The Ugliness Behind the Beautiful Game

Much of the summer, during that innocent year of 2002, I spent in a small pub near my home in the Irish countryside. I was seven years old, and Ireland, little footballing nation that it is, was competing at the World Cup in Japan and South Korea. It is a giddy occasion, a World Cup, especially for the smaller countries that bear no guarantees of qualifying for it, and I remember my happy wanderings about that pub, hobbit-height and hyperactive on too much sugar, staring up at drunken, smoking adults on towering bar stools, each one to a person screaming at chunky television sets mounted to the wall and spilling the heads of creamy pints onto the floor. A healthy, patriotic pride was on the air, amid the stench of cigarettes and stout-farts, as the Irish team acquitted themselves well and pushed Spain to a penalty shootout. These were days of ease and pre-recessionary stability, the country and world in rude health.

That’s the memory, recalled more than 20 years after the fact. The reality was, of course, less rosy. I was a child too young to understand it, but the world, both sporting and political, had already begun to shift in ominous directions. The abstraction we in the West reverently call the “rules-based order” had already begun to unspool by the summer of 2002, with the United States and its obsequious allies, only months earlier, launching its war on terror in response to 9/11. Afghanistan had been invaded, and the invasion of Iraq was a glint in George W. Bush’s eye, fated to begin the following year. The good ol’ days I recall from childish memories, in reality, weren’t quite so good.

But the football, the beautiful game, was surely in a healthy way. It bore character still, hadn’t yet become the shiny, generic product we stream via Amazon today, had not yet been taken over by despotic oil states and predatory capitalists, its governing institutions not yet hollowed out by naked corruption. Except, that’s not true, either. FIFA, soccer’s international governing body, was led at the time by Sepp Blatter, a man later banned from the organization on the grounds of profound corruption and financial mismanagement. The sport may not have been quite as morally bankrupt as it is today, but it was well on the way by then.

What has changed since 2002 is the degree to which soccer and geopolitics have become entangled. While the sport was corrupt all those years ago, it still represented an escape from the grubby business of reality, a 90-minute respite from the bleakness of world affairs. Those days are gone. The very aesthetics of the sport have been corporatized into a state of total homogeneity, in which stadiums act as arenas of late-capitalist blandness, where electronic pitch-side advertising hoardings scream at us to visit the oil states that increasingly own the sport. Quirks of local place and history have been expelled from stadiums, and, watching a match today, it is impossible not to be reminded of the ethical disintegration of our time. The sport reflects our political reality back to us.

At the head of it all today sits Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA and the human embodiment of the sport’s moral vacuity. A woke-masquerading Bond supervillain, Infantino is shameless to the point of sociopathy, a man who either revels in gaslighting the world or is genuinely unable to tell he is doing it. It was Infantino, soccer’s supreme leader, who took it upon himself last week to host the “Extraordinary FIFA Congress,” a virtual event in which delegates representing each national football association of FIFA video-called in to “vote” for the countries that will host the 2030 and 2034 World Cups respectively. It was democracy in action, an opportunity for FIFA’s global membership to have its say in the direction the sport will take over the next decade.

Except, it very much wasn’t.

The “vote” was a bizarre spectacle. Infantino stood at a podium to deliver a speech littered with words like “democracy” and “unity,” before opening up the voting process, which amounted to him naming the hosts, first, of the 2030 World Cup, and, second, of the 2034 World Cup. The delegates were invited to applaud each announcement, raising their hands to their webcams and clapping with as much enthusiasm as they could muster, while, to ensure the rigors of democracy were upheld, a team of “scrutineers” observed the screens of the delegates, looking out for signs of dissent.

The 2030 World Cup, Infantino announced, would be held in — deep breath — Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. That’s right: one tournament, six countries, three continents. The delegates dutifully applauded into their webcams, though without much vigor and, one would hope, with a great weight of shame. The scrutineers watched on, and the bid passed without incident.

It is not unheard of for more than one country to host the World Cup. Japan and South Korea shared the honor in 2002, while the upcoming tournament in 2026 will be spread across the United States, Canada and Mexico. But six nations? That is new. The stated reason for the decision, as posited by FIFA, would be very touching, were it not utter bollocks. The true hosts of the tournament are Spain, Portugal and Morocco, but the 2030 World Cup is a special one, in that it marks 100 years since the first ever tournament took place in Uruguay. So, as a tribute to the competition’s South American heritage, the opening three games in 2030 will take place in Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay.

One might suggest a more genuine tribute would have been to allow a South American country to host the whole thing, instead of three measly games, but there is a grimy logic at play here. FIFA, under its own rules, is obliged to ensure the hosting duties of the World Cup are spread across the various regions of the world on a rotational basis. So, that means North America is ineligible to host a World Cup in 2030 or 2034, owing to the fact it has the honor in 2026. Fair enough. But by awarding the 2030 World Cup to countries spread across three continents — Europe, Africa and South America — much of the world has consequently become ineligible to host in 2034. That year’s tournament could necessarily only take place in Asia or Oceania, meaning Saudi Arabia, FIFA and Infantino’s desired host, faced less competition in its bid.

Still, it wasn’t set in stone yet, so FIFA deployed another trick to ensure its desired outcome. It opened up the bidding process for the 2034 World Cup last year, but it imposed a strict deadline of 25 days, by which time all proposals had to be submitted. The Saudis had already prepared their bid, but Australia, which had intended to submit a proposal, was caught off guard by the deadline. It ultimately backed out, leaving Saudi Arabia as the sole candidate, which, at Infantino’s conference last week, was weakly applauded as the winner, with Norway and Switzerland among only a small few members to express concern about what had happened.

Saudi Arabia does not presently possess the infrastructure necessary to host a World Cup, but several mega-stadiums and an entire city are set to be constructed for it, while airport links will be expanded. This is, to be plain, an environmental disaster, and it comes on top of the upcoming 2026 and 2030 tournaments being spread across continents, which means tremendous amounts of air travel. In its press releases, FIFA loves to declare its commitments to “sustainability” and other such buzzwords, but, obviously, it doesn’t give a shit about any of it. The organization is doing its bit to heat the world, which, by the time 2030 rolls around, is already going to be in uncharted territory.

The actual construction projects for the Saudi World Cup are going to come at the cost of human lives, as multiple human rights organizations have repeatedly warned. There are 13.4 million migrant workers in Saudi Arabia today, amounting to about 42 percent of the country’s population, and they are profoundly exposed to exploitation. The Saudi regime does not allow for unionization, does not impose a minimum wage for migrant workers, and enforces a system called “kafala,” in which migrant workers are bound to a specific employer and, as such, are vulnerable to their whims. The warnings are stark: widespread labor abuses are extremely likely.

The broader population, too, suffers greatly under the regime. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy, meaning no national officials are elected, and the public is tightly surveilled. Male guardianship over women is enshrined in law, homosexuality is illegal, religious and ethnic minorities are persecuted, and people are regularly sentenced to death. FIFA and Infantino have become fiercely fond of deploying woke-ish rhetoric these days, but arguing that Saudi Arabia is sufficiently progressive will be a tough pitch. Still, they’ll be feverishly arguing the point over the coming decade.

It is tempting to laugh at the cartoonish, sociopathic arrogance of Infantino and his clique of well-paid freaks in suits, but beneath the facade of their absurdity lies death. People are likely to die for this World Cup, while the Saudi regime, murderous though it is, will enjoy its time in the spotlight, sports-washed and legitimized as a footballing superpower.

Soccer itself, despite the ways it has been twisted out of shape by despots and racketeers, retains, for now, the ability to produce moments of beauty, and of slapstick comedy. At the grassroots level it helps communities to define themselves, which, in societies as atomized as our own, is a profound thing. But it increasingly feels like its future is doomed. As more and more money floods into the game, as dictators twist it to their will and dead-eyed corporate freaks like Gianni Infantino bask in the power it inexplicably affords them, the beautiful game is fated to become ever uglier.