DOHA — The best World Cup ever! The best World Cup ever! The best World Cup ever!
How many times were we told this was the best World Cup ever? Mainly by people with a vested interest in spreading the message, it must be said. Fifa president Gianni Infantino. Officials at the Supreme Committee. Salt Bae, probably.
With some stunning football and an all-time classic final, this probably has been the best World Cup ever. As long as you’re not gay. Or a migrant worker. Or the family of a migrant worker who died while helping to build it. Or female. Or poor.
Sure, if you’re straight and male – and being white is certainly no disadvantage – it’s been fantastic. An entire World Cup held in essentially one city. The shiny new metro – look at it! It’s so shiny! And it has no drivers!
The stadiums – OMG the stadiums! Nobody is entirely sure how many migrant workers died building them, of course. But, still, by God are they supreme feats of architectural marvel.
Let’s set aside for one minute the fact that all the way up to the final, they were unable to fill them, despite the bizarre Fifa claims to the contrary that were disproven simply by being in a stadium and opening your eyes. But in pics and clips, they truly are the best stadiums ever.
It’s certainly been the most controversial World Cup ever, with tensions smouldering away beneath the shimmering facade of it all.
Fifa collided spectacularly with the English Football Association, waiting until the eve of England’s opening game against Iran to warn in completely uncertain terms that they would face sanctions if Harry Kane tried to wear that OneLove armband. They didn’t explain what those sanctions would be. But they could be bad. Seriously bad.
Given a chance to seize the moment, to take a true stand in the face of oppressors in support of LGBT+ people that would have spread around the globe, with pens poised to add their bravery and courage to the history books, the FA… backed down. Obviously.
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Entirely lost in the whole thing is that it would almost certainly have gone unnoticed had Fifa let England and the other European nations who planned to wear the armband play on. It wasn’t even a sodding rainbow. It was some random colours.
It was, however, ultimately a fitting tribute to a World Cup in a country where same-sex relationships are criminalised. Prominent Qataris and Fifa said everyone was welcome but then spent the entire group stage confiscating rainbow banners and rainbow hats and rainbow t-shirts and rainbow wristbands and even making one fan wearing a rainbow shirt strip naked to check – what? that he didn’t have a rainbow tattoo? Everyone was welcome, unless you wanted to support LGBT+ people.
This was definitely the best ever World Cup of simmering tensions. There were rows about armbands, about rainbows, about migrant workers, about beers, about politics.
All this thrown into the melting pot with the light-hearted and quirky moments. Louis van Gaal, the Netherlands manager, responding to being asked about his impressive tan with, entirely deadpan, “My mother lay in her coffin with rosy cheeks when she died, it’s a matter of genes.” Spain manager Luis Enrique saying his players having sex during the tournament was fine but conceding that “orgies” are “not ideal” (he didn’t elaborate as to why). The memorable moment when Matt Upson, paid by the BBC to give his opinion on football, was asked by Gabby Logan if he had a favourite goal so far and momentarily lost his memory. “Erm, my favourite goal so far,” he said, pausing. “I wouldn’t say I do, no.”
There were also actual moments that will live long in the memory. The image of Germany’s players holding hands over mouths, symbolising they’d been gagged by Fifa over the OneLove armband, went everywhere. But then the counteroffensive began. Belgium captain Eden Hazard – remember him? – said Germany should “concentrate on the football” after they subsequently lost the match to Japan, as though deciding to place a hand over your mouth for about five seconds had taken days of careful planning and discussion that disrupted their preparations.
Belgium were subsequently beaten by Morocco and Hazard was dropped for the 0-0 draw with Croatia which meant they were eliminated at the group stage. If anyone needs to concentrate on football, it’s really Eden Hazard.
Others joined in: Arsene Wenger, now a Fifa employee, Wales manager Robert Page (whose side also exited in the group stage after concentrating on football), fingers were pointed back in Germany after their group stage exit.
Everyone could really have done with calming down over a beer. Only the Qatar government decided to torch Fifa’s $75m contract with Budweiser and ordered them to remove all the beer tents outside the stadiums on the eve of a tournament they had been planning for 12 years.
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England fan 'strip searched for wearing a rainbow T-shirt' at World Cup game in Qatar29 November, 2022It was hard not to see it as a furious reaction to all the negative PR the country had been getting predominantly from the West in the week building up to opening game. It was OK though: if you were a rich VIP you could still get booze in your box at the stadium. Or was that reserved for the VVIPs? Regardless, we couldn’t be upsetting the people who really mattered here: the ones with loads of money.
Attempting to shift the tone, the World Cup organisers – presumably based on the advice of all the highly-paid British PR firms they had recruited – tried to claim that the negative reporting of the World Cup hosts amounted to racism. Having spent a lot of time reporting on the abuses of migrant workers and the contradictory messages around LGBT+ fans, it certainly made me take a moment to reflect on my own role in this. And to conclude that, no, it was definitely stuff actually happening to marginalised and exploited members of society, and not racism.
Everyone was having a pop at everyone else everywhere. Carlos Quieroz was in the thick of it, leading Iran, a country where protests spread throughout the nation following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody.
Quieroz eventually lost his temper, and after a press conference confronted BBC Persia reporter Shaimaa Khalil to ask why she didn’t question Gareth Southgate over the UK’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. The image of the national team manager standing over a woman was presumably noted by authorities back in Iran. Hopefully so did Khalil standing up to him.
Obviously, Qatar, a close ally of Iran, couldn’t have fans at the World Cup highlighting Amini’s death and the seismic female-led protests, so stadium security set about feverishly confiscating any mention of her.
Iranian journalists then started questioning American head coach Gregg Berhalter about how he felt representing a country where black people are discriminated against, the high level of inflation in America, whether he was aware US citizens can travel to Iran but not visa versa ahead of their game.
Supreme Committee secretary general Hassan Al-Thawadi accused the BBC and Gary Lineker of refusing to engage with Qatar ahead of the World Cup. Lineker denied that he or his agent had been contacted. Al-Thawadi also accused Jurgen Klinsmann of making racist remarks about Iran, which the former Germany striker strenuously denied.
Not content with avoiding all the controversy, Uruguay put up Luis Suarez for the prematch press conference in the country’s first meeting with Ghana since Suarez’s infamous handball in the 2010 World Cup. A Ghanaian journalist told the striker: “In Ghana they consider you as El Diablo, the devil himself.” Suarez’s response: “I don’t apologise about that because I took the handball, but the Ghana player missed the penalty. Not me.”
About as far away from the spotlight as you could get, two migrant workers died during the tournament (that we know of), one while working at a resort used by the Saudi Arabia team and another falling from a great height at the Lusail Stadium. Astonishing, really, that prior to the tournament, in the 12 years it took to build the World Cup, the official figure from Qatar was three work-related deaths at World Cup stadiums. Some countries just get all the bad luck. Supreme Committee chief executive, Nasser Al Khater, responded by saying that “death is a natural part of life”. It’s easy for you to say, when you’re still alive.
In a statement, Fifa said it was “deeply saddened” by the death. Although not enough to use some of its $7bn tournament revenues to set up a compensation fund for migrant workers, who were abused and exploited during the last 12 years and without whom none of this would have been possibly.
And, throughout it all, barely anyone mentioned the climate crisis – the single most concerning issue facing the human race. It did, at least, make you feel briefly like you were back home. Instead, we sat in stadiums where they were air-conditioning THE OUTSIDE in a country that climate scientists have predicted will become such a burning inferno that it will be uninhabitable by 2070. All the while quaint messages occasionally appeared around the digital hoardings saying we should save the planet.
After all this, it kind of made sense of Infantino’s surreal pre-World Cup speech when he went into bat for the Qataris to attack the West and gave what will go down as one of the most bizarre speeches in history. In hindsight, it set the tone perfectly.
“Today I feel Qatari,” he said, proudly. “Today I feel Arab. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel a migrant worker.” When it was later put to him that he’d missed out women, he shot back: “I feel like a woman.”
It would have been pitch-perfect had this been a scene written by Armando Iannucci in The Thick of It, not a real, actual speech, in real life, with millions watching, in reality. You could just imagine Malcolm Tucker on the phone to Infantino afterwards and calling him a lot of words beginning with fuck.
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