take off your trousers, they're offending our sponsor

I am not amused, in fact I'm annoyed by this. If it had been a governmental thing, people would have been rightly outraged by the fascist-seeming action, but it's about commercial sponsorship, so it's okay. What am I on about?

Critics say the decision to make more than 1,000 Dutch fans strip off last Friday is evidence of the extraordinary lengths to which Fifa has gone to protect the interests of World Cup sponsors - at the expense of ordinary fans. Fifa, however, says it has done nothing wrong and is entitled to defend itself against what it calls "ambush marketing".

I say "tough luck corporate sponsors", money shouldn't be able to buy the right to subject people to this kind of indignity. At the very least these people should have been offered alternative netherwear. In fact I think they should sue the sponsor who insisted on this and campaign to boycott their wares. So watch out Budweiser, I'm off Bud now.

I'm afraid ambush marketting may not be nice, but corporations are going to have to recognise that mental space and civil liberties are tied up with one another. There are issues in here that concern Christians: freedom of conscience is involved, loving neighbours does not involve humiliating them especially for such trivial reasons. More importantly, where could this kind of control freakery end? Potentially the same arguments could be used to strip Christians of faith symbols or to censure such things as crossing oneself. It only takes corporations to become aware of how radically anti-consumerist Christianity can be and for that to be in the public mind somewhat and we will be suspect in public life where sponsorship and the right to propagandise are being bought and sold ... we will be a threat to their messages and to the anthropology and to the life-purpose they wish to construe for human beings through the connotations and implicatures of their brands, messages and use of symbol. Too hyped? Too 'thin-end-of-the wedge'? Maybe, but then so many big things have grown up from little origins that no-one thought could lead where they did.

Guardian Unlimited Football | World Cup 2006 | The new World Cup rule: take off your trousers, they're offending our sponsor:
Filed in: marketting, sponsorship, football, FIFA