Jack Tame: The beautiful game is pretty dirty

By Jack Tame

Herald on Sunday·

30 May, 2015 05:00 PM2 mins to read

40,000-seat Al Wakrah Stadium is a proposed venue for matches during the 2022 FIFA World Cup Qatar.

Opinion

In Qatar it gets hot. Filthy hot. So hot, you really wonder why anyone thought it'd be a good idea to settle there in the first place.

"Hey guys," an original Qatari might have queried, when they first got there. "You don't think maybe we should head south? Or north? Or anywhere?"

The average daytime temperature in Qatar in June and July, when the Football World Cup is normally hosted, is 50C. Meat starts cooking at 50C. But when Fifa awarded the 2022 tournament, it selected tiny Qatar, with its ambitious plan to build giant, air-conditioned, indoor stadia. It'd be like hosting the World Cup in a shopping mall.

At the time, it seemed comically corrupt. Imagine if the IOC awarded the Winter Olympics to Miami. For what Qatar desperately lacks in appropriate football playing conditions it undoubtedly boasts in cash.

It would actually be funny. We could laugh at all of Fifa's incorrigible, trough-diving hogs with their "Who, me?" expressions, bespoke suits and Berlusconi-style protestations of innocence.

Except a lot of people have died. Since Qatar was awarded hosting rights for 2022, trade unions estimate 1200 workers have been killed working in the Qatari construction sector. Most are migrant workers from India and Nepal.

It sucks to be poor. Before last year's World Cup, eight workers were killed in Brazil.

With that in mind, it seems a bit odd it has taken so long for authorities to do anything, except of course that the world's biggest game commands the world's biggest cashflow.

That's the depressing thing about this week's raids on football's governing body and the arrests of several officials. Despite the good intentions investigators may have, this is hardly likely to be a comprehensive clean.

It doesn't take much to be cynical about Qatar hosting the Football World Cup and it doesn't take much to be cynical about the prospects of eliminating corruption from a sport whose revenues top $40 billion a year.