This World Cup is a farcical disaster, but that’s not Qatar’s fault. Call it punishment for the sins of capitalism
By the time this article is published on Salon, the opening match of the 2022 World Cup tournament will have reached halftime. That match is between teams from Qatar and Ecuador, two nations whose citizens — at least before this week — might have had great difficulty finding the other one on a world map. (Just to prove I’m paying attention, Ecuador leads 2-0.)
That game is without any serious question the most random and least star-powered opener in World Cup history; even hardcore soccer nerds would be stretched to name a single player on either team. (Qatar almost certainly would not have qualified if it weren’t the host nation, and Ecuador is the lowest-ranked Western Hemisphere team in this year’s tournament.)
But perhaps a meaningless contest between two obscure nations is exactly the right way to launch the world’s biggest sporting event, which in this instance has become so overloaded with symbolic meaning and offers such a vivid illustration of the predicament of late-stage global capitalism that the on-pitch spectacle of a bunch of ripped young millionaires playing games for national glory almost seems beside the point.
No, I don’t entirely mean that, of course. Setting aside a few high-minded boycotters — themselves a persistent epiphenomenon of late capitalism — the world will still watch the games. This will almost certainly be the final World Cup for several of the world game’s biggest current stars, including Lionel Messi of Argentina, Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal and Robert Lewandowski of Poland. Many knowledgeable observers expect a Latin American team — either Brazil or Argentina — to claim the championship after several cycles of European domination.
Defending champions France will be somewhere between magnificent and godawful, and can never be counted out despite missing several key players. Belgium, Croatia and the Netherlands are the other European teams clearly capable of making it to the final four. There’s an outsider team in every World Cup tournament that captures the globe’s attention and pulls off a few surprises — if you want to lay down a few bucks on a longshot, take a look at Canada and Cameroon.
As for the young and erratic U.S. men’s team, it’s burdened by grossly inflated expectations in its return to the world stage after failing to qualify in 2018. Honestly, winning at least one game and getting out of the group stage would be significant progress. But this team should offer long-suffering Yank fans an exciting glimpse of the future, in which a rising generation of American players honed in Europe’s top leagues — yes, media darling Christian Pulisic, but also Gio Reyna, Weston McKinnie, Tyler Adams and several others — can compete on an equal footing with almost anyone. Make time on Nov. 25 (yes, that’s Black Friday) for the U.S.-England match, one of the highlights of the opening round. Sure, the English are a better team on paper, but the difference is not astronomical and they have a long tradition of lackadaisical play against lesser opponents; the potential for an upset is very real.
Yes, the world will watch the games, and so will I. That was the promise baked into the pie of Qatar 2022 from the beginning, along with lots of blood, sand and money: Once the action starts for real (at least three matches a day, starting with England v. Iran early on Monday morning U.S. time), all the ugliness and stupidity suffusing this bizarre episode of sports history will be shoved to one side, labeled in passing by world-weary commentators as „politics“ or „controversy.“
But make no mistake: This World Cup is haunted, both metaphorically and in the most tragic and literal sense. Qatari organizers have denied human rights activists‘ claims that more than 6,000 foreign workers — mostly from Nepal, Bangladesh and India — died building the nation’s infrastructure for this tournament over the last 12 years, laboring in blistering desert heat for low wages in conditions similar to indentured servitude. But the substance of those denials seems to be that the true number is much lower and that many of those deaths had nothing to do with the World Cup, which might strike reasonable observers as a less than compelling response.
Qatar 2022 is also haunted in the Ebenezer Scrooge-on-Christmas Eve sense, and the specters on parade don’t have much to do with the desert kingdom itself. First of all, of course it is grotesque, farcical and disastrous that the world’s biggest sporting spectacle is being staged in a Persian Gulf autocracy the size of Connecticut which has no discernible soccer tradition and where daytime high temperatures routinely break 110℉, homosexuality is illegal, women are second-class citizens and roughly 85 percent of the population consists of manual laborers or service-sector workers imported from other Asian countries.
