Tommy Martin: A bit of that golden trophy remains untarnished even after all the filth

Thu, 17 Nov, 2022 - 10:06

It was the BBC’s South American football correspondent Tim Vickery who called the World Cup ‘the United Nations for the common man.’ Maybe that’s why the Qatar tournament feels like such an affront, above and beyond the horrors that have been done in its name.

If football is anything beyond a simple pastime, it is an expression of the popular soul. It’s what 19th-century British industrial workers decided to do when granted the concession of leisure time. In their millions they played it, watched it, found unity and identity in it. It spread like wildfire around the world, brought by British merchants to distant ports, eyed warily by local onlookers, then adopted and cherished by the working poor in places a world away from the factory towns from whence it came.

It has never been a marker of social standing. It is not associated with class superiority. It is not something you take up in order to get on.

That’s not to say it doesn’t raise people up. Its fuel is in its ability to bring people together, to provide a voice for the voiceless, aspiration to the everyman. A ball and a yard of grass is all you need and you can rule the world.

That is what finds its fulfilment at the World Cup. Every nation sends the best of its millions of scabby-kneed kids who dreamed a dream. Vickery talked about the moment during the national anthems when the camera pans down the line and “you are seeing the male working class faces of that nation”.

No one is there because of who their father is or what school they went to. It is pure and meritocratic, and it may well be that, for one month every four years, it’s when the workers of the world actually unite.

Taken in this context, Qatar’s treatment of the people who have built their World Cup becomes only more grotesque. Ignore the tournament organisers and their paid apologists. We know that many workers have died to make this happen, many more mistreated, their freedoms restricted, their dignity suppressed, paid a pittance by a country with more money than God.

They have come from Asia and Africa in their hundreds of thousands because even the desperate conditions and miserable pay are a chance to better themselves. It is in exactly these people that football has always found fertile ground: The people who have nothing, who can see in football a place where greedy bosses cannot reach, where low status does not matter. What a cruel joke that the World Cup, the great celebration of the common man, has been used to bring him such misery.

For anyone who loves the game, it is this — more than the alleged bribery, the disruption to the football calendar, the paid-for fans or the expensive beer — which provokes distaste toward Qatar 2022. Most reasonable football people have struggled to know how they should feel as the tournament drew closer. They have heard the whataboutery and the hypocrisy but still they can feel this one jabbing at their soul. Historically, football has been no friend of women or the LGBTQ community but they can see in Qatar and Fifa’s attitude to those issues the same disregard for those in power towards the oppressed.

They know the World Cup has always been the plaything of politicians and state-builders, despots and democrats. No nation aspires to hold a World Cup that doesn’t want to use it to bolster its image. No ruler has ever passed up the opportunity to bask in the reflected glory of a winning team.

From 1930, when tiny, rich Uruguay projected its post-colonial confidence through football, to the lizard smile of Vladimir Putin in 2018, it has been used and abused. The Brazil team of 1970 — the World Cup’s sublime, shining moment — was celebrated by that country’s brutal military dictatorship as emblematic of national virtue. The ticker-tape glory of Argentina’s victory at home in 1978 helped the ruling junta justify the torture and murder of their political opponents.

The descent into the slough of Fifa corruption was noted with a weary shrug, that organisation’s exposure as a criminal endeavour to rival any branch of the Mafia greeted with a hollow laugh of recognition. Qatar was the culmination of decades of decay.

And yet, what they don’t realise, the politicians and the powerbrokers, is that no matter how much they buy and sell it, they will never truly own it. This tournament feels at once appalling but at the same time, as the teams prepare to line up once again, oddly beyond the reach of those who have degraded it. The fact that there is a bit of that golden trophy that remains untarnished even after all the filth seems somehow miraculous and reassuring.

It is in this strange place of the mind where we sit now, with this troubled, unsettling World Cup in front of us. For many, the question of whether to watch it is where that unease lies. Choosing to do is a fudge that turns a blind eye to those who have suffered in its name. But keeping alive the flame of this unifying global celebration seems worthwhile too.

The writer Paul Howard said this week that your favourite World Cup is the one that fell closest to your 11th birthday. My son was 11 in June and has been reading all the previews and sticking up wallcharts and holding forth about potential Golden Boot winners. He’s going around singing the song ‘World Cup’, a dreadful ditty by the hugely popular YouTuber IShowSpeed. It doesn’t feel right to point out all the bad things about this World Cup because his mind does not yet have the dark corners in which to place notions of corruption, tyranny and mass cruelty.

Maybe the World Cup’s enduring appeal is that it allows us briefly to live in a place like that, where the common man is king.