OF SPY DRONES AND HIGH FOOTBALL STAKES!

Story by Patrick Kamanga (pgkamanga73@gmail.com)

OF SPY DRONES AND HIGH FOOTBALL STAKES


 

Prior to their Group E match against Honduras last sunday, the French national team’s training camp was thrown into disarray before they flew out from Porto Alegre when a spy drone flew over, then hovered over their base in Ribeirao Preito.

The use of drones has been widely popularized by the U.S army in their global war on terror and occupation of Afganistan and Iraq in particular, over the past decade.

Unmanned military drones, miniature versions of actual planes are built with radar evading space age material and equipped with high resolution cameras, heat sensors, infra-red imaging among other capabilities for high altitude surveillance, security and even assault missions.

Drones don’t come on the cheap either. The sleek looking R-Q 4 Global Hawk drone manufactured by Northrup Grumman widely used by the U.S military for example costs a whopping $35 million! Other cheaper versions for civilian use go for significantly less.

Whether it’s the high end military grade or a cheaper version, anyone brazenly applying the use of reconnaissance drones to spy on a team’s training base in Brazil obviously means business. 

It’s on that back drop that any lay person would ponder why anyone would employ such an elaborate and bold measure as the use of a spy drone. 

The French are pooled together with Honduras, Switzerland and Ecuador in a less fancied Group E. 
The very nature of this group’s consistency would obviously eliminate Frances’ other group opponents and imply the complicity of other bigger players for this plot.

One conspicuous image from this year’s tournament has been that of F.I.F.A President Sepp Blatter’s convoy shuttling across the various venues in Brazil. 

Jet set, driven in tinted limousines, with security and a convoy to match, this is an image that would make any sitting President, Prime Minister or Monarch envious. 

The implication of this opulence, at the very least symbolizes how wealthy FIFA has grown during Mr. Blatter’s controversial tenure. This would imply that outside the conventional governments or related political entities, the Vatican and other religious organizations, and the major global financial instituitions FIFA’s financial muscle is unrivaled. 

That is also testament as to how popular football as a sport has grown, and how far reaching its global appeal has become. 
With a total population of 7 billion inhabitants on earth, no one single religion has been able to unite all the divergent races and cultures as much as the game of football does. That is the power of football!
Invoking the intricacies of life’s nature, any good thing has a bad countermeasure and vice versa. 

The ugly side of the game is represented by the illegal international betting and gambling syndicates who haven’t been left behind as FIFA morphed into the financial monolith it has become over the subsequent decades.

These gambling syndicates use bribery and match fixing as a primary method of achieving their ends. They traverse the length and breadth of the globe stretching from Singapore, to Moscow, China, the America’s and beyond racking in profits only paralleled by the illegal narcotics trade.

With that scenario in mind, and on the back drop of the global financial stakes in play at the modern game, it’s a small wonder then someone would employ a spy drone, perhaps in preparation for France’s inevitable progression from an obviously weaker group….