JUST SIX DAYS TO DECIDE
Will our conscience allow us to watch the World Cup? Soccer’s premier event is rife with ethical conflicts.
“For me, it is clear: Qatar is a mistake The choice is bad … It’s too small a country.” Sepp Blatter Former FIFA president
Wait. The World Cup starts in six days?
You know, the one played over a month with 32 national soccer teams, with 1.2 million fans converging on the host nation, with an estimated global television audience of 5 billion, with $200 billion in infrastructure projects, with seven new stadiums, a new airport, a new driverless metro system, new highways, 100 new hotels.
Six days.
Can white elephants sneak up on you in the desert?
Part of that is the timing. When FIFA, the sport’s omnipotent (and unscrupulous) governing body, awarded the planet’s premier sporting event to the tiny Persian Gulf nation of Qatar, it apparently forgot that the World Cup is traditionally held in June and the average high temperature in June is 107 degrees.
So the dates were switched to Nov. 21 to Dec. 18, when it’s only in the 90s. In August, local organizers realized Qatar wasn’t actually playing in the first game and, wanting the full spotlight to themselves, moved it to Nov. 20 — never mind that tens of thousands of people had already booked plane tickets and hotels.
There’s a reason why big international events are always held in the same windows. The Summer
Olympics are in late July and early August, when European soccer leagues are in their offseason and the NFL hasn’t kicked off. The Winter Olympics open in midFebruary, the week after the Super
Bowl. The World Cup gets June, when soccer leagues have ended, the Northern Hemisphere weather is agreeable, kids are out of school and people take vacation.
But late November? In the United States, there is no busier time on the sports calendar. NFL teams are battling for playoff spots. College football has conference championships and bowl games. The NBA and NHL are a month into their seasons. College basketball has started (there are 56 Division I games on Nov. 20). High school sports are in full swing.
In Europe, the major soccer leagues all played this weekend. Players banged up from a truncated schedule to accommodate
the six-week World Cup break will get on planes, fly to Qatar, practice once or twice … and start playing Sunday. The U.S. opens Monday. Mexico opens Tuesday.
It feels forced, rushed, contrived, artificial. It feels weird. It feels wrong.
“I think for everyone, players and fans,” Portugal midfielder Bruno Fernandes said Sunday after playing a Premier League match for Manchester United, “it’s not the best time.”
The bigger question is whether there ever is a good time for a World Cup in Qatar?
Sixty years ago, it was an impoverished British protectorate in the Persian Gulf, a desolate peninsula of sand, fig trees and pearl fishermen. It is roughly the size of Connecticut. The predominantly Muslim population is 2.5 million, of which fewer than 300,000 are actual Qatari citizens. Only 1.1 percent of its land mass is considered arable. The CIA World Factbook describes the climate as “arid” with “sandstorms common.”
Homosexuality is illegal, punishable by prison. Alcohol is scarce. Women typically wear head coverings. General elections weren’t instituted until last year. Citizenship is not guaranteed by birth unless through your father (but not through your mother).
“For me, it is clear: Qatar is a mistake,” Sepp Blatter, FIFA’s president when the 2022 World Cup host was selected, said last week. “The choice is bad … It’s too small a country. Football and the World Cup are too big for that.”
Blatter, in his defense, preferred the United States for 2022 and privately lobbied with the 24 members of the FIFA Executive Committee that voted on World Cup hosts. But he is not without culpability. It was the system of unabashed corruption he fostered that Qatar exploited, securing enough votes by, ahem, currying favor not with him but with ExCo members from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and even Europe.
Don’t blame Qatar, which at the time had a men’s national team ranked 112th in the world and no women’s team. It was merely playing by rules set decades earlier by FIFA and the International Olympic Committee for the pleasure of staging its marquee events. It’s a small country looking for ways to spend the sudden riches from massive natural gas reserves, and what better way to stamp your existence on the global consciousness than hosting its most popular sporting event?
Salt Lake City and the mighty United States, it is well documented, bribed their way to a Winter Olympics in 2002. Why not a World Cup in Qatar?
“You know,” Blatter once said, “it’s easy to control football when it is played on the field, because you have a referee, you have a time limit and you have boundaries. But outside the field of play, you have no referee, you have no time limit and you have no boundaries.”
So Blatter shouldn’t have been surprised at the FIFA Congress of 2010, when was handed a sealed envelope with the host of the 2022 tournament. He opened it and, turning it to the cameras, pulled up a card to reveal the country’s name. The audience gasped. The world gasped. If Qatar miscalculated, it was that in getting the world to notice it, the world noticed it. All of it.
The monarchy and its Islamic-leaning policies — no homosexuality, no alcohol, reduced rights for women — drew the expected eyebrows. But what really caught the West’s attention was less what they were building for $200 billion than who was building it.
Qatar, like other oil-rich nations in the Gulf, adopted the system of kafala, a sort of indentured servitude that preys on Asia’s vast economic inequities. Construction companies recruit migrant workers from Nepal or Bangladesh or Sir Lanka, where people live on as little as $5 per day, and bring them to the Gulf to build skyscrapers, roads, metros, and now soccer stadiums. Living conditions are poor, hours are long, temperatures are north of 120 degrees, labor unions are nonexistent. Oh, and you can’t leave without
the permission of your employer.
One English newspaper reported 6,500 workers had died in World Cup construction projects. Qatar and FIFA said it was three, claiming the death total was from the total migrant community and the mortality rates per capita were in line with other countries.
Under international pressure, Qatar buckled in 2019 and moved to abolish kafala. It raised minimum wage and established an insurance fund for families of injured and deceased workers that, it says, has made $271 million in payments this year.
Qatar’s other miscalculation is the current global culture of heightened sensitivities to human rights abuses, whether domestic or international. What was ignored, even tolerated, in the past is no longer. Abu Dhabi and Dubai were built the same way. Qatar, World Cup host, wasn’t getting the same pass.
Sportswashing — the use of sports to launder a country or company’s image — has been around since the Greeks and Romans. Suddenly,
it’s a dirty word.
Current FIFA President Gianni Infantino wrote a letter to the soccer federations of all 32 competing teams, discouraging all forms of political protest and urging them to “let football take the stage.” It is a time-honored formula from past Olympics and World Cups with troubling back stories, the theory being that once the caldron is ignited or the first ball kicked, sport magically becomes the opium of the masses.
Will it this time? With eight NBA, 12 NFL and 56 college basketball games on Sunday? With Thanksgiving and Christmas shopping and school exams? With frigid conditions across the Northern Hemisphere preventing the festive, outdoor watch parties in town squares that have defined past World Cups in June? With struggling U.S. and Mexico teams that haven’t inspired their fan bases?
With the ethical sandstorms?
You have six days to decide.