If you look over social media, even poor old Twitter as it spirals off into who-knows-what, you’ll see that anyone who has a problem with the World Cup’s hosts gets a very patterned series of responses that generally boil down to two points: first, that none of the people expressing dismay have any right to criticize because they come from countries that have histories of doing all the bad things that Qatar is being criticized for and second, that guests don’t have any right to criticize their hosts and that when you’re in Rome, do as the Romans do.
It’s honestly hard to tell how much of that might be some form of paid-for coordinated response funded by Qatar and its neighbors. They’ve certainly been willing to do that in the past to ward off criticism. But at the same time, they’re basic rejoinders that many people might spontaneously offer. Say, like the head of FIFA, or as Michael Spicer puts it, “a tone-deaf president of a corrupt football association”. Or any other person on social media who wants to defend Qatar without having to be paid to do it.
Should the World Cup be hosted all over the world, including the Middle East? Absolutely. If FIFA wasn’t the fantastically corrupt organization that is, I’d argue that it should be taxing all participating nations to pay for building capacity in every major soccer-playing region of the world and then ending the entire practice of bidding for the tournament. Establish a rotation: Western Europe, North America and the Caribbean, South and Central America, Africa, Middle East, Central Europe and Russia, East Asia, South and Southeast Asia. Have the member states in each of those regions vote on which one of them gets it during their rotation with the only rule being “you can’t get it again if you’ve had it within the last forty years”. A global event should be shared out on a global basis.
But FIFA is grossly corrupt and that’s part of what’s at issue here. There’s no dispute about what happened: a very wealthy country bribed the people making the decision and they set aside a whole set of ostensibly normal procedures to award it to the bribers. That’s not altogether new or unprecedented for FIFA, I know, but this took the usual pay-for-play to a whole new level. Sinners are allowed to throw stones at much worse sinners, I think. Otherwise, you might as well say the whole of the law is do as thou wilt; there is no sin because all is permitted.
Well, say the defenders, the past is past. The tournament is here, let’s get on with it, make some reforms later. Ok, maybe. It’s hard not to have a queasy, sour feeling about the whole thing nevertheless.
But that is, at any rate, a different matter from the “a guest should follow the rules of the host”. That’s a fair enough point when I arrive unbidden in response to an open invitation into someone else’s home. They can set the ground rules if so. It’s not a fair point when you’re hosting someone else’s party. In this case, the world’s party. If I offer up my backyard for the neighborhood block party and then run out as everybody’s setting up the grills to say that I only allow cold food and that it all has to be vegan and please leave the children at home, I should never have offered my yard as the venue for that event. I’m ruining everybody’s fun. It’s even worse if earlier on I said “sure, go ahead and grill some meat, and all kids are welcome”. Then I’m not only spoiling the party, I’ve broken faith with my entire neighborhood. (Even worse if they all knew I was a zealot about grills and hated children but chose to believe me.)
Being a good host includes welcoming people you might otherwise not welcome. If you can’t do that, you shouldn’t host, especially not a party that everyone is part of and has an emotional stake within. Knowing that this World Cup is the product of an especially bad bout of corruption from a corrupt organization may leave a sour feeling, but Qatar’s faithlessness as a welcoming host is a different kind of breach. It doesn’t matter if in the past some of the countries that now complain have themselves behaved badly. If we’re asked to look past how the Cup ended up in this country at this moment, then let’s also focus on decisions that have been made right at this moment—including suborning the referees to be political enforcers. Qatar is not welcoming teams from forty years, ago, it is welcoming teams in 2022. Teams and fans that were invited to their own party.
Image credit: Photo by Connor Coyne on Unsplash
Yes yes yes. Tim scores!!!