It’s that time again. The World Cup (no qualification required) is on and the whole planet goes on hold for one month. Wars, elections, climate change, negotiations and all matters of importance are put on pause. Everyone is glued to their television set, following their national team’s progress or their favourite team, all except perhaps for one select group, the FIFA Executive. At a time when they should be basking in the glory of the competition, they have all probably sought refuge in their air-conditioned suites, switched off their iPhones, advised their personal assistants of their unavailability to the media and have begun to count the minutes until the 18th December, the day of the final.
The 2022 FIFA World Cup, also referred to as Qatar 2022, (perhaps it should be the other way around?), from its inception, has been a bad dream for FIFA, which continued to get progressively worse, and in the last week has become a reality nightmare.
Qatar 2022 kicked off last Sunday with the hosts opposing the up-and-coming Ecuadorians amidst rumours that some of the South American players had been offered bribes to allow the hosts to win. (Qatar has virtually no chance against the two other Group A members, Netherlands, currently the number eighth ranked team in the world, and Senegal, the reigning African champions). No doubt FIFA members breathed a sigh of relief after Ecuador romped to a 2 – 0 victory.
Thus, the rug which had been pulled from under FIFA’s feet back in August, slipped slowly back into place virtually unnoticed. On 11th August, top FIFA officials unanimously acquiesced to Qatar’s request to play the opening match and made the unprecedented move to reschedule the start of the tournament to November 20, from the long-planned date of November 21. This FIFA decision (?) came just hours before a series of events marking the 100 days to kick-off was set to begin.
“The change ensures the continuity of a longstanding tradition of marking the start of the FIFA World Cup with an opening ceremony on the occasion of the first match featuring either the hosts or the defending champions,” FIFA said in a statement.
In bowing to Qatar’s demands to change the schedule, and thus having to shift the kick-off time of another match the next day, FIFA disrupted the plans of teams, fans, sponsors and broadcasters. The tournament’s marketing department which had spent millions of dollars buying advertising space around the world to mark the 100-day countdown to the World Cup suddenly found that the campaign was proclaiming the wrong opening date for Qatar 2022.
On 11th November, FIFA was informed that the beer tents at the stadiums must be moved immediately. The directive, according to sources, came from inside Qatar’s royal family and there was to be no discussion about it. The concern voiced was that the prominent presence of alcohol at the stadiums would unsettle the local population and present a security threat.
Budweiser, one of FIFA’s biggest sponsors since 1985, pays approximately US$75 million for exclusive rights to beer sales at every World Cup, and was not informed of the royal decree until Saturday, eight days before kick-off. A cloud of weariness had always hovered over this aspect of sponsorship from the time Qatar, a conservative Muslim country, received the host’s mandate. This edict has been handed down despite the campaign promise which stated that beer would be widely available during the tournament, but that it would be sold and consumed on terms that respected local customs.
Last Thursday, FIFA’s worst fears came to pass – the exhuming of the circumstances surrounding the awarding of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar. On Thursday, London’s Privy Council, the highest court of appeal for many Commonwealth countries unanimously agreed that former FIFA vice-president, Trinidadian Jack Warner can be extradited from his home country to the United States of America to face corruption charges. The Court’s ruling immediately revived all the suspicions and rumours that swirled around the 2010 vote by FIFA’s executive to hand the 2018 World Cup to Russia and the 2022 edition to Qatar. (FIFA had never previously selected two sites simultaneously)
In 2020, a US Department of Justice (DOJ) indictment stated that bribes were paid to soccer officials to secure their votes for hosting rights. Warner, then president of CONCACAF which organises soccer in North and Central America and the Caribbean, also allegedly wielded heavy influence on the African vote, and acted as a powerbroker for former FIFA chief Sepp Blatter. Warner was suspended by FIFA in 2011 and in 2015, charged with wire fraud, racketeering and money-laundering by the US, whereby FIFA banned him from all soccer-related activity for life in 2015. Of course, Warner, now 79 years old, has always denied any wrongdoing.
The US, which lost its bid to host this year’s World Cup (14 – 8 on the fourth round of voting to Qatar), led investigations of FIFA that revealed industrial-scale bribes, kickbacks, money laundering, racketeering and tax evasion which resulted in the indictment of 27 FIFA executives by the US DOJ. The disgusting details of FIFA’s corruption scandal have been the subject of several books, most notably, The Dirty Game (2016) by BBC Panorama presenter Andrew Jennings, and Red Card (2018) by New York Times reporter Ken Bensinger.
Last Saturday, on the tournament’s eve, current FIFA President, Swiss-Italian Gianni Infantino, now a resident of Qatar, delivered a near hour-long tirade, described by some observers as ‘Trumpian’, in which he lashed out at “European critics” for attacking Qatar which has laws criminalizing homosexuality, limits freedoms for women and does not offer citizenship to migrants
“Today, I feel Qatari. Today I feel Arab. Today I feel African. I feel gay. Today, I feel disabled. Today, I feel [like] a migrant worker,” Infantino wailed. Of course, Infantino is technically none of these things – “but I feel like it, because I know what it means to be discriminated [against],” he added.
FIFA’s President lectured Europeans who criticised Qatar’s human rights record, defended the country’s last-minute decision to ban beer from the stadiums on match days, praised the country’s immigration policy and the government for bringing in migrants to work. The latter was seen as a direct response to the London-based human rights group Equidem’s 75-page report, released this month, which stated that the migrant labourers who worked on Qatar’s US$220 billion splurge on eight brand new stadiums, had done so under harsh conditions and were subjected to discrimination and other abuses. FIFA’s President has found, or rather, has placed himself between a rock and a hard place. Infantino inherited a bad situation when he took office– Qatar was already the host — but he compromised himself by taking up residence there (he should have waited until after the event), and it appeared to all and sundry, that he was delivering a speech scripted by the Qatari authorities.
Finally, there is the threat that sanctions could be issued by FIFA to players from England, Wales and five European countries who had planned to wear OneLove arm bands as a show of support for inclusivity for all. The captains would be booked or forced to leave the field if they donned the arm bands. Naturally, this veiled threat issued by those in charge and voiced by FIFA has brought all manner of condemnations.
With the all the major European Leagues currently on hold, (because it would have been too hot to stage the World Cup in Qatar during the customary summer break), fans subject to Qatar’s intense heat, and the Qataris clearly calling the shots, FIFA’s best hope and prayer is that the action on the field of play will deflect all the criticism and scrutiny this World Cup has drawn. Perhaps, the three-time bridesmaid, Netherlands, will emerge as the winner, and all the drama will be forgotten in a cloud of sand. Not likely FIFA, this is the World Cup which should never have been.
