Utime bomb: the expression has often been used to describe the attribution to Qatar of the organization of the FIFA World Cup 2022. It is possible that the “bomb” finishes exploding precisely when the competition ends. will take place. Only end, because since this attribution, a little more than ten years ago, successive explosions have been numerous.
The International Football Federation (FIFA) has been embroiled in a litany of court cases, and forced to disrupt the world football calendar by moving the competition to November and December to avoid impossible weather conditions. Above all, Qatar was less placed in the hoped-for light than under fire from critics which we had a foretaste of at the time of the World Cycling Championships in 2016 and athletics in 2019.
In addition to calls to boycott his World Cup, a protest movement is now emanating from footballers and their selections. In recent days, Norwegians, Germans, Dutch and Danes have, as a preamble to their qualifying matches, displayed messages denouncing the non-respect of human rights by Doha.
Political censorship of athletes
The alarm was sounded very early on by investigations by the Guardian or World and several reports from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the International Trade Union Confederation. A new study of the British daily, published in February, broke the cut by recording – for only a part of foreign nationals – 6,500 deaths of migrant workers for ten years in the emirate.
Twenty months from the kickoff, a boycott remains very unlikely. At a more militant time, that of the 1978 Argentine World Cup had failed, and we are no longer in the days of the Cold War, when Washington and Moscow could drag their allies into abstention from the Olympic Games (1980 and 1984). Since then, international sports bodies have adopted a strict doctrine of the prohibition of political expressions.
But while athletes and spectators were kept silent, sports governments continued to hand sport over to states seeking to instrumentalize, this time in modern forms of sport. soft power. Apolitism has no longer consisted of sparing any scruples when it comes to putting oneself at the service of infrequent regimes – especially since even the richest democracies consider the cost of major sporting events to be exorbitant.
The sports confederations’ argument that media exposure compels governments to make efforts is reaching its limits. Did the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing prompt the Chinese regime to make amends? While Qatar has revised its social law, which is feudal in nature, the application of reforms is considered insufficient by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) The state maintains as much opacity as it can, and FIFA refrains from putting pressure on its partner.
Sportwashing in the spotlight
Jérôme Valcke, then FIFA general secretary, had he not estimated in 2013, about Russia 2018: “A lower level of democracy is sometimes preferable to organize a World Cup” ? The following year, its president, Sepp Blatter, said that football was “Stronger than any protest movement”…
The sanctuarization of stadiums appears in all its hypocrisy today, especially among footballers, more and more likely to transgress it: collective support for the Black Lives Matter movement, commitments of British players Raheem Sterling against systemic racism and Marcus Rashford in favor poor children, positions taken by Antoine Griezmann against the persecution of the Uighurs, by Kylian Mbappé and others against police violence in France, etc.
If political awareness comes to footballers (if it comes back to them, more exactly, because they have had it many times in the past), if they allow themselves the right to be citizens and if their legitimacy is no longer contested. even if they put pressure on sponsors and federations, “sportwashing” operations for which major competitions are the tools will be undermined.
The “big party” of the next World Cup will present an overwhelming human toll, will take place in a country of 2.5 million inhabitants (including 10% of nationals) which neglects human rights, without a footballing tradition, in absurdly oversized stadiums that will have to be “air-conditioned” …
The evidence of this political, sporting, economic and ecological aberration is late in coming. The 2022 World Cup will take place, but at what cost for Qatar?