We can never turn a blind eye to greed ... but game we love has us over a barrel

SA World Cup in a country with no background in football is an easy target

HOULD we feel guilty about looking forward to Qatar kicking off their home World Cup against Ecuador later this afternoon? Will we feel the need to take a long, cleansing shower every evening after sitting through four games a day from these outlandish venues built on migrants’ blood?

Perhaps. There is certainly no question that what is about to unfold is one of the more vile and absurd chapters in the professional game’s steady descent, but we ought not to find the prospect of adopting a spot of cognitive dissonance too difficult.

After all, remaining interested in top-end football has involved a considerable bit of that for quite some time now. Indeed, watching and supporting all kinds of elite professional sport these days requires it.

A World Cup being taken to a country with no background in football — and no likelihood of it taking hold — is an easy target. As is that stupid tour set up by those golfers taking Saudi Arabian coin to play under ludicrous team names such as Majesticks and Torque.

We can feel safe giving Qatar or Saudi or wherever else a kicking when their lifestyles, cultures, their value systems, don’t meet with ours. Theirs is a distant world. A world hard to like, where the riches of the few appear to matter far more than the basic human rights of the many.

Already this week, a number of individuals heading for Qatar have made it clear they will be going there to report fearlessly on the issues. To raise awareness of the inequalities and injustices.

This is all good and well and let us hope it transpires. The corruption that resulted in the award of the event to the hosts was sickening, but it doesn’t even start to hold a candle to the treatment of immigrant manual workers there down the years.

Yet, isn’t it all part of where football, in particular, has been going for a long, long time now? A dark path that people seem less inclined to shine the torchlight upon when it leads close to their own homes and clubs and cultures.

Have we thought much of the sweatshop workers in Thailand or Cambodia earnng pennies an hour as we kit out our children — or ourselves — in the extortionately-priced replica kits they produce?

Probably not as much as we question the clubs for releasing four strips a season and ripping off their own punters for as much as they possibly can.

We accept the English Premier League being lionised. We pay our umpteen different — and costly — TV subscription deals to tune in, even though we know and accept that those same subscription channels mess up all the kick-off times for the paying, attending supporter.

We listen to those heading for Qatar to brandish the sword of truth big it up every week even though it has owners from all over the place — including Saudi, China and the United Arab Emirates — ploughing in money through often opaque channels and changing the competitive basis of the entire competition.

Liverpool are now up for sale at an estimated £4billion, presumably because it is clear the European Super League they initially supported is not going to happen for them.

Barcelona, once the club of no sponsor on the shirt and UNICEF tie-ups, are still pushing for it to happen in some guise or other — although president Juan Laporta this week let slip that it isn’t going to be the egalitarian paradise previously described thanks to plans in place to make sure the founding clubs bank an earlybird bonus of a billion euros each.

The Champions League format it is intended to rival becomes ever less competitive under the umbrella of UEFA, an organisation supposed to protect the integrity of the game. Much like FIFA.

That’s because big clubs call the tune. Big clubs such as Paris Saint-Germain, who have happily been allowed to assemble a squad of megastars on Qatari money without the same outcry we’ve had about a World Cup taking place on their benefactors’ soil.

Meanwhile, clubs such as Rangers happily rinse their punters for £180 for a three-game ticket to watch it — before their manager starts complaining about them being unable to compete. Just another club with a huge reputation from the wrong country that will be allowed to become less and less relevant unless it gets the chance to bite Laporta’s arm off and jump headfirst into something new that looks like being weighted against them, too.

Cristiano Ronaldo, meanwhile, moans about how hard life is on a reported £560,000 a week in a TV interview and it’s all just part of the circus. Just like all these lunatic sponsorship details with mysterious cryptocurrency firms that have been going under the radar everywhere from the SPFL to the biggest leagues around. Well, the money’s got to come from somewhere, anywhere, right?

FIFA and UEFA say all the correct things about racism. Yet, so many players who have to deal with it in countries around the world will tell you they don’t match those words with actions.

And let’s not be too comfortable about where we are in Scotland, where we like to see ourselves as somehow more authentic.

That’s true in many respects, but we still have a culture within stadia of bigotry and sectarianism that carries on regardless year after year because the authorities and the clubs can’t agree on how to punish it. Or just don’t want to.

Earlier this month, the Children’s Commissioner Bruce Adamson slammed the SFA after they finally revealed reforms to protect the rights of young people — kicked into the long grass for years — and admitted that elite-level clubs will still be able to tie down 15-year-olds on restrictive 30-month registrations.

One prominent MSP also insisted earlier this year that the Scottish senior game was ‘contaminated’ by drugs money.

And let’s not forget who helped put Qatar where they are now. Don’t you remember the protests outside Easter Road in 2015 when the SFA staged a friendly with the Middle East nation and had then

chief executive Stewart Regan stating that ‘we have to separate the football from the political matters’?

And most of us do that to a degree, don’t we? We have to. How else would it be possible to enjoy top-level football given all the baggage it carries these days?

We can still protest when our clubs or our national associations indulge in practices we disapprove of. We must. Yet, the train feels too far down the tracks to turn back. In any case, is it realistic to expect football and wider sport to adopt different rules to a wider world where the government can sell arms to the Saudis, for example, and regard them as allies?

Putting these things to the side is something many of us do every week when watching football. Otherwise, the only option is to walk away. And that’s not easy or straightforward when it involves something you love.

It’s just the way of the modern world. And the sullied, tarnished game that has us all over a barrel.