Since the World Cup, the campaign against Qatar has been strong. One of them was the death of 6500 migrant workers during the construction of World Cup venues. Surviving the allegations, Qatar are making the most of their opportunity
World Cup football continues. As usual Kerala is in football fever. Even the rushers are rushing the status of each game. Huge cutouts of world-class players line the nooks and crannies. Football related tips are offered for anything. In the past few days, I was in Calicut, where football was the most engrossing. Therefore, there was no escape from football.
Whether it was at any political meeting, in the midst of questions from journalists, in a welcome speech at a debate with women’s college students, or in an interaction with lawyers at the Calicut Bar Association, football allusions kept flowing. But at any World Cup, the debate will spread beyond football. There is no change in the Qatar World Cup. Qatar is being questioned in world politics for many reasons.
Qatar has been vilified for human rights abuses, neglect of sexual minorities (homosexuality is illegal in Qatar), treatment of migrant workers, and excess use of hydrocarbon fuels (Qatar is the world’s largest producer of liquefied natural gas). The Western media attack on this sparsely populated country has been there since the beginning – since 2010, when they won the race to host the 2022 World Cup, the Western media has been heavily bombarded with a campaign to exclude them.
The British newspaper The Guardian alleged that 6500 foreign migrant workers were killed during the construction of the World Cup venues. The slogan “6500 lives were sacrificed for 6750 minutes of football” was chanted for the moral exclusion of Qatar. Allegations of bribery and illegal money transfer were not proved. Qatar denies allegation of death of 6500 workers. They point out that this is the number of people who have died in various fields over a period of five years. The Qatari government says that only 38 people died accidentally during World Cup-related construction work.
Most of the neighboring governments have blamed the political stance of Qatar, which was given the chance to host the region’s first World Cup venue. Allegations include establishing the Al Jazeera channel with a worldwide audience, facilitating the Taliban’s invasion of Afghanistan (the Taliban’s only international office is in Doha), and funding terrorists (ISIS receives money from Qatar). The Gulf Cooperation Council has imposed economic and political sanctions on Qatar since 2017. It was withdrawn in 2021 through diplomatic moves.
Many people who oppose the World Cup venue for Qatar are speaking irresponsibly. They were joined by Sepp Blatter, the FIFA president at the time when Qatar was given the venue. He recently said that Qatar is a small country and football and the World Cup are not in their hands. However, current FIFA president Gianni Infantino mocked the ‘hypocrisy’ of the Western media in a lengthy press conference and supported Qatar. “I don’t need to defend Qatar, they will do that. I am speaking for football” – he said.
When it was reported that players were wearing logos and headbands in support of sexual minorities, FIFA banned all such moves. Infantino wrote to all the teams asking them not to drag the tournament into controversy. “There are various political problems in the world. Football does not exist in a vacuum. “Don’t drag football into ideological and political current issues,” he requested. Qatar made a big effort to make the most of their opportunity.
They have spent 22000 crores to set the stage for the football mammoth. Seven stunning new stadiums, multi-storey highways, roads, new railway sections, hotels (even ships moored on the shores to provide temporary hotels), even open air, with expensive cooling systems for each stadium! After winning the World Cup bid, they bought French club PSG to increase their influence in the world of football.
Among the superstars, Brazil’s Neymar, Argentina’s Lionel Messi and France’s Kylian Mbappe were hired for the club. Football historian David Goldblatt writes that no other country has yet made sport, and particularly the World Cup, central to its foreign diplomacy and economy as Qatar has done. However, there is a dispute. There are many host countries that have used football to enhance their prestige on the global stage.
Uruguay, which hosted the first World Cup in 1930, is a very small country whose only reputation is football. “Other countries have their history. “We have our football” is a famous local saying. Fascist Italy, which hosted the next two World Cups, used football for global prestige. Argentina, which was under military rule in 1978, and Russia’s Putin in 2018 did the same.
Eric Hobsbawm, a British historian, once said: What is so special about football in consolidating national sentiment? Hundreds of thousands of unknown people together are a team behind football, rather than 11 players with proper names. My son Ishan Tharoor, World Cup commentator for the Washington Post, adds: Football is a global game more than any other sport. A cornerstone to bring people together. These 11 players epitomize the nation’s thirst for success and fear of defeat.
tail piece
English betting company BetVictor has built a supercomputer that looks at each team’s talent, history and odds and uses an algorithm to predict the winner. Its prediction is that the Brazil-Belgium final will come and Brazil will be the champions.
But before popping champagne bottles in Brasilia and raising yellow flags on the Kerala coast, a word of caution: even supercomputers are not completely flawless. This algorithm could not predict Saudi Arabia’s resounding victory over Argentina! It is from such beautiful uncertainties that true sportsmanship is born. No supercomputer can be created to predict it.
English Summary : Qatar hosting World Cup amid several Controversies and Criticisms