Sepp Blatter, the oily Frenchman who oversaw soccer’s global governing body for nearly two decades and treated it like a private fiefdom, has been banned from the sport since 2015. We still don’t know precisely who bribed these officials, but we know why they did: Both Russia and Qatar have extensively used sports to distract from widespread human rights abuses. This is an old trick, especially when it comes to soccer: Think Munich in 1936, the 1978 World Cup, held by Argentina’s military dictatorship during its “dirty war,” and Manchester City, Newcastle United, and Paris St. Germain, soccer clubs owned by the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar respectively. Russia’s sportswashing—the purchase of Chelsea F.C. by oligarch Roman Abramovich in 2003, the 2014 Winter Olympics, the 2018 World Cup—helped to bolster the dictatorship’s image. It invaded Crimea in 2014 and all of Ukraine earlier this year; it was only then that Russia was finally, belatedly exorcised from the soccer world.
This World Cup has been built by migrant labor. Many of these workers are paid a pittance—when they’re paid at all—and are treated as indentured servants, held for years as they pay back extortionate fees from “recruiters.” They live in squalor, have limited to no access to justice, and work constantly. Thousands of workers, many from Nepal, have died building the stadiums, according to multiple investigations. Qatar is a country in which homosexuality is illegal, where women cannot work, marry, or travel without a male guardian’s permission, and which has little freedom of speech or of assembly. FIFA, like most global soccer organizations, has spent much of the last decade trying to cast itself as inclusionary, with specific campaigns aimed at women and LGBTQ fans. And yet Qatar wouldn’t dream of hosting a Woman’s World Cup. Gay fans risk imprisonment simply by attending to cheer for their countries.
The World Cup is being held in Qatar, a country the size of Connecticut, in winter—for the first time in its history—because it is too hot to play soccer there during the summer when temperatures can reach 113 degrees. This is no surprise and was obvious in 2012 but was hand-waved amid fantastical, Elon Musk-ish claims of climate control and magic clouds. (Seriously.) This has led, thanks in part to greedy owners packing league schedules post-pandemic, to a horrific level of scheduling congestion: Many of the players on the field are exhausted after playing with little down time since June of 2020. The first two months of this season have seen a shocking number of muscle injuries and it’s highly likely that the tournament will as well. Even before it starts, many of the world’s best players will be absent: France’s dynamic midfielders N’Golo Kante and Paul Pogba; Portugal’s versatile striker Diego Jota; Senegal’s brilliant winger Sadio Mane are among the many who have been ruled out by injury.
