The ugly side of the beautiful game in desperate need of a makeover

AM I the only one who is slightly losing track of the allegations and counter allegations being made at the top of world football?

With everyone accusing everyone else at FIFA of corruption, the wisest thing might have been a pause. Instead, Sepp Blatter’s name alone will go forward for the Presidency of FIFA today and tomorrow’s newspapers around the world will all be crying “farce”.

If FIFA is so bloody venal and corrupt, though, why on earth did England and the US — which unsuccessfully bid for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups respectively and from whence most of the criticisms of FIFA seems to originate — ever have anything to do with it?

Just as democratic governments have tolerated dictatorships when it suited them, so for many years everyone has tolerated leadership systems for world football that we would not really want for our own governance.

One FIFA decision above all others brought together a diverse coalition of the unwilling. From President Barack Obama downwards, it seems that everyone has criticised the decision to give the 2022 World Cup to Qatar as wrong-headed.

While there is no evidence of outright bribery, it appears Qatar made questionable investments in “soccer academies” in voting FIFA executives’ home countries. Blatter promised the obligatory investigation but he relies for his position on a system of patronage and is smart enough not to scapegoat those who guarantee his position.

Ten years ago, hardly anyone had ever head of Qatar. But with around 15% of the world’s known natural gas supplies below its surface, it’s a significant energy supplier. Now, à la China with the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Qatar wants to use the 2022 World Cup to parade its importance before a global audience.

A World Cup held in a sparsely settled desert patch adorned by a recently sprung forest of skyscrapers concealing a minuscule population — where foreigners outnumber natives and which has no footballing tradition whatsoever? Many expect an event as authentic as the gondolas that decorate the local shopping centre’s fake Venetian canals.

Certainly, more than a handful suspect some of that petrochemical revenue may have found its way into the pockets of FIFA panel voters to clinch the bid.

But only the naïve believe these spectator-sports mega-events are just about athleticism and prowess. The 1984 Olympics were capitalism’s victory; the 1952 Olympics highlighted brave Finland’s recovery from Stalin’s invasion. The ’60 and ’64 Games celebrated post-war Italy’s and Japan’s pacification and prosperity. These are images that Russia and Brazil now hope to foster when they host two World Cups and two Olympiads, one summer (Rio), one winter (Sochi).

For sure, FIFA uses plenty of non-football criteria in its decision-making. The 2010 World Cup was not just about showing off the arrival of African football, but also about demonstrating how far the world has come along since the end of apartheid — a laudable sentiment, no doubt.

Qatar, therefore, has half a point when it claims it is moving the goalposts to moan that hosting rights are being awarded for apparently arbitrary reasons. As Zinedine Zidane pointed out in a clever ad for the Qatar bid — for which he was paid $3m all told by the Qataris — “Football is for everyone.”

But has FIFA caught itself on the wrong side of history? As revolutions and civil wars shake the Arab world, isn’t the danger that Qatar 2022 will be remembered not alongside Tokyo, Rome, Helsinki and South Africa but Berlin in 1936 and Argentina in 1978?

Qatar will be the event’s first time in the Middle East, hinting at a (perceived) wider diplomatic role for the beautiful game. For sure, some of the whining resembles the pessimism of those who predicted that the 2010 World Cup would be the pretext for an orgy of robbery, rape and murder across South Africa. It wasn’t. But Qatar does embody the easy money, the culture of extravagance, and the yawning social gaps that made the disenfranchised Arab masses take to the streets of Cairo, Tunis and Damascus.

If left as an exclusively Qatari affair, World Cup 2022 will be counted alongside megalomaniacal projects like the United Arab Emirates’ artificial islands, symbols of the Arab moneyed elite’s misuse of its fortunes, which could be used to educate, house and employ desperate Arabs from Casablanca to Sana’a. But look on the bright side: with luck, the al-Thani dynasty which runs Qatar as a family business will have been cleared out or cut down to size by 2022.

Still, it seems that some football fans have just stumbled across the issues of gay rights and women’s rights as sticks with which to beat the Qataris. Other fans fear for their right to get drunk in public.

But if you need a successful World Cup bid to alert you to the injustices in a society, it indicts your own lukewarm interest in justice; had the United States won, presumably Sharia law under the al-Thanis could have passed without comment.

Whether or not a smidgen of democracy is allowed to creep in, the oils sheikhs are more than capable of building an adequate number of stadia in the next 12 years — or, more accurately, the indentured labourers from the Indian subcontinent are more than capable.

GRACIOUSLY, the Qataris have promised to promote the sport around the world by transporting several of the 12 engineering marvels, stone by stone, after the World Cup concludes to developing nations.

Whether the Qataris can find a way of dealing with the extreme heat is another matter. No doubt resources will be thrown at ways to take air conditioning to the great outdoors, creating a dramatic counterpoint to the uneven application of under-soil heating throughout European football.

With its slogan “Expect Amazing”, the regime has promised some $4bn will be spent preparing for the World Cup. In its bid to FIFA, Qatar pitched itself not as a Gulf nation, but as a Middle Eastern country that could bring the game to this tumultuous region by bringing people together, a belief strongly shared by FIFA.

And to speak for the Middle East, they could not ignore Israel, whose citizens are banned from Qatar. In the lead-up to the bid, Qatar pledged it would open its doors to the Israeli national team for the World Cup if the team advanced, but it remained unclear what the rules would be for Israeli fans. The politics of sport are rarely straightforward. But the appeal and wealth attached to football make its politics more complicated than most. With power and wealth ought to go greater transparency.

Just as Salt Lake City Winter Games corruption finally forced the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to modernise and become more open, the latest round of allegations surrounding kickbacks which the award of the World Cup to Qatar epitomises, should be the spur that leads to change. Sport is supposed to exemplify the highest ideals, and hosting a major tournament should be an honour bestowed on the country best able to stage the event.

FIFA should heed the forces towards democracy, openness and transparency that have fuelled the Arab Spring and adopt the same anti-corruption rules as the IOC. Under Sepp Blatter, it won’t. Until it does, the European football federations should withdraw from its deliberations.