World Cup 2022

Football fans who tend to get their news nourishment from limp-wristed, knitted-sweater, bleeding heart leftie liberal outlets (or pretty much anything to the left of the Daily Stormer) will probably have noticed a consensus. Certain topics now appear in articles with increasing regularity, like a checklist of targets to hit: FFP or lack thereof, the super league fiasco, ticket/subscription/merchandise prices, all sorts of shady oligarchs, arms dealers and human rights abusers (some of them actual state actors) waltzing through the laughable fit-and-proper-person test, and so on. Many of these will seep into the pieces that are ostensibly about on-pitch happenings, and all of it nudges you towards one inescapable conclusion:

Football is shit. 

Perhaps the most hot-button topic of all, and one that adds a very modern moral quandary to the game, is sportswashing. The Saudi takeover of Newcastle has been a major catalyst, since it came hot on the heels of other naked sporting power plays such as F1 races, wacky new golf tours and heavyweight boxing bouts designed to soothe our memories of unfortunate events like the Jamal Khashoggi hackathon. (Fair play to WWE, however, who have been way ahead of the game in chasing that sweet oil cash.).

August's Man City-Newcastle 3-3 thriller was inevitably billed as the Sportswash Derby, the callow Saudi arrivistes going toe-to-toe with their trailblazing Abu Dhabi neighbours and coming away with a result. Eddie Howe appears to be doing a bang-up job as the Magpies' boss, but the discourse around the club can't avoid the political stuff for too long. Here's the Guardian's reliably snarky take on one press conference answer (the links inevitably lead to coverage of various human rights violations): 

At least Howe has shown more PR nous than Phil Mickelson. Anyway, some Toon Army fans have cosplayed as their new Sheikh overlords, others have been more circumspect, but few have stayed away, with average attendances of circa 52K matching or exceeding pre-pandemic levels. But there's always the questions, always the insinuations. For example, here's a recent Twitter exchange in which The Guardian’s Barney Ronay and the Independent’s Miguel Delaney defend the right to bring every footballing conversation back to sportswashing (I paraphrase, but not by much.).

The upcoming World Cup in Qatar, then, represents an apotheosis for some - everything that's corrupt, venal and wrong with football and, by extension, the world. And even if you wanted to largely ignore the tales of modern slavery before, now the buildup is now in full swing and all those inconvenient truths seem uncomfortably close to home. Even supervillain former Fifa Don Sepp Blatter has admitted that a tiny, scorching hot country with no pre-existing infrastructure may not have been the right choice for hosting the world's premier football tournament, albeit as a dig at his former buddy Platini (as a bonus, that BBC link also covers a textbook bit of rampant homophobia from one of the tournament ambassadors).

In this context, Fifa's writing to participating countries telling them cut out the politics and stick to football seems like an exercise in futility. So, given that football does indeed appear to be a festering dungheap, the real question becomes: what should we do about it?

Opinions vary on which of the Great Covid Lockdowns was the worst. For many, the third one that spanned an enormous chunk of early 2021 wins hands down for its sheer length. But for me, Lockdown 1 in 2020 was a miserable desert where we were all terrified to leave our homes and there was NO SPORT WHATSOEVER to distract me from my airless, hermetically-sealed existence.* Sport, for me, is a lifeline of pure escapism, as well as a useful channel for all my pesky pent-up emotions. 

Nonetheless, the obvious and most reliably pious course of action would be to boycott watching the World Cup and then to renounce football completely. But would that be enough in and of itself? A key theme, reading pieces such as this one from Barney Ronay (again)** or this classic of the genre from Football365’s John Nicholson, is that everybody connected with football has allowed this shitshow to happen. As fans, we have either passively sat on our hands while prices, wages and agents fees have skyrocketed, or actively contributed to the madness by continuing to go to games, subscribing to Sky/BT/Amazon, buying all the rip-off merch, etc. Most of us haven’t gone so far as dressing up as our new human rights-averse owners. But the vast majority, if and when our club gets a sniff of a new benefactor, will happily welcome the cash injection with little or no regard to where the hell it came from. The conclusion here (and one that also applies to those lucky souls like John and Barney who get paid to write about the game) is that you’re allowed to carry on watching, but only if you - and by extension, everybody you talk to -  feel really guilty about it.

The dangers of such a sanctimonious, hair-shirt approach should, in theory, be obvious. Purity is a slippery slope; it doesn't end where you decide it does. All it takes is someone even more self-righteous than you to clamber onto a slightly higher piece of ground and all of a sudden you are cast as apostate. It's an endless, exhausting authoritarian game (one that’s being very publicly played by all sorts of modern-day social justice advocates, but that’s another discussion).

What, then, is the alternative? I can hardly deny that modern football is pretty rubbish in many ways. I do sometimes yearn for those halcyon pre-1992 days when the good old first division was populated by British cloggers, corrupt chairmen were local rather than international and Richard Keys was becalmed in the backwaters of breakfast TV. And in recent years I've reduced my football consumption considerably, to the point where this season I've barely seen any games besides Wolves ones, and even then I'm recording them to watch later so I can fast-forward through the horrific stuff (ie 95% of it).

Sadly though, the reasons for this are anything but moral. Life is busy with stuff like child-rearing and novel writing (oh yes, Charlotte is a wonderfully happy five year-old and an actual literary agent gave me great feedback for my opening chapters, thanks for asking), and - more pertinently - I now devote a lot of time to the NFL. Transatlantic football is just as morally bankrupt as ours but has the cocktail of salary caps, college drafts and equally-shared TV money that generates a large degree of unpredictability. Never mind the naked corruption, feel the parity! Indeed, I would venture to suggest that if we somehow found a way to level the playing field in football and end the superclubs’ monopoly, a lot of the carping about human rights and sportwashing would quietly go away.

In the end, the World Cup is the World Cup. If the build-up to this one feels strangely subdued, it's as much to do with timing than any moral qualms. Plonking it in the middle of the domestic season just when everybody is gearing up for the Christmas stress marathon feels absurd. Still, I felt just as unexcited for the Tokyo Olympics, which happened a year late and in the middle of a Japanese Covid resurgency, and yet as soon as the Games started all that negativity was forgotten and I watched them as religiously as ever. 

For a lazy, weak-willed guy like me, not watching the World Cup would be madness. I will watch, and I will feel guilty about not doing as much as I could about the state of the world, but I also recognise that the planet has problems that aren’t easily solved by us regular individuals. Football, like all sport, is a glorious escape. The right thing to do isn't always the easiest thing, which helps to explain human nature and why we're in such a state.

Anyways, enjoy the tournament everyone! (Oh, and come on England.)

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* Granted, we were also struggling to entertain our stuck-at-home three-year-old with undiagnosed Coeliac, but that’s another story.

** Apologies to Pseuds Corner favourite Barney for dunking on him twice in one post. I’m sure he’d be delighted to know that I really do rate him as a journalist.