There’re some things Money just can’t buy

It is hard for us to be fans of credit card companies. The debt we rang up when we were in college is going to force us to work until our arthritic fingers can blog no more. But today we are cheering on MasterCard, which has filed an injunction against FIFA. You might recall that FIFA recently announced a new partnership agreement with Visa, MasterCard’s competitor. According to MasterCard, FIFA entered into this agreement illegally. Why do we care?

It is simple. The more FIFA lawyers that are involved in lawsuits involving loads of money, the less likely they will send their henchmen after us. Here’s hoping MasterCard is able to drag this thing out until 2018.

In other legal news, a German court ruled today that the German Football Federation has the legal authority to veto black market transactions of World Cup tickets. This means that if you want to exchange tickets you can only do so through the very complicated and convoluted official site.

The German Football Federation still maintains that it will be checking the names on each ticket when people enter the stadiums this summer to prevent black market exchanges.

You have to think that if this is the case the lines to get into the stadium are going to be absurdly long. You also have to think that all those corporate sponsors tickets won’t have names on them at all and that MasterCard, et al will be making a bundle selling their tickets through touts and on their own black market.