The cause is heard: the world, in Qatar, is going to play foot ball (as they said when I was a kid) while covering their noses. Samuel Piette, the Montreal CF midfielder who defends the colors of the Canadian selection, about the many controversies that parasitize this pharaonic World Cup, made things clear a few weeks before the start, in the Montreal Journal “It’s not really something we dwell on. We go there for the “business” in inverted commas. »
Interesting statement, which would seem less out of place in the mouth of a player of the French team, if we remember that this prestigious showcase of French football that is Paris Saint-Germain is the property of a businessman Qatar since 2011 and that France sells Rafale fighter jets to this emirate, a commodity which, in 2015, was worth just over three billion euros per dozen. An investigation is still underway, across the Atlantic, to try to understand the role that a certain “lunch at the Élysée” could have played in the attribution of the 2022 World Cup to an unofficial slave state and officially homophobic.
President Sarkozy’s guests at this meal were the grand cacique of football with our cousins, Michel Platini, and Crown Prince Tamim ben Hamad Al Thani himself, of the hereditary dynasty which monopolizes power in Doha. It was shortly after that Platini – splashed, since, by the shenanigans which ended up getting the better of Sepp Blatter at the head of FIFA -, to everyone’s surprise, swung the block of European votes from UEFA in the camp of tiny Qatar.
For the past few weeks, I have wandered between the books of Scottish journalist Andrew Jennings — Red card ! The disturbing underside of FIFA (2006); The FIFA scandal (2015) — and the documentary FIFA Uncovered produced by Netflix. I saw João Havelange, the protege of the Brazilian mafia and great lover of Swiss watches, take the reins of world soccer in 1974. I followed him when he arrived in Paris with a suitcase filled with Brazilian coffee for the employees of the local FIFA offices and when, after a jump in Zurich, he left with the same suitcase stuffed with gold bars. I heard him, in Buenos Aires in 1978, publicly congratulate the bloodthirsty General Videla for his “beautiful quiet country”.
I’ve also seen FIFA members fly with wads of cash tucked into their jackets and pants to take all that money out of their country’s tax office. ” He [pouvait] useful, Jennings remarks, to have a girlfriend with really big panties. His investigation was, as he came to understand, “a sort of perfectly organized criminal syndicate.” Kickbacks seemed to be part of soccer culture along with the comedy of diving and crying at the slightest touch to sway the referee.
In the fall of 2010, during the simultaneous announcement of the obtaining of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups by Putin’s Russia and the sheiks of Qatar, this corrupt system, under the presidency of the dolphin of Havelange, Blatter , was still in place. Jennings also explains this unusual double announcement – tradition dictated that only one World Cup was awarded at a time – by the totally cynical feeling of urgency that would have seized the leaders of FIFA at the approach of an end of now predictable part. Their cash cow was sick, so they went into overdrive.
A neo-tsarist empire, a reactionary oil emirate, and between the two the Olympics in China… Faced with this grooming of authoritarian regimes, we never stop bringing back the specter of the 1936 Nazi Games, which were not however an isolated case: two years earlier, the fascist Italy of Duce had been entrusted with the organization of the second World Cup in history, the first on European soil. Could it be that sport in the 1930s looked like the world of the 1930s?
And in 2022, what image of our societies does the most popular sport on the planet send back to us? What was Samuel Piette saying, exactly? “We’re going there for the”business” in inverted commas. Ah, those quotation marks… But Piette is right: in China, Qatar, Ulaanbaatar and elsewhere, “we go there for the business and even in Egypt, where, during COP27, the Minister of the Environment of our constitutional sub-monarchy was chaperoned by representatives of the oil industry and where our chief traveling salesman, goodman Fitzgibbon, went to peddle “clean clean clean” energy from the future François-Legault hydroelectric complex. The end of the world ? A business opportunity like any other…
And the Qataris are going to manage to air-condition 40,000-seat open stadiums by producing around zero tonnes of greenhouse gases, you’ll see, because we’re in a tale of Thousand and one Night.
You know the old joke: soccer is a game of eleven with a ball, and the Germans win in the end. I write these lines while the players of the “Mannschaft”, by posing an unequivocal gesture on the ground, have just openly challenged the authority of the pundits of football and the emirs, before bowing against Japan. But in my heart, they have already won… And it is now, for me, the most awaited clash of this World Cup: the players against FIFA.