With just under two months until the start of the 2022 Fifa World Cup, the 2022 Contortionist World Championships are in full, bendy swing as players, commentators and paid-for apologists twist themselves this way and that to convince all that holding the tournament in Qatar could bring “real change”.
The leading contender is, of course, David Beckham, who, according to whom you read, was paid a guesstimate of £150m — the equivalent of a Gupta Eskom deal — to be a “cultural ambassador” for Qatar. He described Qatar as “perfect” in an advertising campaign.
They had, according to the US justice department, a perfect method of ensuring they would host the 2022 World Cup — fat backhanders to Fifa officials. Fourteen of the 22 Fifa executives who voted for Qatar have since been banned or live under a cloud of suspicion. A witness told a New York court in 2017 that Conmebol officials Ricardo Teixeira, Nicolás Leoz and Julio Grondona received money for their votes.
In 2011, Beckham was an ambassador for England’s 2018 World Cup bid, which they lost to Russia, another victory darkened by say, some of them in a US court, of bribery and corruption.
“It gives you a real sick feeling,” said Beckham in 2011. “So much hard work went into that bid. Nobody could have done any more, genuinely, and then you factor in that we also had the weight of the prime minister and the future king of England behind us. It doesn’t get much bigger than that. So the situation we see now ... it leaves a sick feeling in your mouth.”
So, dearest David, does the oppression of women, the LGBTQ community and the number of workers who died in building the stadiums. You would hope that would leave a sick feeling in the mouth and, hopefully, your paid-for soul.
Last year, The Guardian reported there had been “6,750 deaths of South Asian migrants in the 12 years since Qatar was awarded the Right to host the World Cup. Many of those deaths were traced to routinely working as many as 10 hours a day in summer temperatures of 113°F or more.”
Deaths? What deaths, said Fifa president Gianni Infantino in May. “Fifa is not the police of the world or responsible for everything that happens about the world.”
Others will tell you the World Cup in Qatar is an opportunity for change and dialogue. This is the starting point for bringing reform. It’s certainly what Fatma Al Nuaimi, media and communications executive director for the supreme committee, said to the LA Times. “The World Cup has been an important accelerator for those reforms and she pushed back on the idea that Qatar is trying to ignore or gloss over the abuses,” reported the paper.
“Then why are we hosting the World Cup if we don’t want anyone to come here or to expose ourselves?” she said. “With the World Cup you will always have the spotlight, which gives the good side and the bad side of it.”
It’s the bad side that should bother us, though. It won’t go away. It will be pushed under the tarpaulin and kept in the shadows until the end of the tournament, then will resume with gusto and little care for what the rest of the world says. And many countries are trying hard not to say about their own interests. Migrant workers be damned.
“If Qatar’s human rights and indentured labour issues had not been made into a PR problem, would competing nations be wearing armbands and looking politely concerned? Answer: no. This is corporate image management. Which is fine, but best to be aware,” The Guardian’s Barney Ronay tweeted this week.
“It’s no coincidence that the loudest dissenting European voice on Qatar’s fitness to stage a World Cup is Norway. Norway is also a gas superpower. Everyone else is balancing what-can-we-say with, ‘oh sh*t, we really need a carbon friend’.”
Who else is in contention for the Contortionist World Champs? There’s Sir Alex Ferguson: “I would back the Qatar bid. Qatar have got the finances and the purpose. Above all, they’ve got the vision.”
Add former players Tim Cahill, Cafu, Samuel Eto’o, Xavi Hernández and Ronald de Boer. Gary Neville is trying to come across as a voice of sense. He will be going to Qatar because, as he told the BBC, he would rather sit about “a table with these people” trying to work on change.
“Would,” the BBC host asked, “you have played football in SA during apartheid times?”
“Eh... probably not because I think we were banned, weren’t we?” replied Neville.
You were banned but loads of British footballers didn’t let that stop them from playing in SA as blacks were horded into homelands and tortured. The truth: twisted, turned and contorted by a footballer near you.
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