Not worthy of a thread - 2018 FIFA World Cup edition

[OzzieMandias]

It's pathetic how little fans count in the overall picture. The ideal World Cup for us ordinary folk is somewhere where the facilities are good, travel is easy (both to and from the country and internally), and there's plenty to do between matches – somewhere that makes for a nice summer trip.

 

Not a fucking tiny desert state where no one in their right minds would take a holiday, where alcohol is forbidden and where ordinary folk might get thrown in prison just for being, say, gay. Nor in winter at a time when people might have difficulty travelling.

 

Germany, Brazil -- these are good places for a World Cup. Qatar, Russia -- hopeless. Though at least you can get a drink in Russia.

[Decky]

Premier League clubs (and other leagues) should just play without their internationals, rather than take a month off. Those two pre-seasons are a complete joke man, once again club football is forgotten about in favour of the internationals.

[Guest DebuchyAndTheBeast]

Scrap the CL and Europa League for that season and play the December games midweek to catch up. Problem solved.

Also make Qatar pay for all the prize money and lost TV rights.

[Deuce]

Scrap the CL and Europa League for that season and play the December games midweek to catch up. Problem solved.

Also make Qatar pay for all the prize money and lost TV rights.

 

Aye, problem solved.

[Interpolic]

Aye, cancel the Champions League, problem solved.

[Guest Roger Kint]

Premier League clubs (and other leagues) should just play without their internationals, rather than take a month off. Those two pre-seasons are a complete joke man, once again club football is forgotten about in favour of the internationals.

 

If France dont make it 

[Dokko]

World Cup is one thing but god knows what Qatar will do when they host the Winter Olympics.

[Segun Oluwaniyi]

For what it is worth, I don't think the actual World Cup in Qatar will be much trouble at all. It is a small, compact, and organised country with an incredible fortune at its disposal. I'm sure they will do everything possible to make the tournament hospitable to foreign travelers and to ease transportation and housing concerns. I actually think it will be quite a show.

 

The real one people should be worrying about is Russia. I believe this has to the potential to go very badly.

[Interpolic]

That's all well and good but the World Cup should be somewhere else, right?  Why do we have to keep having it in wackier and wackier places meaning that the people in the countries that have made football what it is for over a century never get to see it in their own country?  The odd one fair enough, I could see the point in having one in the States and in Japan/South Korea and in South Africa, but that sort of choice shouldn't be so frequent IMO.

[Disco]

That's all well and good but the World Cup should be somewhere else, right?  Why do we have to keep having it in wackier and wackier places meaning that the people in the countries that have made football what it is for over a century never get to see it in their own country?  The odd one fair enough, I could see the point in having one in the States and in Japan/South Korea and in South Africa, but that sort of choice shouldn't be so frequent IMO.

 

Don't see what's wacky about Russia like, they've a rich footballing (and wider sporting) history and tradition.

 

The main issues surrounding that one are non-footballing reasons: corruption, social inequalities, visas for foreigners etc.

[Interpolic]

I think it's pretty wacky when it was up against England and Spain.  Why did Russia get it when England hasn't had it for so long and thoroughly deserves another one?

[Disco]

I think it's pretty wacky when it was up against England and Spain.  Why did Russia get it when England hasn't had it for so long and thoroughly deserves another one?

 

But by the way it's done (by region) using those reasons it'd never get too host it (so long as one of the status quo bid for it) despite that Russia has never hosted it, has the capability too and has appeared in 9 World Cup finals (under various guises).

 

I was as narked as anyone that England didn't get a sniff but for footballing reasons I don't see the problem with it going to Russia.

[Interpolic]

That's the fundamental problem, I don't think it should rotate by region the way it does.  It should go to Europe/South America half of the time, if not three quarters.

[Segun Oluwaniyi]

To be frank with you, it is not possible for me to care less about England and it's hope of a World Cup. Its citizens have direct access to the most watched and followed league in the world for nine months of every single year. People will live without it. Undoubtedly, it would be an exciting event, probably akin to Germany 2006 in terms of being very well run while also being very familiar. Brazil is the most successful nation in the history of the sport, and will have waited 64 years to host once more. No one has done it more than twice.

 

If I was in control of everything, I would alternate the tournament between the fully industrialised football hotbeds and nations that either are mad for the game, but developing economically or economically developed, but not known for football. I do agree that a run of four World Cups that counts Brazil as the most stable location is quite ridiculous.

[Interpolic]

Seems we roughly agree then, apart from the England thing.  I personally think it's fucking stupid that arguably the most football-daft country in the world has only hosted the competition once and that was ages ago.

[jdckelly]

the fact that England only one vote (iirc) was the ridiculous thing when from an infrastructure point of view there's few easier places to hold it, good level of public transport, stable country, high level stadiums required for such an event already exist and for the most part wouldn't turn into massive white elephants just sitting there decaying after the party's left and a very football mad population which would fill the grounds for each game.

 

The more I think of the very existence of FIFA and the shit they pull when a world cup comes to a country makes me more and more disillusioned with international football and wonder why the hell should I give 2 shits about it, it takes a lot of effort to make the elite clubs normally utterly morally bankrupt in every sense look like good guys but my god compared to FIFA, UEFA and all the sniveling spineless football associations throughout the world they look like bloody saints and frankly the game of football would be best served by them saying a big fuck you to all of the above and striking off on their own and taking all the best players with them.

[OzzieMandias]

A big part of the problem is that the people making the decisions are all obsessed with the idea of "legacy", as if the only point of staging a World Cup was to leave behind a bit of sporting infrastructure... like the now barely used white elephant stadiums in South Africa.

 

England already having great stadiums then becomes part of the problem. "No point doing the World Cup there, they don't need the legacy."

 

I seem to remember Qatar arguing that they would build temporary, prefabricated stadiums for the World Cup and then afterwards donate these to needy undeveloped countries who are gagging for new places to play football.

[Miercoles]

You guys should have paid the fucking bribe money then, instead of relying solely on Beckham's blowjob abilities.

[DJ_NUFC]

Didn't he have long hair then? Surprised it didn't provide proper grip for Blatter. Maybe he's a hands-free kinda guy.

[jdckelly]

IOC isn't exactly happy with FIFA over this winter world cup thing since its threatening to get in the way of their winter olympics and is even a threat of throwing football out of the Olympics-which will not upset Blatter and Co in the slightest

[Guest DebuchyAndTheBeast]

The impact of moving the 2022 World Cup in Qatar from summer to winter could be limited to one season, says Football Association vice-chairman David Gill

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/24193298

[Tooj]

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/21/qatar-human-rights-sport-cohen

 

With the European football association, Uefa, reaching the unavoidable conclusion that you cannot play competitive sport in the 50C heat of a Qatari summer, the way is clear for the international football association, Fifa, to break with precedent and make a decision that does not seem corrupt or senseless or both.

 

All being well, the 2022 tournament will be held in the winter. Just one niggling question remains: how many lives will be lost so that the Fifa World Cup™ can live up to its boast that it is the most successful festival of sport on the planet. "More workers will die building World Cup infrastructure than players will take to the field," predicts Sharan Burrow, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation. Even if the teams in Qatar use all their substitutes, she is likely to be right.

 

Qatar's absolute monarchy, run by the fabulously rich and extraordinarily secretive Al Thani clan, no more keeps health and safety statistics than it allows free elections. The Trade Union Confederation has had to count the corpses the hard way. It found that 83 Indians have died so far this year. The Gulf statelet was also the graveyard for 119 Nepalese construction workers. With 202 migrants from other countries dying over the same nine months, Ms Burrow is able to say with confidence there is at least one death for every day of the year. The body count can only rise now that Qatar has announced that it will take on 500,000 more migrants, mainly from the Indian subcontinent, to build the stadiums, hotels and roads for 2022.

 

Not all the fatalities are on construction sites. The combination of back-breaking work, nonexistent legal protections, intense heat and labour camps without air conditioning allows death to come in many guises. To give you a taste of its variety, the friends of Chirari Mahato went online to describe how he would work from 6am to 7pm. He would return to a hot, unventilated room he shared with 12 others. Because he died in his sleep, rather than on site, his employers would not accept that they had worked him to death. There are millions of workers like him around the Gulf. When we gawp at the wealth that allows the Qatari royals to buy the Olympic Village and Chelsea Barracks, we miss their plight, and the strangeness of the oil rich states, too.

 

How to characterise them? "Absolute monarchy" does not begin to capture a society such as Qatar, where migrants make up 99% of the private sector workforce. Apartheid South Africa is a useful point of reference. The 225,000 Qatari citizens can form trade unions and strike. The roughly 1.8 million migrants cannot. Sparta also comes to mind. But instead of a warrior elite living off the labour of helots, we have plutocrats and sybarites sustained by faceless armies of disposable migrants.

 

The official justification for oppression is, as so often, religious. Migrants and employers are bound by the kafala system – taken from Islamic law on the adoption of children. "Kafala" derives from "to feed". Nourishment is the last thing the system provides, however. It delivers captive labour instead. Migrant workers cannot change jobs without their sponsoring employers' consent. As Human Rights Watch says, if workers walk out, the employers – the adoptive parents – can say they have absconded and the authorities will arrest them.

 

In order to leave Qatar, migrants must obtain an exit visa from their sponsor. This stipulation means that they can be held hostage if they threaten to sue over a breach of contract. Wouldn't it make a bracing change if the religious leaders we hear condemning free speech as blasphemy so often could find the time to damn this exploitation?

 

It is not just poor construction workers who suffer. One might expect that Fifa would have been concerned about the fate of foreign footballers working under kafala contracts. Abdeslam Ouaddou, who once played for Fulham, has warned players not to go near Qatar. Speaking from experience – he played for Qatar SC in the Qatari domestic league – he said that if a player is injured or his form drops, the club can break his contract. If the player goes to lawyers, the club (as "sponsor") can refuse to let him leave the country until he drops his case.

 

Ouaddou got out of Qatar after much tortuous negotiation. But French player Zahir Belounis, a former captain of the team Al-Jaish, is trapped in the country with his family and hasn't been paid for two years. When he went to the international press, he was threatened with defamation proceedings.

 

After promising the International Trade Union Confederation that it would ensure human rights were respected in Qatar, Fifa tells me that it is "promoting a dialogue" to ensure dignified working conditions. Sharan Burrow's colleagues say all they hear is PR flam.

 

It is not just Qatar in 2022. The corruption and waste around the 2014 World Cup has provoked riots in Brazil. As for 2018, Putin's Duma has already restricted the rights of workers preparing the stadiums for the World Cup.

 

Fifa strikes me as a decadent organisation in the political rather than literary meaning of the word. It is an institution whose behaviour contradicts all of its professed purposes. If it cared about football, it would not even have thought of staging a tournament in the Qatari summer. If it cared about footballers, it would take up the case of Belounis. And if it respected human life, it would say that the kafala system could not govern World Cup contracts.

 

I don't know how much longer sports journalists can ignore the abuse Fifa tolerates. The World Cup is overturning all the cliches. People say that "football is a matter of life or death", said Bill Shankly. "It's more important than that." Shankly was joking. Qatar and Fifa appear to mean it. Sport is "war minus the shooting", said Orwell. There may not be any actual shooting in Qatar but workers will die nonetheless.

 

The quote that ought to haunt all who love football is CLR James's paraphrase of Kipling: "What do they know of cricket that only cricket know?" James was writing about how sport was bound up in the Caribbean with colonialism, race and class. Anyone writing about the World Cup must also acknowledge that the beautiful game is now bound up with racial privilege, exploitation and the deaths of men, who should not be forgotten so readily.

[henke]

A big part of the problem is that the people making the decisions are all obsessed with the idea of "legacy", as if the only point of staging a World Cup was to leave behind a bit of sporting infrastructure...

 

Perhaps FIFA could have said before England put a bid together, that you needed to leave a "legacy" to be successful. Would have saved a hell of a lot of time and money.

 

[mrmojorisin75]

this boggles my mind tbh, i can't understand for the life of me why everyone is just going along with it

 

yes the world cup is fifas but they'd not have a world cup if the major players got together and decided they'll opt out if the football calendar in europe is shifted...how hard can that be, make a few phone calls and get them all on the same page?

 

that'd sort it in no fucking time

[oldtype]

this boggles my mind tbh, i can't understand for the life of me why everyone is just going along with it

 

yes the world cup is fifas but they'd not have a world cup if the major players got together and decided they'll opt out if the football calendar in europe is shifted...how hard can that be, make a few phone calls and get them all on the same page?

 

that'd sort it in no fucking time

 

Surely it can't be that Qatar is bribing key officials at various organizations to get their agenda through.

 

I mean, they've never done anything like that before, right?