World Cup

… Refined technique — the term of art for the instruments of control and precision — is no longer the secretive preserve of the Dutch academy and the Italian training ground. It is now expected that a player be able to bring a hurtling orb to a complete standstill — to kill it dead — and rifle it to all four corners of the field with laserlike accuracy. The gap between the iconic teams and the middling powers has never been narrower, which is why the group stage of this World Cup was so thrillingly unpredictable and why two of the four semifinalists, Croatia and crowd favorite Morocco, came from outside the traditional elite. This was the globalization of the game at work, greased by enormous pools of cash. It was evident in everything from the quality of the players, each of whom represents an investment in cutting-edge training and nutritional technology, to the ubiquitous haircut of the tournament: high and very tight on the sides, as if every player were a Navy Seal, an assassin…

The World Cup has made clear the uncomfortable truth that money has made the sport much better. It’s also made clear that a growing chunk of that money comes from bad places that do bad things. Almost everything a fan could love about a soccer performance these days — the athleticism, the explosive power, the grace on the ball — has a cost, both monetary and human. De facto slave labor may not play a role in the next World Cup, held in Canada, Mexico, and the United States, but that doesn’t mean it will lie beyond the shadow of despots…

Never bet against the Trickster God:

Kind of respect the ruthlessness of the French FIFA team.

Came in knowing they were the evil empire against the scrappy underdog. Didn’t care. Looked God in the eye and told Him happy endings were for Hollywood.

— Checkless Starfish Who Can Change His Name (@IRHotTakes) December 14, 2022

Chief executive of the Qatar World Cup chief criticised for migrant worker death comments https://t.co/ZeegW37upt

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) December 8, 2022

Albert Burneko, at Defector, “Qatar’s World Cup CEO Scolds Reporters For Noticing That Another Worker Died”:

… FIFA and the Fox network’s efforts at distraction notwithstanding, the dire plight of migrant workers in Qatar has been a focus of critical media coverage pretty much since the emirate successfully bought the rights to host this World Cup back in 2010. By now much of the world knows that the tournament’s infrastructure was built with, in effect, slave labor, and that some 6,500 migrant workers—sit with that number for a second—are believed to have died in the effort. Qatar is ruled by an absolute monarchy with effectively limitless riches; FIFA is a bottomlessly corrupt cesspool of graft and self-dealing; neither organization has shown or ever voluntarily would show the slightest inclination toward meaningful accountability for, or even recognition of, this more than decade-long atrocity…

When a Reuters journalist got access to Nasser Al Khater, this deeply accursed World Cup’s chief executive, the subject came up. Here you might expect an even minimally accountable boss type, one encumbered by, if nothing else, a cynical sense of responsibility to good public relations, to affect the appropriate face and recite the obligatory lines about being deeply saddened by this tragic loss of life and about the Qatar World Cup’s absolute commitment to the safety and fair treatment of all the workers who make this possible and so on. None of it would mean all that much, of course, except as a rearguard action to reassure skittish advertisers and brand partners. Still, there’s something chilling implied by an executive apparently unbothered even by those gross mercenary concerns…

“We’re in the middle of a World Cup. And we have a successful World Cup. And this is something that you want to talk about right now? I mean, death is a natural part of life, whether it’s at work, whether it’s uh, in your sleep. Of course, a worker died, um, our condolences go to his family, however, you know, I mean it’s strange that this is something that you want to focus on as your first question.”…

“Workers’ death has been a big subject, uh, during the World Cup. Everything that has been said, and everything that has been reflected about workers’ death here has been absolutely false. This, uh, this theme, this negativity around the World Cup has been something that we’ve been faced with, unfortunately. Um, you know, we’re a bit disappointed that the journalists have been exacerbating this false narrative, and honestly you know, I think a lot of the journalists have to question themselves and reflect on why they’ve been trying to bang on about this subject for so long.”

These are the remarks of a man who needs nothing from the world or the other people in it that he cannot buy a million times over, and whom the world in turn can do no more than annoy. He’s trying to walk from here to there, man, he shouldn’t have to deal with noise about some guy who died, one of several thousand who died. In his aggrieved petulance, the grudging parentheses he practically pantomimes around his hollow expression of worthless condolences to the family of a guy his very own decisions might have killed, is the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come for every working person in a society suicidally dedicated to empowering a tiny number of its worst inhabitants. A guy fell and died, thousands of miles from home and under Nasser Al Khater’s authority, and the sum total meaning of the former’s life and work and death to the guy under whose boot he served is that it gave the latter an opportunity to chastise some reporters for bothering to count the corpses.

Look at the fire we built! You expect us to mourn the kindling?

It’s complicated, you guys!

How Qatar’s riches touch millions of UK lives https://t.co/6Vl2SfQzCB

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) November 24, 2022

‘Being a gay fan in Doha is so taboo we’re invisible’ https://t.co/MfWF0wqmXO

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) November 29, 2022

About 70% of the world’s soccer balls, including the official World Cup ball, are hand-stitched in a single city in Pakistan https://t.co/fFUAu28zHr

— Businessweek (@BW) December 16, 2022

Eugene Robinson, at the Washington Post:

@Eugene_Robinson on the problematic erasures in World Cup media coverage. Free link. Read here: https://t.co/OFKgZzu3lB

— Monica H Green, PhD #VaxTheWorld (@monicaMedHist) December 13, 2022

every awful regime should get to host a world cup so they lose billions of dollars and remind people how shitty they are

— Seva (@SevaUT) November 19, 2022

Anybody gonna follow up on this? Or have the French already announced a blockade at every port?

New Day, New Tweet. Winning Country gets the Buds. Who will get them? pic.twitter.com/Vv2YFxIZa1

— Budweiser (@Budweiser) November 19, 2022

no wonder everyone wants it pic.twitter.com/QpnfwW4J2h

— Jorge R. Gutierrez (@mexopolis) November 21, 2022