05.12.2024
Rules of the game
As Fifa waves through the Saudi bid for the 2034 World Cup, Paul Demarty asks what it tells us about football - and global politics
This week, the international football association, Fifa, released its technical assessment of Saudi Arabia’s bid to host the 2034 World Cup - one really wonders why they bothered.
After all, to give Mohammed bin Salman a failing grade would have been bizarre, given that Fifa - whether by collusion or incompetence - organised the bidding in a way that ensured the Saudis were unopposed. It would have raised considerable questions about the internal functioning of Fifa - even more than usually haunting its senior executives.
Even so, the thing is a whitewash. Somehow the Saudi bid came out with a higher score than the US-Mexico-Canada bid for 2026, despite the fact that there are not yet even enough stadiums in the kingdom. Thanks to recent attempts to turn the Saudi Pro League into a hot international property, basically by way of throwing infinite money at ageing star players, they are at least further ahead than the Qataris were 10 years before their own World Cup back in 2022. We expect that they will get it done - by the usual means of large-scale migrant slave labour.
This thoroughly expected news followed months of desperate lobbying by various NGOs, from the International Trade Union Confederation (successor to the old CIA-backed International Confederation of Free Trade Unions) to Amnesty International, begging Fifa to decide that Saudi Arabia was unfit to host a major sporting competition of this nature. Their complaints will need little introduction to readers of this paper, I expect - the aforementioned slave labour looms large for the ITUC, as indeed it does for Amnesty, whose Steve Cockburn denounced Fifa’s “astonishing whitewash of the country’s atrocious human rights record … There are no meaningful commitments that will prevent workers from being exploited, residents from being evicted or activists from being arrested.”1
Amnesty also noted that Fifa has finally snuck out a long-delayed independent report into the abuses of workers in relation to Qatar 2022. The report finds that it is liable for compensation to workers super-exploited - in many cases to their death - in the construction of stadia and related infrastructure. But it was published two days after Fifa announced all its “legacy” funding, none of which includes any such compensation. Nicely done!
One has to admire the likes of Amnesty, at least for its tenacity in the face of surely insuperable odds. Like a plucky League Two outfit drawing Manchester City away in the cup - at least, before City’s current wobble - they get on the team bus with fire in their bellies and a song in their hearts, before dutifully getting skinned alive. The prospect of denying MBS his big football party was already lost years ago, when indeed it proved impossible to stop the Qatar train from reaching its destination. Qatar’s award set important precedents, for holding the tournament in mid-winter, for accepting that all the infrastructure can be built after the fact. It was also felt keenly by the Saudis as an insult, as they and the Qataris compete for influence in the region and beyond. MBS was not to be denied, and no kind of resistance could be expected from the stupendously corrupt clique that runs Fifa.
Political economy
This tells us two stories, really, about the political economy of football itself, and about the development of world politics, as it is projected onto the sport - though there is, of course, no Chinese wall separating the two.
On the football side, it is increasingly clear that the dominant forces in the sport are nation-state actors. The major clubs are divided in their ownership between fan/membership models (Barcelona, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich), private equity and friends (Liverpool, Manchester United) and state actors (Manchester City, Paris Saint Germain, and more to follow). In that sphere, the state actors are still fairly well matched by alternative ownership models, but it is states that are best placed to influence bodies like Fifa and its European equivalent, Uefa, as well as national governing bodies like the Football Association in England.
This is, in the end, because states are playing by different rules to either ‘normal’ capital (like the private equity people) or consumer cooperatives (the member-owned clubs). As I have argued before, it is wrong-headed to say football is being ruined by profiteering - certainly profiteering has ruined individual clubs who have fallen under the ownership of extractive financiers, but the sport as a whole is being ruined by the fact that it is not terribly profitable, and moreover has major owners, like the Saudis, Qataris and, until recently, well-connected Russian billionaires, who simply do not care about making a profit at all.
We got to this point in stages. Football was governed largely by a pyramid of gentleman’s agreements until relatively recently. It was a professional sport, but bore the marks of the old amateur ethos of the English elite that codified many popular sports in the 19th century. Different leagues were largely separate from each other; international player transfers took place, but were rare. In some leagues, including the English, there was a strict salary cap for wages. There were mechanisms for redistribution between clubs (again in England, it became the norm that 20% of gate receipts would go to the away side, somewhat softening the gap between big city sides and teams from smaller towns with less built-in revenue). It was a delicate balance, and had its own corruptions and defects, but it succeeded in keeping the game competitive for a long time.
Deregulation took place in lockstep with the wider victory of neoliberalism. With the rise of pay TV at this time, suddenly the money theoretically available to clubs skyrocketed. Then, in the 1990s, a series of court cases - most importantly the Bosman ruling of 1995 - made it much easier for players to move between clubs, and much harder for clubs to hold onto them. The result over time has been that vast revenue has flooded into the game, but also that costs have shot up, most especially on player wages, which now run into the hundreds of millions of pounds annually for the top clubs.
The fact that oligarchs and state owners can just plough endless money into clubs has accelerated this process, and led to a series of rule changes, especially in Europe, intended to force clubs to run at something resembling a profit. Such sustainability rules have, on the whole, proven laughably ineffectual at disciplining the state-owned clubs, though they have spread merry chaos among the lower-ranked, who get a little out over the skis. It seemed, for a moment, that Uefa might have managed to nail Man City’s Emirati owners for disguising direct investments as sponsorship deals with businesses that just happened to also be owned by Abu Dhabi - but that ruling was struck down by the European Court of Arbitration for Sport. The Premier League is going after them for similar offences right now, but it is difficult to see the club suffering any serious penalty when the legalities finally play out.
The friction nevertheless further incentivises the state actors to curry favour among the regulatory bodies. Though the governing bodies often clash and to some extent compete - especially Uefa and Fifa - neither have shown any real willingness to obstruct the subordination of the game to state interests. In an interesting interview with The Guardian earlier this year, Aleksander Čeferin, the president of Uefa, dismissed the reporter’s concerns about creeping state ownership of clubs:
I’m not worried about state-owned clubs, as long as they respect the rules. I’m more worried about hedge-fund-owned clubs. With hedge funds, you never know exactly who is behind them. It’s very hard to know because they are, many times, managing money for investors. Where I see a big difference - and maybe this is a bit simplistic - is that state-owned clubs want to win. Whether it’s also for name-washing or not, I don’t enter into this. But they want to win. With purely financial funds it’s important to get money and winning is not the main goal.2
There is a certain grain of truth to this. Čeferin’s crisis as Uefa boss came in 2021 when the superclubs came out with their proposal for a European Super League. Uefa and mass fan revolt between them saw it off, but the picture was interesting, if one looked a little more closely. These clubs clearly intended to impose a salary cap as part of their proposal; by doing so, and by creating a sort of shared franchise structure, they would make a real dent in the overweening power of the state-owned clubs. The enthusiasm of the latter for the league was tepid at best, which made them natural allies for Čeferin. His attitude signals to states with a substantial war chest to spend it on football: Europe is open for business.
Why?
This seems the moment to introduce the obvious question: what is in it for MBS - or Qatar, or indeed the US? Why spend vast scads of money hosting short-lived tournaments, or bankrolling superclubs? The conventional view that one would get from an outfit like Amnesty is that this is ‘sportswashing’: investing in sport as a way of cleaning up a dirty reputation. As Adorno wrote of the Hitler regime’s various cultural extravaganzas, “The more torture went on in the basement, the more insistently they made sure the roof rested on columns.”
Thus, in the case of the Saudis, there would seem to be plenty of mess needing to be cleaned up, between the monarchical and religious tyranny, the recent belligerence towards its neighbours, the regrettable habit of chopping journalists to pieces in its embassies, and so on and so forth. According to the ‘sportswashing’ theory, magicking a league out of thin air and buying a World Cup from Fifa is a way of providing welcome distraction from all that wickedness, as would be the creation of the breakaway LIV golf tour and other such endeavours.
The problem with this theory is that, if ‘sportswashing’ is indeed the intent, it clearly does not work. Those who take the money from unpleasant regimes like the Saudis often defend themselves by saying that sport will actually draw attention to the problems, so we shouldn’t worry about it. On the face of it, this seems to be true. How many people had heard of the kafala system3 before Qatar was awarded the 2022 World Cup? How much of that competition’s early days were dominated by desperate attempts to manage the objections of gay rights groups, and then the unconscionable decision to ban booze?
It is better to think about this kind of investment as ‘soft power’. Owning a premiership club is a kind of foreign direct investment with a great deal of cultural cachet attached to it. Hosting a World Cup in the end means inviting hundreds of thousands of people to your country and turning it into a great flashing billboard for your current national myth. Both are opportunities to make friends in the bureaucracies of other states, and to increase the cost of alienating the owner/host country.
For the gulf states in particular, there is the imperative looming over them to find some other role in global affairs than merely providing hydrocarbons. Different leaders have different ideas. MBS has his utopia of ultra-high-tech smart cities, so far including the ‘Neom project’ and the even weirder ‘Line’ (each of which are to have a World Cup stadium). The Emiratis and Qataris seem rather to fancy themselves as new-model merchant republics (albeit not republics …), and are competing with other great powers for influence in Africa and elsewhere. For both strategies, football (and sport in general) slots in nicely: it becomes a shop window for the new-model gulf state.
Geopolitics
Here we have arrived at the plain questions of global politics. And what is notable about these three modernisation projects is how none of them make any pretence of democratisation.
There used to be a story that would be told by western politicians when they cosied up to the likes of the Saudis - that, sure, there were problems with these regimes, but the best way to liberalise them would be to build up trade links and engage with them (for whatever reason, this logic did not apply to Saddam Hussein!). Indeed, the regimes would often promote that idea about themselves. Saif Gaddafi joked about the progress still to come in a speech to the London School of Economics; Bashar al-Assad, for a time, sold himself in the west as a liberal reformer.
All of this rhetoric is notably absent today. MBS has, it is true, loosened some of the restrictions on life for women in Saudi Arabia, and in doing so asserted the crown’s power over the clerisy. There is no question of his loosening the power of the crown itself, which he has centralised by repression of junior members of his own family. The high-tech mumbo-jumbo he comes out with is very similar to the big thoughts of a certain Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, who - now that he no longer has to bother with elections - does not pretend any more that he thinks democracy is a good idea either.
There is periodically talk about (in the words of the leftwing podcast Aufhebunga Bunga) “the end of the end of history”, which is to say, the definitive end of the triumphant period of American power and the assumption that the revealed default state of human civilisation is the liberal state ruling over a free market economy - the thesis most famously associated with Francis Fukuyama. There was a bit of this talk after the 2008 crash, and more of it after Brexit and the 2016 US election, and now there is more of it again with Trump’s imminent return to the White House.
This talk is usually focused on the economic side of the ‘end of history’ thesis - neoliberalism and its often-announced demise. Yet it seems far clearer that the ‘political’ side - the supremacy of political regimes based on human rights and the rule of law - is at death’s door. The Chinese state is the sole potential peer rival of the US, and has found its dictatorial structure no obstacle. Twenty-five years ago, Bill Clinton scoffed at the Chinese “great firewall”; today his political heirs panic that they do not have one of their own to protect America from “misinformation”. The similarly populous Indian state has been, for some time now, under the control of the pogromist-sectarian Hindutva movement. The Putin regime sharply turned away from liberalism in Russia.
All these regimes (and, of course, the gulf states for that matter) can cheerily point to western hypocrisy - after all, our oh-so-liberal states, with their invincible respect for human rights and the rule of law, are currently bankrolling a genocide. It has never been more obvious that the vaunted ‘rules-based international order’ has only one real ‘rule’ - pay respect to the boss. They can also point to the scoreboard, so to speak; look at the attempts at liberal nation-building, in Iraq and Afghanistan, or in Libya. Is this something to aspire to?
All of this is downstream of the relative decline of US power, the ever greater exertions required to keep the top spot. In a sense, Fifa was way ahead of the curve on this. When Fifa president Gianni Infantino denounced human rights-based attacks on Qatar as a matter of European neocolonialism, he was essentially continuing the policy of his predecessor, Sepp Blatter, who strengthened the organisation against its great rival, Uefa, by currying favour with all the other regional football federations. This involved stupendous corruption, but gave the Fifa leadership clique a power base against the domestic leagues of Europe and the entitlement felt by the main imperialist countries to host the major tournaments.
They could only do it, however, if they were prepared to dispense with the hot air about human rights that was de rigueur in global civil society at the ‘end of history’. As they did so, smug journalists in the west accused Fifa of being dinosaurs - a weird clique of old men still putting the fix in, as if it were the 1950s. In truth, they were miles ahead of the curve.