Controversies

Today we embark on the first of a series of three "controversial" World Cups. This one is probably the least so, although you'll still have noticed a certain amount of fuss. Many people in Brazil (I'm not going to start calling it Brasil with an s, I'll just forget half the time anyway) have been protesting against it. Yes, that's Brazilians protesting against football.


There's a ten-year-old joke about Brazilians. No, nothing to do with that. An aide goes into the Oval office to see George Bush. "There's been a bomb attack in Fallujah, and three Brazilian contract workers have been killed". "Oh no", says Dubya, "that's terrible. How many is a brazillion?" There are several brazillion protests every day right now.

Of course it isn't the beautiful game itself that bothers them. It's the resources that have been ploughed into new stadiums at such a difficult time economically. It's the social cleansing that always goes on around the edges of these things. It's the general sense of injustice across the whole of Brazilian society that goes rather beyond the scope of this blog. Not that that's likely to stop me, obviously. And I did say the whole thing needed a little salt.

In 2018 we move to Russia. I've nothing against Russia getting a World Cup, but I've plenty against Putin getting it. It was bad enough with Sochi, but this will be in the summer when he can take his top off. And they'll have to squander resources on stadiums too. Although by then they'll probably have annexed some of the ones the Ukrainians built for Euro 2012.

Most controversial of all, though, is the Qatar World Cup of 2022, still on at the time of writing. You've probably heard about the corruption. You may not have heard that more than 900 workers have already died building the infrastructure, and that it's estimated that the final death toll will be around 4000.

The death toll from stadium building in Brazil is six. Six. Which is still a lot of grieving families so we can enjoy a kickabout, frankly, but hardly compares with 4000.

Another bad thing about Qatar hosting a World Cup is that it removes the chance of a genuinely inspiring Arab tournament. Because when sports events are properly scheduled they can mark social turning points. West Germany's victory in Switzerland in 1954 marked their emergence from Nazism and the postwar years of famine. The South African rugby World Cup in 1995 was their first national success after the end of apartheid.

Despite recent setbacks, it still seems reasonable to hope that the Arab world might be a bit less of a dictatorship theme park by some point in the 2020s. And yet this tournament has been given to a vicious dictatorship, in one of the places where change has been most vigorously sought and cruelly denied. It's like playing in South Africa in 1986. Or - no, let's skip carefully past the other one. Let's say it's like holding it in Argentina in 1978. Which FIFA also did, of course, so it's hardly surprising the Qatari secret police haven't fazed them. I bet Blatter would hold their cattle prods for them if the money was right.

Not that Blatter chose Argentina. That was an earlier FIFA, under Sir Stanley Rous. Rous was a traditionalist, promoting the amateurism of the national game and a romantic view of "Corinthian" values, says Wikipedia. Not in fucking Argentina he wasn't. And his support for apartheid isn't looking any better with the passage of time either. So don't go getting nostalgic for the good old days when we ran the show.

I'm warned you this blog might be a bit more political.The problem is, the more beautiful you find the beautiful game, the more disfiguring you find the warts.