Tommy Martin: World Cup aftermath an unpretty picture all of our species must face

Apologies in advance. This is a respectable newspaper renowned as a platform for erudition and analysis. This is not a thesis you’ll see published in academic journals or by respected think tanks. Nor is it the sort of crude terminology this column normally trades in.

Thu, 22 Dec, 2022 - 06:13

Tommy Martin

Sport reflects society, they say, so it was always likely Sunday’s FIFA World Cup final would provide a snapshot of the whole crazy ding dong we have going on right now.

Sure enough, no sooner had the best World Cup final anyone can remember finished than the ominous chords of our discordant times began to sound. The lengthy post-match palaver following Argentina’s victory soon encapsulated the great unifying problem of our species; the single, over-arching challenge that we all face: namely, that we are surrounded by arseholes.

But is there any other way to say it?

There they all were. Gianni Infantino, the craven sports administrator toadying to the rich and powerful. The Emir of Qatar, autocratic ruler of a spendthrift petrostate. In the stands, Elon Musk, sinister tech overlord taking a break from smashing his new toy against the wall like a spoiled child. Beside him, Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, agent of right-wing populism. On the field, shamelessly elbowing into the Argentine celebrations and representing the cult of vacuous celebrity, the Turkish restauranteur known as Salt Bae.

What is it about the World Cup final that brought them together, these malign symbols of their time? Football is the beautiful game, a truly universal language, the World Cup a unique global celebration.

Who invited all the arseholes?

Well, FIFA of course. Ever wonder what the ‘A’ stands for? Netflix showed a documentary called FIFA Uncovered in the lead-up to the tournament. It could have been called Arseholes Uncovered. Since the 1970s when Joao Havelange and Sepp Blatter elbowed out the incumbent class of old duffers who had ruled football, the global governing body has been a hotbed of arseholery.

The genius of Havelange was in realising that you could trouser loads of money for yourself out of running something that people all over the world love. Classic arsehole behaviour. Blatter took that model and reproduced on an industrial scale, spawning a global network of arseholes that made hay until it collapsed under the weight of its own corruption. But not before the crowning arsehole move of awarding the World Cup to Qatar.

Gianni Infantino succeeded Blatter promising to move FIFA on from its arsehole days, but really he has just brought things to a new level. Infantino has been a modernising force – an arsehole for the 21st century. And just as Qatar 2022 was Messi’s World Cup in football terms, it was also Infantino’s crowning arsehole moment.

From the excruciating “Today I am gay” speech, through the clearly premeditated TV closeups to the limelight-hogging indignity of the presentation ceremony, it was an arsehole tour de force. In the suit-and-white trainers combo, he even invented the uniform of the arsehole. Flushed from his success, he announced in the final days of the tournament his intention to stay on as FIFA president for years hence and become a sort of eternal arsehole god.

But no arsehole is an island. It is now obvious why Infantino has made his home in Doha. There has been much discussion and analysis about why Qatar wanted the World Cup, why it spent hundreds of billions on getting it, why it sacrificed the lives of thousands of migrant workers and pumped unimaginable tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere on making it happen. Some say it was about geopolitical security, others a regional powerplay or an economic pivot from global gas pump towards high-end tourism. But watching the rulers of Qatar closely this last month, it became blindingly obvious.

Banning the sale of beer in stadiums was perfectly understandable in a Muslim country but doing so a couple of days before the start of the tournament was bit arseholey. There was the whiff of the arsehole when fans were stopped from entering stadiums for wearing rainbow logos at a tournament supposedly welcoming to all. But rampant arseholery was later confirmed by Qatar 2022 chief executive Nasser Al Khater, who responded to news that a Filipino worker had died carrying out repairs in a Doha resort by saying that “death is a natural part of life – whether it’s at work, whether it’s in your sleep.” What an arsehole.

The Qataris accused Western critics of racism for raising concerns about the tournament, all the while presiding over a society deeply stratified by race to the point where those at the bottom appear to have very little value at all. In the middle of the tournament, it emerged that they had been allegedly bribing politicians for favours in the European parliament, demonstrating that one good arsehole deserves another.

As the Emir draped his proprietorial bisht over Lionel Messi, one thought back to the last World Cup trophy presentation, presided over by the greatest arsehole of them all, Vladimir Putin. The Russian president’s guest in Moscow that day in 2018 was Conor McGregor, Ireland’s top arsehole, as further demonstrated this week by his bizarre social media attack on comedian PJ Gallagher over the latter’s mental health struggles.

We knew back then that the arseholes were on the march but Putin has taken things to new heights since those simpler days palling around with lesser arseholes. The destruction and death in Ukraine since the Russian invasion in February of this year has been so overwhelming that it is difficult to conceive it is down to the actions of one complete arsehole. But that is why you need to call them what they are – the earlier the better.

And so it is with the defining arsehole of 2022 that we end this Christmas week column. With that in mind, we wish peace and prosperity to all our readers. Even the arseholes.