If You Don't Play Nice, We Take the Ball and Go Elsewhere

In 2018 FIFA plans to hold the World Cup in Russia.

Hosting the World Cup Soccer Tournament yields a number of benefits, as well as considerable costs in preparing to do so.  Actual figures are all across the board.  One example is when the U.S. hosted in 1994 and just one (LA) of the many cities involved calculated the monetary value of the event at $623 million compared to the $182 million profit from the Super Bowl.**  Long term infrastructure benefits, establishment of whole soccer leagues, new tourist revenues, and the inherent advantage the home team always seems to have are a few of the indirect monetary paybacks.

There are other intangibles, most notably a rise in status, and world acceptance of the primacy of the country hosting the world's biggest sporting event. 

So, doesn't it seem like a total impropriety to have Russia host the 2018 World Cup, given:

• Russia's military take-over of Crimea immediately following its hosting of the 2012 Winter Olympics
• Russia's further military subversion and direct participation in destabilizing the Ukrainian republic, including extensive killing in the east
• Russia's being under European and U.S. sanctions for these latter two acts
• Russia's unrepentant role in helping shoot down a civilian airliner
• Rampant PED use in all the prior Olympics
• Russian government/intelligence service facilitation of such when it hosted the Olympics
• Russia's aid to Assad in Syria, participating in such events as the barrel bombing of civilians and overlooking the continued use of chemical weapons such as chlorine gas
• Russia's not-so-subtle military threat to the Baltic States as it steps up exercises on the Lithuania border 
• Russia's election interference in the U.S. that some equate with an act of war
• Russia's upcoming election interference in Europe/elsewhere and continued hacking despite the incredibly harsh punishment imposed by the Obama Administration (sanctioning four people and maybe five institutions that never leave the country anyways)

• And, of course, NO U.N. action on any of this (because they are too busy passing Resolutions against Israel for building condo's) 

Why is it "business as usual" on the economic and sports front between the free world and Russia???

By way of analogy, if some executive at your company is assaulting the administrative staff, stealing from the coffers, and putting viruses in your computer system, you don't make him Employee of the Month AND give him a Citizenship Award.

Do sanctions mean anything at all?

The world should not be such pushovers; let's hit 'em where it hurts

And actually achieve our goal