Peter Reid’s common touch is undermined by the horrors of the 2022 Qatar World Cup

Sport, as with many things in life, is about putting on a show, giving the audience what they want – preferably with a little of that razzle dazzle. Like with Peter Reid, who won praise last week for calling a host of Conservative Brexiteers “absolute dopes”.

The former Everton midfielder was cheered in his short, impassioned speech at a rally calling for a people’s vote on the shambolic process that has been the Tories’ modus operandi on leaving Europe. He is to be commended: far too few people in sport are prepared to speak for common people on political or social issues. But there is no mistaking the fact that he was telling his listeners exactly what they wanted to hear.

His preaching to the converted would have been fine, if we had not recalled that back in May he was on television in Qatar, speaking about how wonderful the 2022 World Cup will be. He sat next to Richard Keys and Andy Gray recounting his tour round the stadiums with Hassan al-Thawadi, the (deep breath) Secretary-General of the Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy for Qatar 2022. He said the tour was “very, very impressive” and the “infrastructure will be amazing”.

We will give him the benefit of the doubt on his part in whitewashing the Qatar World Cup. After all, he was merely giving his audience – and more to the point, the Bein Sports paymasters – what they wanted. And maybe he was merely helping out an old Everton team-mate, Gray, while getting some spring sunshine at the same time.

Ethical knots

Still, football is full of these little moral knots. Vincent Kompany was revealed to be planning on giving his testimonial proceeds to a Manchester homeless charity (and we must point out that it was the mayor of the city, rather than the City captain, who was most vocal in publicising this deed). Ahh, aren’t Manchester City caring, the football world cooed – ignoring that it was Kompany whose idea it was, not the club, who are owned by the royal family of Abu Dhabi, a nation with a patchy human rights record.

Read more: We need to talk about Richard Keys and Andy Gray going to bat for the Qatari regime

Before Reid went to Qatar – and again, given his People’s Vote rally speech, we must presume he has the masses close to his heart – he should have watched The Workers Cup, the excellent 2017 documentary which was repeated on BT Sport last week.

It gave rather a different angle to the “amazing infrastructure” of Qatar as it followed the fortunes of a football team representing a construction company in the Emirate competing in a tournament with similar business sides.

The team was made up of workers from Kenya, Nepal and Bangladesh, all of whom are working on the 2022 World Cup stadiums and infrastructure. It began as an upbeat tale of workers being given time to indulge in a competitive, hard-fought tournament.

But the motivation for staging the event quickly became clear: to serve as propaganda for the companies when hiring new recruits from Africa and the sub-continent.

After all, pictures of workers enjoying the camaraderie of a football tournament would surely get people on the plane to get involved in the back-breaking, life-threatening building effort for the 2022 World Cup.

Worker’s pain

There were two heartbreaking scenes towards the end of the film.

One was a conversation between two workers, sitting on a bench, looking at a forest of gleaming skyscrapers. “If I go home, I will miss looking at these,” said one. “We don’t have them where I live in Nepal.”

His colleague pointed at one, remarking that he once worked 22 floors up it when it was under construction. He then pointed to another, saying he knew of a friend who had died working on it. The first man said yes, he also knew of someone who had lost their life “on that one over there”.

The camera faded, then we were taken to the final of the Workers Cup. The team we had been following, GCC, had not made it to the final, but were instead watching. One GCC member remarked that the team of rotund, balding men “did not look like workers”. “They are staff,” he said with disgust, meaning office staff.

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The team of rotund “staff” ended up winning. Cue razzmatazz and confetti, as pictures were taken of the team holding the trophy aloft, flanked by various dignitaries.

Most of the crowd lapped it up. A significant few didn’t – although, it must be said, they were not really the target audience. “This is not for the workers,” said David, a Kenyan who was GCC’s top scorer in the tournament, as he looked at the pageant in front of him. He shook his head slowly and repeated: “This is not for the workers.”