No need for conspiracies – World Cup 2030 and 2034 are a plot in plain sight
What do a Saudi Arabian World Cup, inexplicable VAR mistakes, David Beckham pretending Qatar was the best gay World Cup ever because, like, his gay mate told him it was, and the cancellation of the HS2 northern section have in common?
For the first time I can reveal that all these things are indeed connected. Just because you’ve been cajoled into a state of paranoid alienation by algorithmdriven conspiracy theories, it doesn’t mean they’re not actually out to get you. Just not, perhaps, in the most obvious way.
First it is time to see the positives in what is finally a sustainable World Cup. Fifa announced on Wednesday that the 2030 men’s tournament would take place across three continents, with 48 teams travelling up to 6,000 miles between venues in Uruguay, Argentina,
Paraguay, Spain, Portugal and Morocco, plans that have been heavily criticised on carbon-footprint grounds alone.
On the face of it this might look insane, perverse and eye-wateringly wasteful. But drill into the numbers and it becomes clear that increased oil revenues from the long-haul migrations of Everywhere 2030 will cover the costs of Saudi’s own World Cup four years later. This is surely the definition of sustainability.
Here we have a World Cup doubleheader that effectively pays for itself.
Not to mention another example of the same joined-up Fifa thinking that led to a war started by the 2018 hosts helping to fund the World Cup infrastructure of the 2022 hosts.
This last bit is not actually a joke. Qatar Energy’s annual net profits rose by $22bn (£18bn) last year due to the gas price surge from a war started by Qatar’s Fifa predecessors Russia (World Cup motto: Play with an open heart). In the words of the great Jungkook: we are the dreamers. We make it happen. Because we believe it.
It isn’t hard to see how Fifa reached its decision on Everywhere 2030, announced out of the blue a year before the deadline. The most persuasive theory is that the host-sharing plan is a way of ensuring that under the rotation rules Fifa can award 2034 to Saudi Arabia, the outstanding Asian candidate now that the Asian Football Confederation has declared its support.
The new regime prefers this kind of political compromise, a far more reliable source of power than the bidding system, with its old-school mobilityscooter-sweep of handbags and fancy watches. In the new Fifa everyone gets a fish.
There will of course be a great deal of double-speak about spreading the game, about the booming promise of the Saudi league. In reality this is about courting the biggest sponsors in world
sport and tying Fifa’s fortunes to the endlessly gushing cash tap of Vision 2030.
That relationship is already cosyclose. Gianni Infantino has regularly called on Saudi support for assorted pet projects, from the two-yearly World Cup to club football expansionism. Here we have the quid pro quo, presented to the world without even the light relief of a press conference from the great Gianni himself, who no doubt would have been feeling not just gay or female but like a machine-gunned African border migrant.
There will be a familiar response to this. Saudi Arabia is a repressive monarchy where homosexuality is punishable by flogging, where dissenters are imprisoned and tortured and where human rights organisations are banned. It is clearly wrong that football’s guardians, still parroting stock platitudes of equality and freedom, should reward this state with the greatest sporting spectacle on earth.
There will be attempts to rationalise it. The US, one of three 2026 hosts, also has many failings as a society. One bad thing is the same as all the other bad things. Let’s just watch the world burn. Perhaps in England we should even be celebrating the fact one of our own Premier League members is poised to secure the World Cup. Maybe Newcastle’s ultimate majority owners, the per-capita capital of decapitation, will decide to stage a quarter-final at St James’ Park. Maybe it’s finally coming home!
Zoom out a little, however, and the only reasonable responses to this dual announcement are the entirely logical feelings of alienation and disaffection. And this is where the other stuff comes in.
The other big question of the week is: why is football so vulnerable to conspiracy theories?
Why does it seem reasonable to so many people that the sweaty and incompetent men in charge of VAR are in fact a sinister conspiracy? Why is the bizarre decision to allow referees to moonlight in the UAE being interpreted as proof of direct and demonstrable corruption, as opposed to direct and demonstrable stupidity? Why is football so vulnerable to mass fits of anger?
The answer to this is obvious enough. People feel alienated and disempowered because the world has alienated and disempowered them. They distrust authority because authority has shown itself to be untrustworthy.
Albeit, the problem with actual conspiracy theories is that they tend to disguise the more mundane truth. There is a conspiracy out there. But it’s not a secret thing agreed by a lizard cabal.
This is instead an overt and very public conspiracy, a conspiracy of the powerful versus the powerless, of conjoined and self-supporting interests.
This is what football is telling us very loudly and in no uncertain terms. Money and power will simply overwhelm everything in their path. This is why Paris Saint-Germain can sell Julian Draxler to the Qatari league for a budget balancing sum, because it’s just what can happen when you have the means.
It’s why Beckham can get away with talking rot, because it turns out with power and a platform you can say what you want, truth is just spray in the wind. It is why nation-state entities buying clubs in post-industrial cities will use the language of economic abandonment, then talk up their community credentials, because people are vulnerable to this kind of talk right now.
This is what Fifa’s tournament double-header has to tell us, 2030 and 2034 the World Cups of climate death and state-sanctioned death. Now if you’ll excuse me, Darren England is on Rumble talking about getting too close to the truth and being cancelled by a meat-taxing elite. Ask yourself, would we even be talking about this if he was called Darren Germany?
Maybe Newcastle’s majority owners, the per-capita capital of decapitation, will stage a quarter-final at St James’ Park
was a confirmed fan but once he was fired in April 2014, the slightly built Januzaj, who finished the season at the World Cup with Belgium, swiftly dropped from view. Louis van Gaal’s experiments with him as a centre-forward fell flat, and Ryan Giggs’ former No 11 shirt hung heavy. Still only 28, he is currently a Sevilla player.
Van Gaal’s summer 2014 arrival led to the signing of his fellow Dutchman Memphis Depay from PSV a year later. Depay was not short of confidence. “I believe I can be one of the best players in the world,” he said, comparing himself to Cristiano Ronaldo, too, as he took the No 7 shirt. Two Premier League goals and a second season where he started one match were where that comparison came to rest. Depay, now at Atlético Madrid, has gone on to be a highly useful forward for club and country, with whom he played under Van Gaal again. “Now we kiss each other on the mouth,” said the manager, reflecting on shared dog days in Manchester.
That Anthony Martial remains at United results from a severe loss of form and high wages but there was a point in Van Gaal’s second, final season when the Frenchman and Rashford seemed the future of the club. José Mourinho did not share that opinion, making Martial, a centre-forward by anyone else’s measure, compete with Rashford for a place on the wing. Injuries and frequent losses of form have made the man who signed in the summer of 2015 only occasionally useful to Mourinho’s successors.
In hindsight, considering the alignment of personalities, Paul Pogba as summer 2016’s flagship signing for the new Mourinho regime was always a disaster waiting to happen, even if the pair did lift the Europa League together a year later. Mourinho failed to find the key to the enigmatic, wilful Frenchman. A previous youth product signed for a world-record fee who then left on a free is a transactional disaster that still comes little way to matching the disappointment of Pogba’s United career.
Henrikh Mkhitaryan, from the same agency stable, a free-spirited creative talent, was another curious Mourinho signing, never quite fitting the cautious, muscular tactics the manager preferred. Despite a goal in the 2017 Europa League final, it was little surprise a player previously hailed as the best in the Bundesliga was traded out.
That it was for Alexis Sánchez in January 2018 reflected United’s now notoriously scattergun transfer policy, headed up by their CEO at the time, Ed Woodward. A player Manchester City wanted, who at Arsenal had claims to be the best attacking player in English football, was signed on eye-watering wages, to achieve the square root of nothing in a United shirt.
After Zlatan Ibrahimovic – an actual success but an aged veteran – had succumbed to injury, Romelu Lukaku and Mourinho – now reunited at Roma – was another odd fit. Mourinho’s second spell at Chelsea had begun with discarding Lukaku on loan, and yet a hefty fee was paid to Everton. The more direct style United adopted around Lukaku divided fans, and when Mourinho’s end came, among the first of his successor Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s acts was to sideline the Belgian.
The presence of Harry Maguire here is no reflection on the excellence of United’s defending over the last decade. It has been just as listless and inconsistent as the attack but a player signed as a franchise defensive leader now symbolises the club’s slide. An encouraging first season – and the continuing patronage of Gareth Southgate – are no fig leaf for the unfortunate figure of ridicule Maguire has become. That a summer escape route to West Ham was not accepted only adds to the pathos.
Another whose exit surely nears is Jadon Sancho. Manchester United idols such as Best, Beckham and Rooney survived being banished from the club to flourish anew, but the player who was an assists machine at Borussia Dortmund has been sent away from the first team by Erik ten Hag with questions over attitude and fitness hanging heavy as United’s vortex swallows him up.