain’s rise, the topic on soccer fans’ minds continues to be the bizarre fallout of Rubiales’ creepy behavior.
After social media and Spanish government ministers widely condemned the kiss, Rubiales put out a half-hearted apology to “people who felt hurt,” while the soccer federation released a statement quoting Hermoso describing the kiss as “a natural gesture of affection and gratitude.” Media outlets soon reported that Hermoso had not in fact provided a quote. The federation had just made one up.
At an emergency assembly of the Spanish federation last week, Rubiales said “I won’t resign" four times in a row, to thunderous applause from the almost entirely male audience. It was another embarrassing display for both Rubiales and the entire federation. Rubiales’ and the federation’s disgraceful reactions highlight not only that these issues are nothing new in Spanish soccer, but also that the sexist rot runs deep. Rubiales has now been officially removed from all soccer duties for 90 days “pending the disciplinary proceedings opened” against him. In response, Rubiales is now suing the women’s soccer union and saying that Hermoso is “lying” about the consensual nature of the kiss. It’s also reported that Rubiales’ mother has staged a hunger strike and locked herself in a church in protest of her son’s treatment.
This is a repugnant person living in an age, as we certainly see in American politics, when open and malignant misogyny can be met with standing ovations. Rubiales has gone in the last week from weakly apologizing to now insisting the kiss was consensual. But Hermoso put out her own statement, in which she says unequivocally, “I feel obligated to state that the words that Mr. Luis Rubiales has used to explained the unfortunate incident are categorically false and part of the manipulative culture that he has created himself.”
The scandal has spread to not just the sports world in Spain, but throughout the entire country. Early this week, Spanish prosecutors opened a sexual assault investigation into Rubiales. What should be a moment of career-defining glory for the Spanish women’s national soccer team has been turned into a referendum on the predatory men that oversee the sport. Because of the sexist, patronizing, disrespectful and altogether repellent male leadership in Spanish soccer, these champions are instead are having to deal with patriarchal malice.
Side Items
Creeping Sharia: The Adhan or Muslim call to prayer will now ring out more freely in New York City under guidelines announced this week by the bozo serving as mayor, Eric Adams. Under the new rules, mosques will not need a special permit to publicly broadcast the Islamic call to prayer on Fridays and at sundown during the holy month of Ramadan. Friday is the traditional Islamic holy day, and the police department and their community affairs bureau will work directly with mosques to communicate the new guidelines and ensure that devices used to broadcast the Adhan are set to appropriate volume levels, because we all know a few uncles who struggle with controlling their volume
Coup in Gabon: You probably haven’t spent much time recently thinking about the small Central African nation, but they’ve been keeping busy. About the size of the state of Colorado and with a population of about 2 million people, Gabon has been exploited for its oil for well over half a century. But military officers stood in front of cameras earlier today and said they had seized power and put President Ali Bongo under house arrest. These officers stepped in just minutes after the Central African state's election body announced Bongo had won a third term.
The officers who said they represented the armed forces declared on television that the election results were cancelled, borders were closed and state institutions were dissolved, after a vote that was set to extend the Bongo family's more than 50 years in power. If successful, this Gabonese coup would be the eighth in West and Central Africa since 2020. The latest one, you’ll recall in Niger, was in July, but military officers have also recently seized power in Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso and Chad
Let Him Keep It: Some clueless guy in Connecticut discovered a bag with almost $5,000 in cash lying in a parking lot. So, he decided to keep it. Seems like a harmless enough story. But three months later, this guy’s being charged with larceny! It turns out the bag, which police claim was marked with a bank’s insignia and found outside the same bank, contained cash from the town’s tax department. There were also allegedly “numerous documents” inside the bag identifying the rightful owner of the cash as the town of Trumbull. But our clueless king, Robert Withington, 56, of Trumbull, says he didn’t steal the money and didn’t notice anything inside the bag indicating who the owner was. “I walked out onto the parking lot, saw something on the ground and there was no one around so I picked it up. It’s not like I stole something. If I knew I was wrong in the first place, I would have given it right back. I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong.” When police eventually interviewed Withington, they said he acknowledged being at the bank and taking the bag. He also told them that he believed, “he had no obligation to return the bag to its rightful owner”, which honestly seems fair, let that man win his little parking lot lottery