Sam Leith Sam Leith

It’s not too late for footballers to boycott Qatar’s World Cup

Finding it repellant that Qatar should host the World Cup is just basic decency

[Getty]

If you go to Fifa’s website, you’ll find all sorts of things to make your heart sing and tears spring unbidden to your eyes. It’s not just about football, you see, and the making of obscene amounts of money from it. It’s about values. It’s about making football a beacon of good in this wicked world. There are pages of material about how ‘Fifa has been able to use the global popularity of football to spread positive social messages to wider society’.

If you took all this at face value you’d have the impression that football is the means, rather than the end – as if the enrichment of Fifa’s high-ups, the commercial partnerships and the rapacious brand-policing were all just side-effects of its mission to make the world a better place. You’d think, from the way it talks, that Fifa was an NGO or a wearisomely do-gooding department of the United Nations rather than a profit-making private company.

But with the approaching World Cup in Qatar, this material has made the magical transformation from emetic corporate boilerplate into god-tier chutzpah. I’m reminded of the old story of the poacher emerging from the woods, covered in blood, with the corpse of a gralloched stag over his shoulder, and running smack into a gamekeeper. ‘What are you doing?’ asks the gamekeeper. ‘Out for a stroll,’ he says. ‘What’s that on your shoulder, then?’ Poacher looks at the shoulder that doesn’t have the stag on it: ‘Nothing.’ ‘The other shoulder.’ Poacher looks at other shoulder, makes face of fright and astonishment: ‘Eeeeww!’ he exclaims, and starts brushing at the corpse with the back of his hand as you might at a speck of dust.

It’s not too late for musicians, sponsors and even – above all – football players to say: stuff Qatar, and stuff Fifa’s way of doing business

What possible reason could there have been in the first place for awarding the football World Cup to a country with no footballing tradition to speak of, no footballing infrastructure, facilities that had to be slave-built (sorry, ‘migrant-worker’ built) from the ground up, and a climate so hot that having the competition at the normal time of year would have likely risked the players’ deaths from heat exhaustion (not to mention restrictive instincts with regard to the alcohol that forms an important part of the enjoyment of the game for many football fans)? What could possibly have tipped the balance? Could millions and millions of pounds in bribes have had anything to do with it? Fifa denies it hotly, and I suppose we are honour-bound to believe them.

The rationale, we must assume, was the same one that has allowed any number of organisations to justify doing profitable deals with governments whose human rights records are grotesque: ‘constructive engagement’.

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