QATAR 2022 RAISES MORE QUESTIONS OF HOW 15 TO NAVIGATE MODERN FOOTBALL’S MORAL MAZE
Thursday 3 September, 2020 COVID-19:
ON 2 December 2010, I was hosting an event on behalf of the England 2018 World Cup bid outside City Hall in central London. It was toe-curlingly cold. My co-host, Charlotte Jackson, and I were joined by Peter Crouch and David Ginola among others to celebrate England’s certain success – the first World Cup on home soil since ’66. We were favourites. It was a good bid, albeit laced with that hubris that we often fail to acknowledge. They do actually play football in other countries.
A small crowd were in some temporary seating as we beamed pictures back from Switzerland. We got word of the result 20 minutes before it was officially announced.
The crowd had already started to ebb away when Sepp Blatter stood at the lectern and laboured over opening an envelope with the word Russia written on both sides. The director shouted down my earpiece. “Just fill for the next 10 minutes so the crowd stay for the 2022 result.” Trying to retain a withering and despondent crowd in sub-zero temperatures proved too much for my broadcasting abilities. By the time Qatar was officially given the tournament we were talking to a couple of unsuspecting dog walkers. The hot chestnut seller by the river had a bigger audience. Even our guests had gone inside.
We have heard a great deal about Qatar in the following 11 years. We’ve been through the corruption allegations, the realisation that it’s hot in the summer in the Middle East and the tragedy of the (disputed) number of migrant worker deaths.
And now we have the complex job of working out how to cover it. On the Guardian Football Weekly podcast the other day I asked an open question about what we should do. I genuinely don’t know the answer. Do we record one episode about human rights at the start of the tournament and then forget all about it and focus on the football? There will be countless journalists and ex-pros who don’t even do that – before we even consider those taking money from Fifa to promote it. I was as guilty as anyone of nodding to the invasion of Crimea and the repression of political opposition in Russia before 2018 and then forgetting it all as England reached the semi-final. Should I have spent less time worrying about why the Croatians weren’t tired and more questioning how this tournament was legitimising Vladimir Putin’s regime? I have literally no idea what, if any, impact hosting the World Cup contributed to the horrifying scenes we see today. But I don’t think I used my platform enough regardless of whether it would have made a jot of difference.
The latest Amnesty International report into private security firms who employ tens of thousands of migrant workers in Qatar is pretty
damning. It says they are still subject to “forced labour” and a number of other abuses and it criticises Fifa for failing “to put in place adequate processes” to address these issues.
So this time around should we break off our discussion of Harry Kane’s late penalty to beat Iran to find out if the working conditions of migrants really have changed? After Ghana get retribution against Uruguay do we talk about what life is like for the LGBTQ+ community in Qatar? As Jonathan Wilson said on the podcast, this World Cup will be one of gear changes. Journalists
and broadcasters will know workers died providing the stadiums from where they are reporting.
“Hey Max,” wrote someone on Twitter. “I hope between now and the World Cup you can work out your duty as a ‘journalist’ when covering the tournament. Because your answer of ‘I don’t know’ is a little disappointing … Feels a bit of a cop out. Let’s hope you can many things, one of which the racism, the misogyny, work out your job by the end is a seeming desperation for the worrying link to do
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In June, researchers at some physicians, said Dr. said. - NYTIMES.
gamblification of football, pasty shoes. - GUARDIAN