{"id":7095,"date":"2022-12-10T14:45:24","date_gmt":"2022-12-10T14:45:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/?p=7095"},"modified":"2022-12-17T01:02:50","modified_gmt":"2022-12-17T01:02:50","slug":"if-its-the-world-cup-it-must-be-nearly-christmas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/?p=7095","title":{"rendered":"If It\u2019s The World Cup It Must Be Nearly Christmas!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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In two weeks it will be Christmas Day. It will already also be the third anniversary of the passing of a great man, and a great friend of Gooners from around the world, who passed away in the early hours of Christmas Day 2019.I have struggled to know what to write about this World Cup, but I wouldn\u2019t have been considering that at all had the Guvnor not inspired a group of us to try to continue his amazing work. Here\u2019s to you, Dave!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It hasn\u2019t been at all easy to write this piece. I had originally intended to reinforce our banner question of \u201c Why ?? \u201c with some facts and figures to illustrate what a corrupt bidding process and bizarre final decision it had been. In the meantime, hardly a word has been left unsaid about the fate of thousands of migrant workers who built the stadia, the lack of human rights and the extraordinary statements made by Gianni Infantino and, sadly, even our own Arsene Wenger, in an attempt to hush political discussion of the venue and make everyone \u201cconcentrate on the football\u201d. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After all, FIFA goes to great lengths to ensure that sport and politics are not allowed to mix ! Woe betide the player who lifts his shirt during a Champions League game, to display a message condemning war in his own country, or the unjust fate of a relative or loved one. FIFA could never countenance such unchallenged proclamations unless, presumably, it was paid to do so ?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I then thought I would take one aspect of the \u201cWhy ??\u201d and spent some time digging for more information on the bribery involved in the bidding process. I found a very good piece in the New York Times which dealt with the US investigations, the culprits and some of the sums involved. Those who might be interested can find the article by Googling – \u201cNew York Times FIFA bribery Qatar\u201d – but be sparing with your searches – the second time I had to prove I was not a robot, due to my \u201cunusual internet traffic\u201d, and the third time I was hit with a paywall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I decided not to reproduce that large amount of information here as it may already be familiar to some, but thought it might be more interesting to ask our banner question from the other side of the coin, so to speak. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhy did Qatar want the World Cup?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The general response to that question is that the Qatar World Cup is a sportswashing project, but that reasoning doesn’t fully explain why the country has spent an estimated \u00a3220 billion on a month-long football tournament that has invited international scorn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sportswashing is roughly defined as the practice of a controversial company or country using sports sponsorship to improve its reputation. But can Qatar really have said to have improved its reputation by hosting the World Cup? If anything it has amplified the country’s medieval set of rights for women and the LGBTQ community, and their now theoretically reformed kafala<\/em> system of work sponsorship and its associated atrocious human rights violations. Solely on that basis, it has failed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But sportswashing is not the only, or even the biggest reason that Qatar was prepared to throw such vast sums at hosting the tournament.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Simon Chadwick is Global Professor of Sport at Emlyon Business School in France. He claims, \u201cIt was never all about sportswashing. The term serves a purpose but it oversimplifies a complex debate.\u201d He is keen to stress that sport does bring benefits in terms of reputation and does not dispute the accuracy of the phrase “sportswashing’, but he says it is only part of the reason Qatar wanted the World Cup. Qatar’s hosting of the World Cup is also about power and weakness. “Fundamentally the World Cup is about Qatar’s strategic vulnerability”, he says. Qatar is a tiny country – its area is less than that of Cork and Kerry combined – and it is surrounded by larger, powerful neighbours. It shares a land border with Saudi Arabia and maritime borders with UAE, Bahrain, and Iran. It is also sitting on the modern equivalent of a gold mine, with vast natural gas reserves, which they have efficiently exploited to make themselves the richest country in the world. But with great wealth comes great vulnerability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Qatar was a British protectorate until 1971, with the British offering support and protection in return for access to oil and gas.”It was the British at work again in their colonial-era, imperialist way”, explains Professor Chadwick, “But when the British pulled out in 1971, Qatar was vulnerable again. Rather than be dictated to by the British as to how to use their resources, all of a sudden Qatar was on its own. It had to make its own decisions. Fundamentally, Qatar wants to protect itself and has done that by “hedging”, which is geo-political speak for trying not to annoy anyone. So while Qatar has a strong relationship with Iran and housed the exiled Taliban, it is also home to the US Army’s biggest air force base in the Gulf. Sport is part of that process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The World Cup is undoubtedly Qatar’s biggest project, but it also hosted the FIFA Club World Cup and the World Athletics Championships in 2019, along with the 2016 UCI Road World Championships and the 2015 World Handball Championships. It has also been added to the F1 Grand Prix roster and may yet bid for the Olympics in 2036. “They are so small and so vulnerable, they can’t afford to antagonise anyone”, says Professor Chadwick. “So they have to remain visible and present, and appear constructive, trustworthy and legitimate. The World Cup is part of that narrative to allow them to be seen as legitimate and trusted members of the international community. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“If you can demonstrate to the world that you can deliver on a plan, keep your promises, and have the resources to invest in important projects, it sends a signal to the global community.” Sport is also used by Qatar as basic nation-branding, a vehicle to advertise around the world the essential fact that Qatar is its own nation state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Only 15 years ago Qatar was little known. Now, people certainly know the country\u2019s name. Defining national borders and entrenching them in people’s minds has its own defensive purpose. In his book ‘Inside Qatar: Hidden Stories from One of the Richest Nations on Earth’, John McManus writes that there was concern in Qatar that Saudi Arabia might invade during the Gulf crisis of 2017. “There is a defensiveness underpinning Qatar which a lot of people have not picked up on,” says Professor Chadwick. “Putin deliberately used sport for offensive rather than defensive purposes. Without doubt, sport for Putin was of a malign nature. It wasn’t intended to pacify or placate, but to divide and conquer – a totally different strategy.”
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But while the World Cup has betrayed Qatar’s vulnerability it has also projected its power. That power has increased since Russia invaded Ukraine. Qatar’s gas exports for April this year were more than double what they were in the same month a year earlier, as Western leaders descended on Qatar to strike deals. The West’s reliance on Qatari gas has been articulated through criticism – or rather the lack of it – of the nation\u2019s hosting of the World Cup. Western governments have rarely spoken as one on the matter, and often tempered whatever criticism they have mentioned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To give an example, Germany’s Interior Minister, Nancy Faeser said in October that “it would be better if the World Cup wasn’t awarded to countries with a human rights record like Qatar,” which earned her a swift rebuke from the Gulf State. She clarified her comments a week later, saying they were \u201cmisinterpreted” and Qatar had, in fact, introduced “very good laws” in improving the living and working conditions of migrant labourers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has also praised Qatar’s “progress\u201d on improving labour rights in the country while speaking on a visit to Qatar during which he signed gas deals with Qatar and the UAE. Amnesty International have acknowledged those same laws and improvements, but warned that there remained a gap between the writing of the laws and their implementation across all infrastructure, not just the projects directly related to the World Cup.<\/em> “What we have here is a very small country with outsized power, and that outsized power is a consequence of their resources and the interdependence that allows them to exert control over countries like Britain, Germany and many others across Europe”, says Professor Chadwick.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Only this week French president Emmanuel Macron wheeled out the tired old line that sport and politics shouldn’t mix. \u201cWe must not politicise sport”, he said, surely in hope rather than expectation. In awarding the World Cup to Qatar, FIFA have allowed the competition and the sport to be used as a political tool – to become one plank of a nation-building strategy. The politics will never consciously leave the World Cup – it will always be of use to someone, somewhere. It is FIFA\u2019s job to ward off those politics. In that respect, they have distinctly failed.*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A whistleblower who was jailed in Qatar after raising concerns about the mistreatment of migrant workers at World Cup stadium sites, was tortured on the eve of the tournament, his family has claimed. The human rights organisation FairSquare also released a letter from the family of Abdullah Ibhais, a former media manager in Qatar’s Supreme Committee, which accused FIFA of \u201ccallous indifference” for ignoring his case. FairSquare is now calling for the United Nations working group on arbitrary detention to intervene in the hope that Ibhais will be released from his three-year jail sentence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


In the letter Ibhais’s family claims he spent four days “in complete darkness in solitary confinement after being physically assaulted” – as punishment for contributing to last month’s ITV documentary Qatar: State of Fear? – with the air conditioning at full blast and used as a torture device. “He was in a cell of two metres by one metre, with a hole in the ground as a bathroom and with temperatures near freezing,” the letter adds. \u201cI was already suffering from several bruises after the prison guards’ assault and I was shivering all the time, as the cold air directed to me never stopped. I hardly slept during those four days,\u201d Ibhais said.
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Ibhais says he was jailed after raising concerns that the Supreme Committee planned to deny that World Cup workers were involved in a strike of between 4,000 and 6,000 people in Doha. He says he found 200 workers in Education City Stadium and Al Bayt Stadium that had no drinking water and had not been paid for four months. However, Qatar’s authorities insist that Ibhais, who was removed from his role in 2019, was sentenced on fraud charges relating to a contract to produce social media content for the World Cup. But that is disputed by Fair Square, which says he was coerced into a confession and denied a fair trial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nicholas McGeehan of FairSquare said Ibhais had gone to FIFA before his arrest. “He was messaging directly members of FIFA\u2019s human rights team,” said McGeehan. “At some point, however, they just disappeared. They essentially ghosted him – for want of a better word – and he had no further communication from them after that.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And Finally, A Bit Of Fun<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, after all that seriousness, it must be time for something a bit more lighthearted. It\u2019s really isn\u2019t my style to do a solely serious piece \u2026..<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As we all know, Russia and Qatar were each awarded a World Cup at the same ceremony in 2010. In 2022 those two countries are probably the most featured in international news – Qatar for their football tournament and appalling human rights record, and Russia for their own form of inhuman behaviour in Ukraine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Arabic names constantly in the news reminded me of a very old poem, more recently (1974) recorded as a song by Peter Skellern. The poem, by a strange quirk of circumstance, deals with a skirmish that happens accidentally, in a market place, between an Arab Emir (actually Turkish but we can surely suspend disbelief for the sake of a bit of fun) and a Russian Tzar. It\u2019s interesting that way back in the 1800s when the poem was written, the intolerance of both parties led to \u2026.. well, give it a listen. It is fun!
https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=f7GgmOdHDog<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stop press: (for me anyway!)
Baddiel and Skinner have released a revamped version of Football\u2019s Coming Home in an attempt to achieve a Christmas No. 1, says Frank Skinner – \u201cit\u2019s finally come down to a shoot out between Mariah Carey and me as to who\u2019s got the best voice!\u201d Great video – enjoy!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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