The Qatar World Cup distills the essence of what the sport has become writes gcooney93 from Doha.
Get in your seats early, though - South Korean pop star Jung Kook of BTS is raising the curtain.International football is the world distilled, and hosting the world’s biggest show in one of its smallest countries has had a complementary, crystalising effect.
It was eventually moved to the winter, crammed into the middle of the European season to accentuate the authorities’ disregard for player welfare. As Fifa are now discovering, everything related to this World Cup appears malleable: the late-notice change in start date made redundant several Fifa sponsorship activations around there being 100 days to go to kick-off, while the promise of Budweiser being available at matches perished two days before the first match.
Infantino paints his principles on an etch-a-sketch and judging by his extraordinary press conference on the eve of the tournament, he has now gone beyond mere expediency and evolved to late-stage shape-shifting. Neymar, Kylian Mbappe and Lionel Messi, three of this World Cup's biggest stars, play for the Qatar-owned PSG. Source: Alamy Stock Photo
Crystallised also is the fact that football is increasingly Not For You, following golf’s path in become a sport plucked by the rich from the rest. Supporters can’t drink beer in World Cup stadiums but the booze will keep on flowing in corporate suites and in the bars of up-market city-centre hotels, the kinds of hotels in which fans cannot afford to stay.
Qatar is a deeply stratified society and here the separations are blatant, with the men that built a gleaming, air-conditioned city living cheek-by-jowl in thronged, unsanitary labour camps in the desert. But the only fact more shocking than the unknown number of dead labourers is the fact that people keep coming to Qatar for work.
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