Who's up for the World Cup?

A winter tournament in a state that does not respect human rights adds to a growing dissatisfaction with what football is becoming

Jurgen Klopp may well already have said what needs saying about the World Cup. Good on him. The location of the tournament has been known since 2010, as have the many issues associated with it. And yet it seems only during the last few months that debate has really got going about it. When it’s too late.

So what we’re left with are the pretty basic questions of do we take any notice of it or not, and does it make any difference what we do? It shouldn’t have come to this.

If we’re looking to apportion blame then it’s the administrators at FIFA who presided over the process who should be the primary target. Sepp Blatter, who was in charge at the time the decision was made, now says it was “a mistake”, and has thrown his old buddy Michel Platini under a bus. But even now, his biggest issue is apparently that “the country is too small”.

Blame too, must rest with the various national football associations which could have raised objections or asserted greater leverage before the qualification process began. They could have made a difference, but choose not to. For most observers, money trumped all other interests, but that’s a bit of a blunt instrument criticism in this case. Money would have been made wherever the World Cup was held. There is a cultural reticence to challenge decisions that runs throughout much of football, something often also used to cover vested interests at work.

So now we are left where we are. The tournament will go ahead. The competition is important to players and fans. The word boycott has, inevitably, been bandied about. It’s a word too often used in desperation when all other alternatives have failed, and it also shifts the burden of pressure off the decision makers and on to the people who have to deal with the consequences of those decisions.

What that has led to is the popular social media practice of indulging in a great deal of whataboutery and finger pointing. Players and pundits who have taken a stance on anything but are now going to the World Cup are accused of hypocrisy and virtue signalling, usually by people whose militant cynicism means they’ve never done anything of any value. Better to signal virtue than the lack of it, I’ve always thought. There are too many people fixated on belittling and undermining genuine attempts to improve things, and the result is that power goes unchallenged.

The players are in an impossible position. As an athlete, you strive to compete at the top, and the World Cup is the biggest football tournament in the world. It’s not really a sustainable sporting position to say “I won’t be playing for my country” when the tournament is, clearly, going ahead. The players should never have been put in this position, something Klopp emphasised. And while, encouragingly, it’s become more commonplace for players to take a stance on social issues, that’s often rooted in their own personal experience. Many of, but not all, the issues around Qatar are complex and unfamiliar.

What of the pundits and journalists who will work there? Well, the event needs to be reported and the criticism directed at those who will do so again falls into the trap of letting those responsible off the hook. Better the event, and the issues around it, are reported than not. The question will be, of course, what is allowed to be reported. But the journalists present will be more than aware of their responsibility not to simply do the bidding of the Qatari state. Their jobs depend on not doing so, aside from any questions of conscience.

Simon Kuper wrote an interesting piece in the (paywalled) Financial Times arguing The ethical case for watching this possibly unethical World Cup. It’s realistic about the ‘shine a light on wrongdoing’ argument, but says that nonetheless it has some credence – using the example of the mothers of the disappeared in Argentina successfully using the 1978 World Cup to raise their cause.

Which brings us to the fans. Should we even watch it? Will not watching it make any difference? We count in as much as we are, overwhelmingly, the TV audience that companies spending millions on advertising want to target. But I don’t feel that, by watching a game on TV, I am funding human rights abuses. In fact, I’m more likely to hesitate in buying products or brands closely associated with Qatar 2022.

I’m annoyed, like many, that the World Cup has concertinaed and split the domestic season, and that the timing takes us into the busy December period. And I don’t think it should have been played in Qatar for all the reasons everyone is talking about. I’m almost certainly not going to watch very much of it, but I’ll watch the England games and I’ll probably tune in more in the knockouts.

I suspect I’m not too different to many others. The fact the discussion has come down to how much we watch on telly probably says all that needs saying. Everyone has to make their own decision. For me, going to the tournament would have been a step too far even if I had the time and money. But others have made a different decision and that is for them to explain. I don’t know a single fan going who supports the policies of the Qatari state. Just as many of us in the UK don’t support the policies of our government.

It is, though, an odd position for me not to be excited and looking forward to a finals tournament. In the past I’ve relished the festival of football, and gone to great lengths to see as much as possible. My relative indifference this time is not just due to the issues around Qatar. I’ve been wrestling with the nagging feeling that I don’t really like what football has become for a while – something which has prompted the gap in writing this newsletter. I apologise to those of you who have subscribed.

I may have got too involved in something that is, at heart, a leisure pursuit. I always remember former Spirit of Shankly chair Jay McKenna talking about it in terms of being taken behind the scenes at a magic show when you’re a kid and finding out it’s not magic. And too much in football isn’t magic.

Matchgoing fans are still treated pretty badly; policing attitudes are going backwards; the recommendations of the Fan-Led Review into governance are yet to be fully implemented and the clubs and football authorities are largely engaged in a push to ensure anything that is implemented makes as little difference as possible. FIFA and UEFA continue to float ridiculous ideas to ‘improve’ a perfectly good game. VAR, at least as it is being applied in England, is testing the bounds of patience and credulity while threatening to suck the basic joy out of the game.

And fans themselves too often aren’t helping. Tribalism is still a huge barrier to creating any kind of united push for general improvement, and discourse becomes ever more toxic, fuelled by a combination of social media grifters, poundshop demagogues and algorithms designed to amplify conflict and controversy. I’ve seen too many good people lost to the movement because they aren’t prepared to put up with the abuse, and the movement also needs to get better at looking after its own.

In short, there’s a lot not to like. But there’s also hope – the extraordinary putdown by UEFA of the overwhelming arrogance of the A22 outfit trying desperately to keep the European Super League idea alive brightened my day. And the battle over introducing an independent regulator for English football continues, with the Premier League lobbyists and vacillating cabinet members still unable to kill the idea off.

I still hope to use this newsletter to develop a space where ideas can develop, and Substack’s new Chat feature should help that. You can read about about how it works and how it could develop community on Substack’s own substack. I’ll kick off a chat thread shortly after this edition goes live, asking for ideas for future subjects people would like to see covered in chat or The Football Fan itself.

Substack Chat is one of a number of potential new speaker’s corners to emerge as Twitter teeters on the brink. For now, I’m staying on that platform, but I certainly won’t be paying Elon for the privilege of creating content he can monetise in an increasingly nasty environment. And, for some time now, I’ve not really bothered to engage in debate there because it has become almost impossible. (As an aside, I’ve been recommending Charles Arthur’s excellent book Social Warming: How social media polarises us all, to anyone interested in taking a step back and considering where we’ve come).

My feeling is that Twitter will diminish in importance as its relatively small user base – just 8.85% of social media users worldwide access Twitter, and 92% of tweets come from the top 10% of users – atomises. There’s already been an upsurge in signups to alternative spaces, with Mastodon looking to be the most popular destination. Substack Chat provides another option. It may well be that the idea of having a single destination for global conversation becomes as quaint as only having three TV channels to watch, so Twitter won’t be replaced, we’ll just create new ways of having conversations and audiences will become much more niche.

I think genuine engagement will increasingly occur in other spaces. I’m one of those who has dipped a toe in the water at Mastodon and you can find me at @martincloake@mastodonapp.uk I’m currently trying, like many movers, not to introduce some of the worst Twitter practices and to understand how engagement works there.

That’s it for this edition.

Image by Pexels from Pixabay.com