Australia begins its campaign against France a week from now at 6am AEDT. For those living on the eastern seaboard, games throughout the tournament are scheduled at nine o’clock at night, midnight, three o’clock and six o’clock in the morning for those who like to start their day on the couch early.
It will be even harder to watch knowing that the tournament itself is a crime in progress.
Qatar should never have been awarded the right to host the FIFA World Cup.
The Qatari bid was deeply flawed. Initially it proposed the tournament be played in June and July of this year as is normal but when average maximum temperatures hit more that 40 degrees. There was talk of airconditioned stadia, none of which has eventuated. There were no stadiums at all in Qatar when the bid was made and inspected by FIFA in 2009. Everything has had to be built at a staggering human cost. The tournament shifted to November and December and has put the European football leagues on ice for more than a month.
For all this, on December 2 2010, FIFA President Joseph ‘Sepp’ Blatter announced to the world that Russia had won the World Cup bid for 2018 and Qatar for 2022 to a mainly stunned audience.
The construction of World Cup infrastructure in Qatar has come at a cost of an estimated 6500 deaths according to a study by Fair Square Projects, a non-profit advocacy group created to promote basic rights for migrant workers in the Middle East. The figures are taken from government data in Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh where the majority of the foreign workers come from. Not all workers were working on World Cup projects, but the vast majority were. Not included in the count were workers from the Philippines and eastern Africa, so the death toll is bound to be higher.
The Qatari government puts the figure at just three deaths.
In December 2008, Federal minister for sport, Kate Ellis announced that the federal government would give Football Federation Australia $45.6 million for our bid to host the 2022 World Cup. Australia picked up just one vote from FIFA delegates known in the vaguely appropriate colloquialism as the ExCon (Executive Congress).
It was money wasted, hurled into a vortex of bribery, extortion, money laundering and tax evasion.
In case anyone thinks this is a case of sour grapes, the US bid was clearly the best of the five, which also included South Korea and Japan. The US received just eight votes and Qatar 22. The two FIFA delegates from the Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football, abbreviated to the acronymic, CONCACAF, including one American, voted for Qatar.
The American, then CONCACAF secretary-general, Jack Blazer, subsequently pleaded guilty to US federal racketeering, money laundering, tax evasion and bribery charges. The other, the President of CONCACAF and Vice-President of FIFA, Jack Warner, has warrants for his arrest outstanding to this day and cannot set foot in the US lest his collar be felt.
Blazer, who co-operated with the FBI and Department of Justice prosecutors to avoid a jail term, provided a signed confession that he was one of the recipients of a $US10 million ($14.8 million) bribe from the South African Football Association via its government, to secure the right to host the 2010 World Cup.
There are credible allegations that $US4.5 million ($6.7 million) was paid to three African FIFA executives to win their votes for the Qatari bid.
Blazer and 13 others, nine of whom were FIFA executives, pleaded guilty to a range of crimes against the US financial system.
After all the drama of the mass arrests of FIFA executives at the Baur au Lac hotel in Zurich in 2015 – some shuffled off in handcuffs with white sheets hiding their faces, the remaining unarrested FIFA executives held their 65th Congress and re-elected Sepp Blatter for his fifth term as president.
Within a few days, Blatter, too, had stood down. Six months later, he and former French football great and UEFA President, Michel Platini were suspended for eight years (later reduced to six) over a two million Swiss franc payment Blatter had made to Platini. The two men claimed the payment was for services rendered to FIFA by Platini, undertaken by the three-time Ballon d’Or winner nine years earlier.
Blatter and Platini were subsequently acquitted on criminal charges in Swiss courts over the payment.
Yet Blatter, at the height of his powers in 2010, studiously ignorant to the criminal mayhem going on around him, spoke of Qatar’s successful bid as crucial for the development of football in the Middle East.
He chose to ignore the fact that Qatar has no interest in hosting the FIFA Women’s World Cup. The country has never bid for it and probably never will. A Qatari women’s side exists but it hasn’t played an international fixture in years. Besides a few friendlies — the last against an Afghan team after the Taliban swept to power last year. A loss in a regional tournament in 2014 was the last time the Qatari Women’s team played a sanctioned international game.
Qatar has a population of almost three million people but only 380,000 of its residents are citizens. It has an ugly human rights record. Male to male sexual relations is criminalised and comes with a seven-year jail term. Torture and extrajudicial killings occur in a prison system rated one of the worst in the world.
We have a term for this now. Sportswashing. It is often used where corporations with murky histories spend some sponsorship dollars to cleanse their public images. But this is different. What we have starting next week is a country seeking to throw a shroud over vicious repression and human rights outrages.
Under Blatter, the world governing body of football happily played along and took the backhanders, snaffled the brown paper bags and made it all happen. Bribes in South Africa. More money changing hands under the table to make the belligerent autocrat, Vladimir Putin look somehow human.
And now this. You bet it’s going to be hard to watch.
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The FIFA World Cup in Qatar kicks off next week. The world’s best footballers (or those who are fit) will clash in feats of athletic beauty and sporting skill. It will be hard to watch and not just because the time difference between the Persian Gulf and Australia will make viewing an ordeal.