{"id":215568,"date":"2022-06-27T12:00:45","date_gmt":"2022-06-27T11:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=215568"},"modified":"2022-06-23T04:17:39","modified_gmt":"2022-06-23T03:17:39","slug":"the-tragic-absurdity-of-qatars-world-cup-sportswashing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/06\/the-tragic-absurdity-of-qatars-world-cup-sportswashing\/","title":{"rendered":"The Tragic Absurdity of Qatar\u2019s World Cup Sportswashing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Labor abuses, homophobia, corruption? Qatar and FIFA will use the men\u2019s World Cup to put a happy gloss on it all. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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A general view shows flags of the qualified countries for the 2022 World Cup in the Qatari capital Doha during a flag-raising ceremony of the last remaining countries to qualify, on June 16, 2022.
(Photo by Mustafa Abumunes \/ AFP via Getty Images)<\/p><\/div>\n

The extraordinarily popular event is meant to put a happy gloss on both the brutal kingdom of Qatar and soccer\u2019s governing body\u2014that infamous organization of finely tuned corruption: FIFA.<\/p>\n

Normally, the men\u2019s World Cup would be kicking off this month, but FIFA honchos changed the World Cup schedule to accommodate the fact that Qatar is scorching in the summer, with temperatures in Doha regularly\u00a0reaching<\/a>\u00a0109 degrees Fahrenheit (43 Celsius). When they bid for the Cup, Qatar boasted of hosting it over the summer with a state-of-the-art indoor air-conditioned stadium, but that proved to be a lie. Instead, FIFA moved the tournament to November and December, and in the process wreaked havoc on the calendars of domestic soccer leagues around the globe. The fact that the most powerful leagues in the world were willing to reshuffle their plans to accommodate FIFA and their Qatari collaborators is a monument to the brass-knuckle financial power of the men\u2019s World Cup. The 2018 World Cup in Russia\u00a0raked in<\/a>\u00a0$5.36 billion in revenues on the road to more than $3.5 billion in profit. FIFA expects similar profits from the spectacle in Qatar.<\/p>\n

For nearly a decade, journalists have been\u00a0trumpeting<\/a>\u00a0allegations that FIFA never would have selected Qatar were it not for brazen bribery. The US Department of Justice has\u00a0indicted<\/a>\u00a0numerous FIFA officials on a range of crimes including racketeering, wire fraud, and money laundering, some of these charges related to the Qatari bid. Investigators\u00a0assert<\/a>\u00a0that Qatar forked over at least $1 million\u2014and perhaps as much as $15 million\u2014to three soccer officials from South America for their votes. Many more voting members of FIFA have been implicated in various bribery schemes.<\/p>\n

These alleged bribes flung open the gate for human rights abuses. The government in Qatar is a constitutional monarchy in which Amir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani reigns supreme. It\u00a0clamps down<\/a>\u00a0on free expression and assembly and exerts significant prohibitions against labor organizing. Last year, a\u00a0Guardian<\/em>\u00a0investigation<\/a>\u00a0learned that more than 6,500 migrant workers\u2014from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere\u2014have died in Qatar since 2010. Approximately three dozen people have passed away while working directly on World Cup construction.<\/p>\n

Jaw-dropping as that is, the exploitation goes further. Human Rights Watch\u00a0asserts<\/a>\u00a0that thousands upon thousands of migrant workers experienced grave labor abuses while helping Qatar prepare for the World Cup, and they have not yet received financial compensation. When FIFA President Gianni Infantino was asked whether he was doing anything to help the families of exploited migrant workers, he chose to minimize their misery,\u00a0stating<\/a>, \u201cWhen you give work to somebody, even in hard conditions, you give him dignity and pride. It\u2019s not charity.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Then there is LGBTQ safety and security. This month FIFA\u00a0festooned<\/a>\u00a0its Twitter avatar in the colors of the rainbow to mark Pride, congratulating itself for its \u201ccelebration for the LGBTQIA+ community.\u201d But platitudes can\u2019t erase the fact that the two most recent hosts of the men\u2019s World Cup\u2014Russia and Qatar\u2014have horrific human-rights records when it comes to LGBTQ issues.<\/p>\n

Qatar\u2019s stance on LGBTQ rights is appalling. It\u2019s a country where same-sex relations are\u00a0punishable<\/a>\u00a0by a three-year prison term. No one\u2019s fears were assuaged when a senior Qatari security official for the World Cup\u00a0suggested<\/a>\u00a0recently that LGBTQ fans would be welcome to attend the event, but that any unfurled rainbow flags in Qatar could be confiscated in order to protect those waving them from being physically attacked. Sometimes warnings sound a lot more like threats.<\/p>\n

The Independent Supporters Council of North America, a group of ardent soccer fans, issued a\u00a0statement<\/a>\u00a0that read in part, \u201cWe cannot, in good faith, tell our members, LGBT+ people or allies that this is a World Cup for all.\u201d After Wales qualified for the World Cup, members of the Welsh team\u2019s staff\u00a0announced<\/a>\u00a0they will forgo attending the event because of Qatar\u2019s position on LGBTQ rights. We should expect additional global pressure on Qatar as the World Cup nears.<\/p>\n

Lastly, on top of the labor abuses, corruption, death, and anti-gay bigotry, there is the greenwashing. When FIFA\u00a0claimed<\/a>\u00a0that Qatar would host the first-ever carbon-neutral World Cup, the global guffaw nearly registered on the Richter scale. The environmental group Carbon Market Watch\u00a0responded<\/a>\u00a0that only \u201ccreative accounting\u201d that\u00a0ignored<\/a>\u00a0massive sources of carbon\u2014like the energy required to cool the stadiums\u2014could lead to that misleading conclusion. Soccer scholar Brenda Elsey\u00a0joked<\/a>\u00a0on the feminist sports podcast\u00a0Burn It All Down<\/em>\u00a0that soccer barons must have been using their \u201cmagical FIFA abacus\u201d to arrive at their carbon-neutrality claim.<\/p>\n

Yet, despite all of this, the World Cup will be watched by billions and provide oodles of positive coverage for the Qatari state. That is the nefarious part of sportswashing. It\u2019s a force whose mission is to gaslight the consumer and use something as beautiful and universal as sports to do it.<\/p>\n

There are forces not content to let this happen. In England, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the country\u2019s two largest unions, Unite and Unison, are\u00a0calling<\/a>\u00a0for both the funding and creation of a migrant workers center in Qatar and compensation for families of those workers who died in order to bring the World Cup to life.<\/p>\n

Efforts such as these can take the rhetoric of sportswashing and use it against FIFA and the Qatari royal family. These undertakings should be supported not only because they are just but also because they chip away at sportswashing\u2019s edifice so we can see the brutal truth beneath.<\/p>\n

____________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

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Dave Zirin is the sports editor of\u00a0<\/em>The Nation\u00a0and the author of <\/em>The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World. You can find all his work HERE<\/a> and at: www.edgeofsports.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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Go to Original – scheerpost.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

22 Jun 2022 – Were there not so much suffering involved, the Qatar 2022 World Cup would be an absurdist parody of sportswashing. Labor abuses, homophobia, corruption? Qatar and FIFA will use the men\u2019s World Cup to put a happy gloss on it all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":215572,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[223],"tags":[550,2745,2049,1801,1693,1146],"class_list":["post-215568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports","tag-corruption","tag-fifa","tag-homophobia","tag-qatar","tag-soccer-world-cup","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215568\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/215572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}