Qatar has made us all hypocrites
We're all fools for the ugly game
Anecdotes are datum rather than data, but my circle is unusually irked by Qatar’s hosting of the Fifa men’s World Cup. Acquaintances who would have watched every match are rationing themselves to England games, while fair-weather fans are eschewing the tournament entirely.
The foremost reason for this appears to be Qatar’s questionable treatment of LGBT people. “Male homosexuality is illegal in Qatar, with a punishment of up to three years in prison and a fine and the possibility of a death penalty for Muslims under sharia law,” according to Wikipedia, although evidence for actual capital punishment for gay men is seemingly sparse.
Running second is the allegation that thousands of migrants workers have died building the tournament stadiums. In February 2021 the Guardian noted that 6,500 migrants workers had died in Qatar since the World Cup was awarded to the country, although this vaguely-worded claim has been disputed by other media.
The details don’t matter all that much. David Beckham’s puff video might make Qatar look nice, but even before it won the World Cup it enjoyed the reputation most Arab states do: sandy, hot and backwards. That it scored the hosting slot through corruption only confirmed what we already thought about the place, and every fresh allegation cements it further.
It’s not the first time that the World Cup has been hosted somewhere a little shonky, mind. Recent hosts include Russia from 2018, which had not long before invaded the neighbour it invaded again this year. There was some kerfuffle, and people mentioned Russia’s intolerance of LGBT people too, but largely things went on.
Four years before that was Brazil. According to a US State Department report for 2014, the country’s human rights abuses included: “excessive force and unlawful killings by state police; beatings, abuse, and torture of detainees and inmates by police and prison security forces; prolonged pretrial detention and inordinate delays of trials; judicial censorship of media”, plus plenty of discrimination.
The problem, as others have noted, is that if you want to expand the reach of football you will have to interact with places that fall short of European ideas about human rights. If you don’t want any country that practices discrimination, police brutality or any other nasty business, you aren’t left with many options.
On close examination, even the next tournament in America, Canada and Mexico is suspect. The latter is so infested with drug cartels they’ll probably be appointed to run the games. While Canada lacks the mafia problem, the government is running a state-sponsored killing programme in a seeming attempt to determine the exact slipperiness of the slope next to euthanasia.
As for Uncle Sam, the non-Western world could well claim that its foreign misadventures are ample reason to exclude the US from hosting international sports for the foreseeable. Even Britain’s joint-bid with Ireland to host to Euros in 2028 could be disqualified on similar grounds.
So while Fifa president Gianni Infantino is clearly full of shit when he claims that queer people are welcome in Qatar, he’s right that our standards lack consistency. If you don’t want to play football with scumbags, perhaps best not to join Fifa.