The U.S. men’s soccer team officially qualified for the 2022 World Cup last week — the first time it has done so since 2014. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that the team will not be competing until December, instead of the usual June start date. That’s because the organization that runs the World Cup, FIFA, awarded this year’s tournament to Qatar, a nation where the average temperature is 125 degrees during the summer.
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A country the size of Connecticut but with about a million fewer people, Qatar did not have a single stadium capable of hosting a World Cup match when it bid for the tournament in 2010. At the time, Qatar claimed it would build five brand-new venues that would each use solar panels to power air conditioners, which would allow the games to be played, as usual, in June.
Qatar has failed to deliver on that promise, so FIFA had to move the tournament to December, when temperatures are cool enough that athletes can play without dying. December, however, just happens to be right in the middle of the season for all of Europe’s best professional leagues. Imagine Major League Baseball stopping its season for the month of June so all the players could participate in the World Baseball Classic.
Still, that’s the least of anyone’s problems stemming from this Qatar World Cup. Qatar is a wealthy, oil-producing nation where few natives work in manual labor, and so to build those five state-of-the-art stadiums, it imported tens of thousands of foreign workers. It would be a gross understatement to say that they are not treated well as they toil in Qatar’s blistering heat. It is estimated that more than 6,500 migrant workers have died building the roads, hotels, and stadiums needed to host this World Cup.
Which raises the question: Why did FIFA award a World Cup to a country so ill-suited to host it? Before you answer, consider that the international sports community is also just coming off a 2022 Winter Olympic games hosted by China’s brutally repressive, aggressively expansionist, and genocidal regime. Consider also that Russia, credibly accused of an ongoing massacre of civilians in Ukraine, holds the high honor of the U.N. veto, which it uses to stop any action against it. This power is based on the Soviets having switched sides in World War II to fight against Hitler eight decades ago.
International institutions need to change, and only the United States can make it happen. For starters, there is no excuse for rewarding countries such as Qatar and China with the world’s most prestigious sporting events. Speaking of which, FIFA also awarded the 2018 World Cup to Russia, which at that time had already staged its first illegal invasion of Ukraine this century. Russia even provided the missile and launcher that its militiamen allies used to shoot down a civilian airliner over Donetsk, killing 298 people. Even that atrocity wasn’t enough to make anyone consider moving or canceling the World Cup, let alone remove Russia from the company of civilized nations.
For FIFA, the answer to how this happened is simple. The evidence shows that both Russia’s 2018 bid and Qatar’s 2022 bid were secured through plain old bribery.
The International Olympic Committee’s decision to choose China is a bit more nuanced. Beijing was awarded the 2022 games only after Norway pulled out of contention. But why did Norway, itself a wealthy, oil-producing country with excellent infrastructure, end its bid to host an event that its athletes ended up dominating? Because members of the International Olympic Committee threatened to go elsewhere unless they were treated like kings and queens. They demanded cars and drivers for all IOC members; dedicated traffic lanes for Olympic officials; separate entrances and exits for all IOC members at the airport; drinks for IOC members with King Harald V prior to the opening ceremonies (at the king’s expense, of course); and closure of all local schools during the event.
Norway should probably be commended for telling the IOC to take a hike. But the result was that a regime actively committing genocide became the world face of winter sports.
At this moment, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has spelled out in big bold letters that evil regimes must be taken seriously again. World leaders need to recognize that any organization rewarding bad actors such as China, Qatar, and Russia should be shunned and boycotted lest it encourage their leaders to commit even greater outrages. The U.S. can lead by refusing to lend its credibility to corrupt and arrogant international institutions.
This may be an uphill climb at first, but sport would be a good place to start. This can happen if President Joe Biden has the courage to reach out to allies similarly frustrated with the cesspools that these international bodies have become.
Maybe it is time to form a wholly new and separate Olympic committee — and a new international football body as well. That may sound like a long shot now, but if FIFA disrupts any more English Premier League or Bundesliga seasons because of the corruption in its ranks, there might be more popular support for it than you think.
