17.11.2022

A tournament to remember

Corruption, brutal exploitation, hypocrisy: Qatar 2022 has it all. Paul Demarty looks at the price of football

Is it four years already? Indeed - four and a half since the last World Cup, in Russia. On Sunday November 20, the circus comes finally to Qatar, with the hosts facing off against Ecuador in the first game of the group stages.

But the story of this tournament is hardly one of football as such - that is, the peculiar pastime in which two teams of 11 chase a ball around a grass pitch, insult each other and the match officials, commit tactical fouls and shamelessly feign injury. That, at the end of the day, is all good clean fun. But, as well as football, there is the vast institutional apparatus that arranges things such that those two teams meet each other under the gaze of (in this case) the whole world. The tournament apparatus is well known to be a regime of quite exquisite corruption and, with Qatar 2022, we appear to have reached peak ‘Football’ - here’s hoping the football is half as good.

We must begin the story in 2009 and 2010, at which time the great and the good of the world governing body, Fifa - the capstone of capital‑F Football - gathered to consider various bids to host the 2018 and 2022 tournaments. After a process marked by the usual shameless glad-handing and graft (all such bidding processes for tournaments as far back as France 1998 are well known to have been lubricated by bribery, and doubtless such skulduggery has a much longer history in reality). This time, however, they made a fatal mistake: Russia was selected over England, which had the effect of unleashing a vengeful British press on the case; and above all, Qatar was selected over the United States, whose revenge was inevitable and invincible. It came in 2015, after a drip-drip of revelations and allegations; half of Fifa’s executive committee (exco) was arrested on its home turf of Zurich (where else?) and perp-walked into the tender custody of Uncle Sam. Sepp Blatter, long capo di tutti capi of Fifa, was finally forced to resign.

What was the Qataris’ interest in all this? It is a country of three million or so people (or sort of): 90% or so are expats and migrant labourers, who lack citizenship rights. It is a Gulf petro-state like all the others, but something of a wild card in the region, with a distinctive foreign policy (the most important fruit of which, for the rest of us, is probably Al Jazeera).

The World Cup, then, looks like a bit of soft power-mongering: ‘sportswashing’, as they call it. Whatever else you might say of Qatar’s monarchy, you have to congratulate the sheer degree of their dedication to this activity. Given the modest starting state of the country’s infrastructure, sporting or otherwise, putting on this show has cost the regime in the region of $250 billion: this is more than every other World Cup and every modern summer Olympics combined. The national team has been essentially rebuilt from scratch, and won the Asian cup last time around. Beyond that, the money has gone on stadia and training centres, of course, but also all the other bits of infrastructure manifestly missing: roads, hotels, you name it. Judging by reports, there still is not enough - it is extremely difficult to find accommodation. Crowd numbers will be massaged by expat workers in the region flying in - there are an awful lot of English, Australian, American, French folks grinding out a living in Dubai’s financial services industry, for instance, and they will happily fly in and out to catch a game (now that Qatar has mended fences with the Saudis and the Gulf Cooperation Council).

All this building work needs builders, and it is on this front that Qatar has achieved especial notoriety. As noted, the vast majority of people in the country are migrant workers - from the elite finance and petro-chemical experts, largely recruited from western countries, to the domestic servants, typically imported from the Philippines. So far as the building workers go, they hail usually from the Indian subcontinent. They labour (or did, until recently) under the kafala system, which the Gulf states inherited from the British many years ago, and which makes migrant workers dependent on a particular sponsor among the citizenry. This is effectively a semi-free labour system; upon arrival in Qatar (or Dubai, or Saudi Arabia …) a worker will typically have their passport confiscated and be utterly at the mercy of their ‘sponsor’.

Working conditions are as bad as you would expect. Qatar claims that only three people have died on World Cup projects - an utterly risible figure only achievable by implausibly restricting the definition of ‘World Cup project’, and then by not counting people who did not literally die on a worksite from an injury or suchlike. The true figure is likely far, far higher - 200 gets thrown around a lot - though a matter of some controversy. Some civil society pressure has been building on Qatar and Fifa to compensate the families of deceased workers - a salutary demand, but one precluded by the two authorities’ total lack of interest in the counting and naming of the dead.

Promises

Add to that the common defects of the monarchies in the region - deeply restrictive roles for women, total hostility to gay people - and this seems to be a very peculiar case of ‘sportswashing’: one that has had the effect of highlighting every sordid defect of the affair, from its origins in naked bribery to its brutality in practice. It is almost as if the Qataris and Fifa have inadvertently produced a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt - an exercise in sportswashing which estranges itself and lays out its mechanisms before the viewer.

Indeed, it rather raises the question as to whether sportswashing ever works. All that money thrown at this jamboree - a lot of it on a built environment which will be entirely surplus to requirements in two months - and not including the Qataris’ other investments in the game, their ownership of Paris Saint-Germain and Middle East sports broadcasting monopoly beIN. What have they gotten out of it? Money, I suppose, from beIN (but probably less profit overall than they spent on footballers Neymar and Leo Messi at Paris Saint-Germain). Apart from that, the end result is that Qatar is the very poster-child for all the defects of the Gulf regimes in toto (except the embassy basement dismemberments of the Saudis, I suppose).

Capital‑F Football is not, it seems, something that keeps its promises. At its dizzy heights, everything is run according to banana-republic-level mutual back-scratching. Yet, in the end, someone must win and someone must lose; ill-gotten gains get distributed through one underboss rather than another; the World Cup is to be held ‘here and not there’. The results may be spectacular, as in the mass arrests of exco creeps in 2015; but they may be more subtle, with yet another second-tier Uefa bureaucrat (say) willing to dish dirt off the record to the British press. This global bureaucracy is made necessary by the sheer amount of money flying around (somebody must ensure, after all, that a tournament really does take place at the end of the day).

Yet these bureaucrats are also incentivised to grow the pie from which they steal the odd bit of crust; the more ‘celebified’ and spectacular the product, the more money, and then the more spectacle, and so on … It is telling that, in the notorious Fifa propaganda movie, United passions, the big dramatic beats essentially concern the conclusion of the sport’s first lucrative sponsorship deals. This is how these people see their role. These are the deeds for which they wish to be remembered.

Wrong guy

Blatter is gone, but Blatterismo will never be vanquished from Fifa. The crimes for which he was hounded from office (while never being convicted of anything, naturally) came down in the end to building his patronage networks outside of the sport’s richest domains. Though many of the most successful national teams in history are to be found outside Europe, especially in South America, at this point Europe is the principal destination for all the top-tier talent in the world (until the players get old, and are put out to stud at the US major league). Sepp succeeded as a fixer, because he brought the art of back-scratching to Central America, to Africa and to Asia. He was corrupt - but so was João Havelange before him. But in 2009 there were two countries in front of him looking to juice their position in the footballing world - the US and Qatar. He allowed the wrong guy to win.

His replacement, by and by - Gianni Infantino - has been accused of little more than overclaiming on his expenses; no doubt you or I would like to have our employer shell out £9,000 for a few mattresses, as Fifa did for Infantino, but by the usual standards of ‘Football’, he is practically eligible for sainthood. Alas, that is a very low bar, and his response to the various controversies is contemptible in a very Blatteresque way. The latter, when asked what he proposed to do to help gay fans who were travelling to Russia in 2018, offered some very ‘helpful’ advice - “do not engage in sexual activity”.

That is more or less the Infantino line on all the matters arising from Qatar’s Gulf-state Stakhanovism. As each irritant follows the next - teams promising to wear rainbow armbands; Amnesty International demanding a $440 million compensation fund for dead workers; Louis van Gaal, the terminally ill Netherlands manager with nothing to lose, roasting Fifa for its corruption - he can only sulk that people should “focus on the football”. And, as the spectacle gets into gear, and the group stages winnow out the worst teams, the football will likely move centre-stage.

Its centrality is only in question, however, because of Football - because of Fifa, and the whole pyramid of corrupt bureaucracies. It is unlikely that they will make an error exactly like this again: the bribes will be a little more sotto voce, and clement summer weather will again become a requirement for any would-be host nation. Violence of this kind, however, is done to the sport’s dignity every day - from its starry heights down to national associations (which largely consist of club owners marking their own homework) and lower even than that. The sport must be rebuilt around the interests of supporters, rather than the thieves, despots and sportswear giants who run things today.

paul.demarty@weeklyworker.co.uk