There is little quite like the indignation of the righteous. How indelicate of the BBC and Norway’s Fifa delegate to question the World Cup hosts about the legitimacy of LGBT+ concerns over safety in a country where homosexuality is illegal.
And don’t wind up Qatar about its human rights record, the rights and freedoms of women or the appalling treatment of its labour force, the majority of whom are foreign. Just an estimated 6,500 deaths in the building of the World Cup infrastructure thus far, not to mention the insufferable conditions and wage theft that have attended the process.
With its World Cup backstory, all the above plus the questionable bid process and allegations of corruption, denied of course, that accompanied the award of the tournament to the Middle East state in the first place, Qatar doesn’t get to push back against the reasonable scrutiny and understandable outrage of liberal democracies when the grand design becomes reality.
According to Hassan Al-Thawadi, the secretary general of the Qatar World Cup, the host nation need not be apologetic for hosting the tournament. Moreover, much of the criticism is ill-informed, he claims. This is the standard response of bureaucrats who never really understood the power of the forces they unleashed when the idea of hosting the tournament was just an abstraction.
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The tournament is a cornerstone of Qatar’s Vision 2030, an expansionist scheme to broaden the appeal of the country, to integrate Qatar into the international community via a range of social, political and economic transformations. In common with many in the leadership group tasked with controlling the pace of change in Qatar, Al-Thawadi is a western-leaning technocrat, in his case a lawyer with a degree from Sheffield University.
This affords him a degree of empathy with the liberal democratic market place Qatar seeks to mine. It is exactly the same policy direction adopted across the Middle East, the grands prix in neighbouring Bahrain and Saudi Arabia that opened the Formula One season last month classic examples of the use of sport to change perceptions and normalise relations, aka sportswashing.
The problem with this is the gap between the vision and the reality. The region remains deeply conservative, patriarchal and intolerant, anchored as it is to religious beliefs and associated legal systems rooted in the Middle Ages. Reconciling the freedoms of the West with the prohibitions of Arab states is a tension that is already testing the sensitivities of the hosts.
Having spent the best part of the last fortnight at the grands prix in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, and before that at sundry sporting events across the region over the past 20 years I can attest to the generosity of the Arab soul, and of the eagerness from Arab youth to embrace change.
For the foreign visitor dipping in and out of the region according to planned schedules there is no feeling of menace or overwhelming sense of difference. Much of what you see is international in flavour. It is only when you step out of the commercial centres with their grand thoroughfares and shopping malls that you might get a sense of otherness that can be striking and often overwhelming.
The North Terminal at Jeddah airport has little in common, for example, with modern King Abdulaziz International Airport down the road. Egypt Airlines flights to Cairo are due to relocate to the latter later this year.
For now passengers to London via Cairo are witness to a different kind of experience, the chaotic, haphazard movement of joyless passengers, mostly men, seemingly from another epoch. These are not the movers and shakers rolling out their sporting visions but the grafters and grinders whose faces are not lionised in portraits on airport walls.
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The World Cup is not building a bridge to this demographic as much as a wall around it to keep it hidden from view. This is the old Arab world and not for the consumption of David Beckham and other cheerleaders; a world set in its ways, a community accustomed to and in agreement with anti-gay laws and restrictive male guardianship.
Now that the World Cup is almost upon us the host nation is becoming increasingly sensitive about the scrutiny invited, betraying the real motives behind this freakish geopolitical experiment.
The discomfort and unease as much as the billions sploshed on delivering the project is the price to pay for playing the game. If Qatar is genuine about its desire for change, now would be the time to acknowledge the truth of the criticisms not run from them.
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