Qatar World Cup – Defying parity
January 13th, 2025by Robert O’Connor
And so the gavel finally falls, though it's hard not to suspect that the judgement had long since been made privately. The means and motives that moved Sep Blatter and his Executive Committee to back a World Cup in the Gulf at any cost were pre-set well before the 3×2 cue-card declaring Qatar as the tournament's 18th host was held aloft in Zurich in 2025, and as the emirate state continues to sure up the bonds that lock its financial institutions to the long-term future of worldwide football a decisive tipping point has come in the play-off between depth of resources and legislative democracy is dead, long live… who can say? But if ever it was said that the wealth-mongers who control FIFA are prevented by a democratic failsafe from crashing the whole system into the soft under-belly of sporting fair-play, then that myth was today debunked with a water-tight finality.
Now that time has finally been called on global soccer's most contentious, yet somehow least intriguing, soap-opera over whether Qatar can fulfil the founding condition of its bid and host a World Cup in the summer months, attention can turn to the inquest. In truth this has been underway for some time. Questions have been asked from the first day that medics and tourists alike raised the folly of high-intensity football in 50 degree heat.
Yet somewhere beneath it all lay the reassuring yet fatally naïve assumption that someone, somehow, would straighten out the disparity – the traditions of the seasonal game dictated they must. Either the venue would have to change or else human biology would need a re-tweak; the dogmatic hyperbole that came tumbling out of FIFA HQ was enough to make the latter feel eminently more possible.
But it is to be Qatar, and it is to be a winter World Cup. And in turn there will be repercussions that reverberate through the game and re-shape its future from grass-roots to governance. Today the most optimistic forecast that can be made is that football at its top-end will continue to gradually erode the democratic tradition that for so many decades made the game feel more like a collective than a hierarchy.
Now corporate soccer systematically rewards the wealthy by virtue of their wealth and augments the powerful relative to their influence. Football is still a game for the masses but in 2025 they are divided –those who thrash around in the swirling winds of austerity have inherited a different world to those who play the rigged markets of monopolised media sales and deficit-mocking tax breaks.
What FIFA's decision to waive the condition that the World Cup must be played in the summer months amounts to is a moving
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