The real winners of shameful World Cup will be Qatar
BIG days exert a gravitational pull that few involved in sport can resist. Once we enter the orbit of a major tournament, inhibitions splinter. Moral objections are distorted into ever-more timid protest. The occasion is all. It’s started with the World Cup. The last international window before the tournament starts had occasional insights from journalists who have visited Qatar, and some fresh horrors have been exposed.
But these stories are grotesque diversions that are eventually overlooked in the rush to analyse Harry Maguire.
Another threatened French meltdown awaits. Iran’s friendly win over Uruguay highlights a fresh threat to England.
The shamefulness of the decision to give the tournament to Qatar is as tangible today as it was when the announcement was made 12 years ago.
The rottenness that ran through the bidding process has been steadily exposed, but never has it felt like the major powers in the world game – the big federations, the sponsors, and the broadcasters – cared enough to have that squalid charade revisited.
And so the World Cup is upon us, in a country that doesn’t have the physical or social infrastructure to accommodate it.
Yet it is now clear that we can castigate the decision while also wondering if anyone will be able to live with Brazil.
We can feel disgust that gay couples are advised not to show public affection and also think that Lionel Messi’s chances of inspiring Argentina are negligible.
And they’ll tell you that sportswashing isn’t a thing, or that it doesn’t work, or that it can be resisted. It is, it does, and it can’t. There is no scramble for a superior vantage point from this perspective, either. The tournament will be as greedily consumed from here as from millions of other sofas around the planet.
Sheer weight of money has legitimised the wretched 2022 World Cup, just as it has rendered respectable the Manchester City project.
There is now virtually no mention of how the club have become a superpower. Erling Haaland is threatening to reduce the Premier League to helpless tottering tomato cans, as he takes aim and picks them off one by one.
His extraordinary talent is celebrated, and there isn’t a mention of how it ended up in Manchester.
MAYBE people don’t want to hear it or read about it any longer. Perhaps constantly qualifying any account of the player, or his club, or Pep Guardiola makes for bad copy and upsets the punters. Whatever the reason, the nature of their success has been normalised.
That’s another testament to the power of sportswashing.
Look, too, at how golf’s interminable, self-absorbed, repellent civil war has been reduced to a squabble about the standing of the PGA, and to a row about how the sport’s history is curated and its hierarchy ordered.
The source or purpose of the LIV money isn’t mentioned much, and how could it be? Golfers have been stuffing tainted petro-dollars into their pension funds for years. They can hardly start grandstanding about human rights when a new repressive regime starts muscling in on the territory that neighbouring autocracies have been occupying for years.
This is why the golf schism is not attended by much discussion about the moral purpose of the sport, or its responsibilities to the wider world.
Instead, the talk is about protecting the integrity of the game – and this is indulged by pliant commentators, with those defending the PGA and the existing order celebrated as principled giants of our time. It’s utterly absurd. Maybe there is no way of resisting the power of the money sluicing out of Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
It might find a way around the most determined objection, because professional sport must always answer to the person holding the biggest cheque.
It’s a sobering thought, but if it’s the case – and it surely is – then let’s admit it.
Let’s concede that sportswashing works, and that the winners of the 2022 World Cup will not be Brazil or Spain or England, but a repellent regime that is determined to buy its way to respectability.
This won’t stop it happening again. It won’t stop Haaland scoring or golfers bloviating.
And it won’t stop us watching all these events.
That is the real curse: these wretched regimes understand the intoxicating power of big-time sport.
They manipulate its popularity for awful ends, and they get away with it.
There could be no stopping them. The least we can do is admit we’re being used, that we’re submitting to a wider, darker, more dispiriting game.
That’s the dismal truth of it, and we all have to live with that.