The Trap
Art by Kytten Janae.

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Tech

The Trap

Will FIFA one day turn all of soccer into a corrupt, fixed, techno-bloodsport?

Last week, the US indicted 14 FIFA officials on charges of corruption; they were arrested in Switzerland. FIFA has long fielded accusations of malfeasance, including allegations of game-fixing and bribe-taking. In today's Terraform, sportswriter Aaron Gordon looks down the road at the future of FIFA—and the entire sport—if the corruption were to reach its logical conclusion. -the Eds.


The ball is still at my feet as I fend off the drone locust attack. Then the gravity cannon gets me again, pushing it away from me and right into the defender's foot. Sometimes it takes my legs out, too. I lose control of my own body. I've become accustomed to that.

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I've read about the days before the multisurface turf, before the gravity cannons, the lasers, the locusts, the ambi-heat lamps, the lifts, the rampant rompers—I'll never forgive them for that broken leg in 2062—the rovers, the invisiwire, the invisigoal, the invisistands, the invisi-everything. The history scripts tell me of games won based on merit. It's been a while since I've played in one of those.

It takes three types of people to fix a match: the fixers, the fixees, and everyone else. The fixers are the organizers, the gamblers, the benefactors. The fixees are the ones who get paid off to make it happen. Everyone else has to pretend it's all straight—and buy the tickets.

I lift my head out of the multisurface turf and brush its temporarily mud-like substance from my face. The Eurasians are advancing quickly up my right. My teammates are useless clods. A design of the system, not a flaw. But I'm not ready to surrender. Not yet. I'm tired of pretending.

I have two minutes left.

Over the years, FIFA has bounced back from a lot—remember when we thought the stadium disaster at Qatar 2022 was the end?—but the 2058 World Cup was a bridge too far. Turned out, no one could get past the neo-Nazi hitmen.

With the World Cup tarnished beyond all salvation, FIFA replaced it with a new tournament, the TransPanContinental Cup, AKA TraPaCoCu, AKA the Trap. Great idea at first: every two years instead of four, played in the same city every time to eliminate the temptation for bribery and corruption, rigorous organizational oversight. A global celebration ensued. The beautiful game finally had a just commander.

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We should have known better. After all, it's FIFA, the same organization that elected Sepp Blatter seven times, even though he served his last term in Leavenworth.

Eventually, they came to me with money, and I took it because it didn't matter whether I took it or not.

I know the Eurasians are going to cross the ball. I run into the box so I can play it in the air. But the ball hangs a beat longer than expected thanks to the jet propulsion tubes. I return to the ground after a fruitless journey skyward, but there's no attacker to benefit. The ball glides harmlessly towards the far corner. I go to retrieve it but a teammate fetches it first and collects it before shuffling my way. I'm the only one on my team who even wants the ball. Nine years of fixed games, and I've had enough. It's time to shock Dan Tan City.

The first warning sign was the location. Why build it in the middle of the Australian salt flats? The second warning was the secrecy. What were they even building, and who was paying for it? The third was the sudden transparency. If there was no reason to be secret, why the secrecy? Why did the city suddenly appear?

We play in Dan Tan City, a monument to FIFA. I knew something was wrong the first minute of the first game. It was supposed to be a stadium of the future, but it wasn't a stadium at all. It was a theater.

At first, we were confused. Why was the ball suddenly shooting ten feet away from us when we hadn't even touched it? Why would the ball drastically curl 20 feet off target after flying straight for two-thirds of its journey to the goal? Why would we fall on our faces for no reason? Why would we get itchy as fuck in the middle of making an off-the-ball run? Why would our ears suddenly bleed?

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Not long after, the biggest stars retired, assuming they'd lost their god-given talent. "The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away," many said in their retirement press conferences. Only partly true.

FIFA realized it had a problem on its hands—that the most marketable stars couldn't be seen to leave the game in droves. So they told us what happens in Dan Tan City.

I begin my journey upfield. Swiftly, I dodge the multi-surface turf and power my way through the locusts. I don't make too big a show of jumping the invisiwire, because if I do they'll nail me right then with the gravity cannon. It makes it look like I dove, which the refbot can still card me for. But I know what I'm really being carded for. I know everything is stacked against me, which is why I have to win. Just once, I have to prove I can still beat this stadium, this city, this system. I can still beat FIFA.

"We need you," he told me. "The people, they want to see a game." No matter who the FIFA president is, they always sound exactly alike. It's only about the game. Not politics, not money, not corruption, not evil, not grift, and never war. Only the game. "But the game is different now, since '58. We cannot be leaving matters up to fate. We have to exercise con-trol."

I still remember the way he said that word, his voice getting low, raspy, his fists clenching, breaking the word into two distinct syllables. "But the people," the president said softly, with more than a hint of disdain, "they cannot know."

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Sick of letting other governments control their only product, FIFA decided to build their own. So Dan Tan City was made and they paid me, and a bunch of other mid-talent hacks to pretend to play their most sacred game.

The roving rompers usually hit around midfield. The trick with them, I learned after the broken ankle of 2062, is to give the ball away just before they arrive. They'll pelt him instead, the poor bastard.

Tan, which probably isn't his real name, made a name for himself back in the day bribing human referees. Such a clumsy mechanism for fixing games, but it got the job done. When FIFA could no longer attract legit sponsors after '58, Tan approached them with an idea. He financed the stadium, in exchange for being allowed to collaborate on its design. It would be so state-of-the-art as to be unprecedented, the first stadium in the world capable not only of hosting the game, but controlling it. It would be a fixer's paradise, as long as you were on the money side.

Things get trippy in the final third. The goal becomes an optical illusion, a hologram floating out and away before snapping back into place. The ball changes weight between dribbles, oscillating between the density of cement and mozzarella. The defenders actually try. But this is it. This is my last shot.

Once you're in on the fix, you begin to see that everyone else is, too. Eyebrows raise in delight rather than skepticism when the ball deviates from its skyward path into the net. Players trip on thin air. The sportswriters attribute it all to randomness, luck, or skill, but none of these things matter in Dan Tan City.

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I don't have much time. I have to be quick. Less than a minute now, I'm sure of it.

Way before holograms and VR, before digital, even, people made images on cellulose acetate. But they degraded over time. The colors would shift and change. Everything would look bluer and pinker. If I showed you those blue and pink pictures of the world, now, you might wonder why the world used to be bluer and pinker.

When I think back on soccer before the fix, I'm not sure if I'm remembering or creating it, like the fading cellulose acetate. Am I just like the eyebrow-raisers, or was it really, truly different back then? All I can remember was the wonder. I've seen the clips of the greats. Boatang tripping over Messi's brilliance like his feet were glued to to the turf—were they?!—or Beckham curling the ball with a preternatural command that may not have been his at all. Even if it was a ruse for profit, it was a beautiful ruse, it was our ruse, and they sold it to us brilliantly. I want to give these people more than what they came for. They came for the ruse, but I can give them the wonder.

Quick dip around the left back. I've got space now. I can make it around the corner if I sprint. But sprinting is when you have the least amount of control, and that's when they get you. But you can't score without taking a risk, so I go for it. The defender is too hot on my heels for the invisiwire. I don't think they can get me with the heat blast either, for the same reason. If it's anything, it's going to be the gravity cannon, because it's always the gravity cannon.

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They don't like it when you score, but they know you have to, sometimes. They lose their control if people start to suspect. Things can't always go as planned, or else it all becomes too clear. When you can give people a damn good show, when you can fool them, when you can be a part of this mechanism, taking their sport away from them and still convincing them it's theirs, so they watch it and love it and fight for it—now that's the real game, isn't it?

I get the shot off before the gravity cannon can get me. Whether it's intentional or operational error, the cannon blast hits me square in the sternum. Gravity blasts to the sternum send your heart the wrong message about how things are supposed to work. I have to watch the shot from the seat of my shorts, arm pulsating with pain, heart resting forever.

The shot is a tight angle but it's true. I curl it perfectly around the keeper, who is terrible. It's off to the far post now, gently angling towards it as if the post has a gravity pull of its own. With a little grace, it'll kiss the inside of the post and glance into the net, and I'll win a game dammit, I'll beat the fix for once in my sorry life. It may make some eyebrows rise, some voices gasp, some kids want to wear my name on the back of their shirts, and do what I did this day, here in Dan Tan City.

Goal.

FIFA giveth, and FIFA taketh away.


This dispatch is part of Terraform, the new home for future fiction.