Qatar Dreamin'

Why the 2022 World Cup is a Mirror of Our World

The greatest global sporting spectacle in the world has begun, and whatever happens in the next month, the 2022 FIFA World Cup hasn’t been accompanied by the kind of delirious expectation that we tend to expect on such occasions. If it’s true, as the Qatar 2022 icon David Beckham reminds us in his mind-numbingly banal promotion video, that ‘Every sporting competition begins the same way, as a dream,’ then this is one dream a lot of people don’t seem to want to share.

Beckham is getting a lot of money - a cool £150 million by some accounts - for churning out emollient Qatari propaganda, so you can’t blame him for the smirk on his face and his predictions that the World Cup will make the world a ‘more tolerant and inclusive place’ - or his willingness to overlook any evidence to the contrary

This is what celebrity sports branding is about after all, and it’s not as if Beckham’s mercenary ambassadorship is some kind of anomalous exception to the preening narcissism and limitless avarice that his post-football career is based on.

Of course, many other people will also be making a lot of money out of this spectacle, including the sports commentators who have criticized Qatar’s human rights or LGBT rights record or its treatment of migrant workers, but have still gone on to cover the tournament. And then there are the FIFA officials who have defended that record or deflected from it, not to mention the Qatari government, which has threatened to withdraw its investments in London in response to criticism from the Transport for London authority.

Meanwhile Emmanuel Macron - no doubt thinking of the billion-dollar fighter plane deals that France has signed with the Qatari government - has tried to calm things down, insisting that football ‘shouldn’t be politicised’.

It’s certainly unusual for a World Cup to begin in such an acrimonious atmosphere, when commentators criticise the host nation on air and even the disreputable Sepp Blatter agrees that FIFA should never have awarded the competition to Qatar. But it’s not the first World Cup to be held in a questionable country, and it’s certainly not the first time that sport has been ‘politicised.’

In 1936, the Nazis turned the Olympic Games into the first global ‘sportswashing’ event. In 1968 Mexican security forces shot down more than 300 students only days before the Olympic Games began, and then cracked on with the competition as if nothing had happened.

1978: the World Cup from Hell

Perhaps the most egregious example of sportswashing took place in 1978, when the World Cup was staged in Argentina. At that time, the country was in its second year of the military junta headed by the sinister fascist ghoul Jorge Rafael Videla.

When the World Cup was awarded to Argentina in 1964, FIFA could not have known that it would be ruled by a man who promised a conference of Latin American military commanders in 1975 that ‘As many will as is necessary will die in Argentina to protect the hemisphere from the international communist conspiracy.’

When Videla and his fellow army officers came to power in 1976 they initiated a secret program of mass killing and torture known as ‘The Process of National Reorganization’ in which this principle was put into practice with insane and savage ruthlessness.

As many as 30,000 people were swallowed up by a machinery of annihilation whose modus operandi was defined by the governor of Buenos Aires: ‘ First we kill all the subversives, then we will kill all their collaborators, then…their sympathizers, then…those who remain indifferent, and finally, we will kill the timid.’

The full horror of Argentina’s war on ‘subversion’ was mostly concealed from its population and the outside world. Nevertheless, news did get out., so much so that in the lead-up to the World Cup, international criticism of the regime’s human rights record became so vocal that FIFA considered staging the competition in other country.

Videla was desperate to avoid this outcome, and he was equally desperate not just to hold the tournament, but to ensure that Argentina won it. The regime spared no expense to make this happen, spending a whopping $700 million on the tournament that included hiring the US public relations firm Burson-Marsteller to oversee what became one of the most epic sportswashing exercises ever undertaken.

To counter criticisms from Amnesty International and other organisations of its human rights record, the regime disseminated decals and banners proclaiming ‘Los argentinos somos derechos y humanos’ - ‘We Argentines are human, we Argentines are right.’

This was the message that greeted visitors who arrived at the Ezeiza international airport, which was repeated endlessly in shop windows and cars. Employees at the Ministry of the Interior even had the gall to ‘demonstrate’ in favour of these supposedly violated ‘rights’ in the Plaza de Mayo to counter the women who were demanding to know what had happened to their children and grandchildren.

The regime also adopted a policy of complete radio silence in response to the ‘World Cup offensive’ organised by the exiled leadership of the leftwing Peronist guerrilla group the Montoneros.

In addition to disseminating leaflets, the ‘Montos’ staged nine armed attacks during the World Cup, including RPG-7 attacks on public buildings. These were attempts to disrupt the regime’s aura of normality rather than take casualties, and they received little or no attention in the national or international press.

It was true that the World Cup brought the regime under closer scrutiny, and provided an umbrella of safety that enable journalists to interview human rights activists in Argentina without being killed or disappeared.

But once the football started, few people cared about the desaparecidos or whatever else was taking place off the pitch. As the world knows, Argentina won the tournament, amid accusations of bribery and match-fixing that still persist. Throughout the competition, Videla took a personal interest in the outcome, visiting the Argentinian dressing room to ‘inspire’ and even intimidate the players.

At the group stage, Argentina had to beat Peru in order to avoid elimination, and won 6:0, in what remains one of the most controversial matches in World Cup history. Allegations have persisted that Peru threw the match, either because they were bribed or intimidated.

A 2012 Channel 4 investigation claims that the Peruvian government pressured its players to lose, and that Videla visited their dressing room before the match, accompanied by the equally atrocious Henry Kissinger.

Whatever the truth of these allegations, Argentina went on to make the final. Some great football was played throughout, by Argentina and also by a brilliant ‘Total Football’ Dutch team that continued to dazzle even without the presence of its star player Johan Cruyff.

Millions of spectators watched the final, including the regime’s prisoners, some of whom could hear the cheers from the La Plata stadium from the clandestine centres where they were being tortured.

Incredibly, the basement of the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA) building in Buenos Aries - where thousands were tortured and killed - was used as a changing area and relaxation centre for footballers, while the upper floors were still being used for interrogations.

In other camps, prisoners waiting for death flights or ‘transfers’ were brought out into corridors to watch Argentina on the television and made to shout ‘goooaaaal’ when they scored.

In one astounding episode, prisoners at the ESMA were taken by their guards on a day trip to hear the cheering crowds acclaiming Argentina’s victory, before being brought back to the centre. Three days after the final Videla delivered a speech to the nation in which he hailed the victory as a ‘lesson’ in ‘civic maturity’:

This unanimous cry of ‘Argentina!’ that rose up from our hearts, this singular flag of sky-blue and white that fluttered in our hands, are signs of a deep reality that exceed the limits of a sporting event. They are the voice and insignia of a Nation that is reunited in the plenitude of its dignity…All the Nation has triumphed. We are one people who today assume the challenge we put to ourselves: that of creativity, of fruitful work, and shared effort.

As Marguerite Feitlowitz put it in her magisterial A Lexicon of Terror, ‘At no other time during the Process was Argentina ever so massively, orgiastically fascist.’ The beautiful game helped make that happen. FIFA helped make it happen. Everyone who watched the tournament - including me - helped make it happen.

Far from being above politics, the World Cup bolstered the regime’s political agenda and drowned out the voices of its victims, at least temporarily, because this is what prestige sporting competitions will always do.

A tournament like the World Cup, that appeals to so many people as an all-absorbing distraction and media spectacle, lends itself easily to political amnesia and forgetfulness, and the same thing will almost certainly happen in Qatar.

So why has this particular World Cup been singled out for such criticism? The regime is not the Argentine Junta, and it is not Russia, where the World Cup was staged in 2018 to far less criticism. Is it true, as Qatari officials claim, that their critics are being ‘unfair’? Are these critics guilty of ‘double standards’, as the ridiculous FIFA president Gianni Infantino insisted in a rambling disingenuous speech that seemed to suggest that because everyone was bad, then no one was bad?

Yes and no. To anyone who believes that LGBT rights matter and that sporting competitions should uphold them, then the World Cup should never have been staged in a country that doesn’t believe in them and made no secret about it.

Unlike Argentina, FIFA knew exactly what kind of country it was dealing with when it voted to stage the World Cup in Qatar, and given FIFA’s dreadful record and Qatar’s deep purse, it is difficult to believe that a lot of money didn’t change hands to make this happen.

It’s also difficult to avoid the suspicion that some of the criticisms directed at Qatar are based on the fact that this is the first time the World Cup has been held in a Muslim/Arab country, without any notable footballing presence or tradition.

Criticisms of this ‘artificial’ and ‘unnatural’ context ignore the fact that Qatar may not have much of a football tradition, but the MENA countries certainly do, and have done for a long time. Nor do such critics complain of the absence of such a tradition when Qatar and the UAE or Saudi Arabia buy Premier League and European football clubs, from PSG and Manchester City to Newcastle and Malaga.

These might be self-interested financial investments, but no more so than those that the likes of Roman Abramovich or the Glazer family have made, because the beautiful game is drenched in money and capital. Does it only become ‘corrupted’ or less beautiful, because Arab capital seeks to profit from it?

And as for artificial, is Qatar any less authentic that the other ‘evil neoliberal paradises’ of the Persian Gulf, as the late Mike Davis memorably described Dubai, where airconditioned shopping emporiums, high-rise resorts, mansions, yachting marinas and amusement parks converge to make ‘an emerging dreamworld of conspicuous consumption’ out of a ‘dying planet’s terminal addiction to Arabian oil?’

Consider Qatar’s man-made ‘Banana Island’ - shaped in an Islamic crescent - where guests can pay £3,500 a night to stare out the sea from above-the-water-bungalows just across the water from the war in Yemen, and enjoy ‘wellness’ rooms that include an ‘Antarctica room.’

This is not for the likes of you and me, or for most of the fans who will be watching the World Cup. If Antarctica ever melts, this ‘island paradise’ may go the same way as islands that have been there for much longer, but this is the lifestyle that Qatar enjoys, as a result of the world’s addiction to gas, rather than oil.

And no one should be surprised that the stages that millionaire footballers are now performing on were built by migrant workers, of whom an incredible 6, 500 have died working on World Cup facilities and related infrastructure.

We shouldn’t be shocked by the attempts to attribute these deaths to ‘natural causes’; by the kafala contracts that have turned tens of thousands of Nepalis, Pakistanis, Indians and other workers into disposable serfs; by the security guards who work 100-hour shifts for the equivalent of 35 p an hour on World Cup facilities. Because this is the 21st Century Gilded Age, and these workers are at the bottom of the pyramid that Qatar and the Gulf States are built on, and that our Gilded World is also built on.

So Infantino is right to denounce Europe’s treatment of migrant workers, and point to the borders that kill and trap thousands of them every year, but the FIFA president is not trying to advance the cause of migrants or refugees,but only to ‘sportswash’ Qatar and absolve FIFA of any responsibility for a championship that floats on blood as well as money.

We don’t have to do the same. Because Qatar may not be the Argentine dictatorship, but its human rights record deserves to be criticised. But whether we tune into the global spectacle or not, we should not fall for the phoney egalitarian ‘dream’ that Beckham is helping to sell.

We should know that Qatar is not some anomaly, but part of the world that we deal with whenever we turn on our gas ovens.

And perhaps that’s why this World Cup feels so sour, as we shiver in our cold homes in this dire winter with Russia’s terrorist war raging in Ukraine; as we buy liquefied Qatari gas to compensate for the Russian gas that we don’t have; as we contemplate our failure to address climate change, our energy dependency, gross inequality, and collapsing living standards.

Perhaps Qatar 2022 is simply a reflection of the world we are trapped in and cannot find the will and the courage to change, where footballers might provide fleeting moments of beauty and distraction, but if you look beyond the cheering crowds and empty seats, you can see the ghosts of 6,500 workers who died to make this happen.