The Qatar World Cup is the Perfect Spectacle for Our Weird Times
THE president of FIFA feels things. He feels things strongly
THE president of FIFA feels things. He feels things strongly. He feels like an Arab, like an African, he feels gay, he feels disabled, he feels like a migrant worker.
On Saturday, Gianni Infantino was one step away from performing Stevie Wonder’s Happy Birthday pean to Martin Luther King after giving a soliloquy on how he feels blinded by the forces of oppression.
Thankfully, he didn’t. Infantino walked his feelings back, which is probably just as well given that he was making his Gettysburg address from Doha. Without the clarification that he was just feeling gay for the purposes of making a political point, he could have found himself subject to an uncomfortable interrogation about the nature and location of his last sexual encounter.
Infantino’s speech was bizarre on many levels [(959) FIFA President Gianni Infantino Press conference - YouTube]. But that may only demonstrate that the man has his finger on the pulse of the weird times we are living. Introducing the world to the idea that he used to have ginger hair on his Thunderbirds puppet-like dome was a masterstroke in diverting his audience into forced visualisation.
Ostensibly standing up for the Qatari government, Infantino twice used the analogy of children in reference to the country’s development. When they grow up, they will be just like Switzerland was his not too subtle argument. Except that the Qataris may not want to be Swiss and, besides, actually existing Switzerland isn’t even the Switzerland of Infantino's imaginarium.
However, once Infantino got through dishing his emotions onto a plate and playing with them for his queasy audience, he did make a point that stands up to scrutiny – and it wasn’t one that most media outlets cared to linger on in their reports of the press conference. According to Human Rights Watch, as the FIFA president highlighted, nearly 25,000 people have died in the Mediterranean sea since 2014 trying to reach Europe – more than 1,2000 this year alone [Endless Tragedies in the Mediterranean Sea | Human Rights Watch (hrw.org)].
As Human Rights Watch has made clear, it is the racist Fortress Europe policies of the EU that has been primarily responsible for the deaths of these mostly north African and Middle Eastern citizens.
“While the endless tragedy has many causes, the decision of European governments to prioritize border control over sea rescue is central,” says HRW.
While the majority of commentators giddily leaped upon Infantino’s faux pas in talking of “3,000 years” of European crimes against the world, the majority remained silent on the indisputable fact that these crimes are not a relic of yesteryear – that the building of a 21st century Fortress Europe is a crime, that the preventable drowning of refugees in the Mediterranean is a crime – and that the president of FIFA made a valid point in highlighting them.
But come Sunday afternoon, there was the World Cup opening ceremony to delight in ignoring or sneering at, depending on the nature of your disdain. The mascots and soundtracks from World Cups past were there, including Gauchito from the spectacle the fascist Argentinian junta generously laid on in 1978. The BBC aired the ceremony only on their website without commentary or subtitles as a protest at Qatar’s human rights record. A fair protest, although failing to make any attempt to comprehend when someone speaks in a language other than English does follow in a fine British establishment tradition.
The Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, was flanked in the royal box at the Al Bayt Stadium by Infantino (presumably by now feeling something a bit more lofty than a migrant worker) and Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (he of butchered journalist infamy), while behind was slouched a man in military attire who wore a deranged stare like he was trying desperately to ignore the past (his own, everyone else’s, a universal congealed conglomeration of human regret) whispering sweet nothings into his ear.
The opening of the World Cup wasn’t the only event happening in the Middle East at the weekend, however. In Jerusalem, the World Team Chess Championship was finally kicking off, having been rescheduled due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The problem as Justin Horton has pointed out, is the Championship is taking place in Occupied East Jerusalem, [Justin Horton | In Occupied Territory · LRB 17 November 2022].
According to Horton, “Along with the federations, players and officials participating in the tournament, FIDE is assisting in the slow erasure of Palestine as a nation and of Palestinians as a people.”
On Sunday morning, hours before Qatar kicked off against Ecuador in the World Cup’s opening game, NATO member Turkey launched Operation Claw-Sword, a series of air raids against the Kurdish inhabited areas of Iraq and Syria.
"Terrorists' shelters, bunkers, caves, tunnels, and warehouses were successfully destroyed," said Turkey's defence minister Hulusi Akar in the well-honed manner of generals who go to war with ‘terrorist’ peoples anywhere and everywhere they conjure them up.
The Kurds, on the other hand, say the targets were the city of Kobane and a number of densely populated villages, not isolated caves full of conspirators [Turkey Kurdish raids: Operation Claw-Sword targets militant bases - BBC News].
One thousand miles from Doha, on the other side of the Arabian peninsula, Saudi Arabia’s air war against Yemen, guided by British and US military advisors, trundles on with sickening effect. On Tuesday, Saudi Arabia begin their very own World Cup group of death with a game against Argentina, with not much hope that there will be a note of protest against the air war on Yemen from the assembled commentators.
This World Cup has already been weird and it’s going to get weirder. Don’t discount a military man or two commandeering a truck load of Budweiser before stripping to his bare balls and screaming back at the universal past from the centre circle at half-time in the final, all while holding a loaded pistol to Giovanni Infantino’s poor ginger head.
The 2026 World Cup is scheduled to be held between Canada, Mexico and the USA. If we get that far. ‘Four more years,’ you might say, ‘What’s the lunatic going on about – “if we get that far”!?!’
But seriously, I’m not trying to be melodramatic, I’m not trying to say there’ll only be a couple of us left come the middle of the decade, fighting it out over the bone marrow from a canine tibia in the gutted shell of a Twitter skyscraper. Not really. But we are reaching a tipping point, that stage where change moves from the quantitative to the qualitative. When the previously normal becomes like a strange fever dream of a memory squinted at through a shattered kaleidoscope.
Because, and sorry to pummel you with grotesqueries, but I almost forgot to mention COP27. Even before the dismal failure of the latest COPout in Sharm El Sheikh, many scientists were publicly stating that the 1.5 °C limit to global warming needed to avert widespread societal breakdown is no longer possible [The World Will Likely Miss 1.5 Degrees C--Why Isn't Anyone Saying So? - Scientific American]
The idea that there can be a managed decline in the state of our environment, and consequently for everything else pertaining to us, runs contrary to what the scientists tell us about how our planet operates. The Earth is like us, which makes sense since we’re hooked into it and it into us – it can take only so much of something before the collapse or the rupture or the swell comes. And our time for pre-empting those rising waves is growing perishingly thin, if not already past.
But regardless, come 2026, I’ll be betting my dog marrow on Brazil - the South Americans always do well outside of Europe.