THREE KEY FACTS
By stealth, by acclamation, without even a hint of truly independent scrutiny, Fifa is poised to seal perhaps the most craven sell-out in the history of sport.
There will be no vote as such, most likely just a round of applause, as Saudi Arabia is swept in unopposed as hosts of the 2034 World Cup finals. Typically, the awarding of the game’s greatest showpiece would be an august affair: in 2010, everybody from Bill Clinton to Morgan Freeman descended on Zurich to lobby for the 2022 rights, only to see the United States humiliated by Qatar.
This time there will be just a sterile video conference to rubber-stamp a fait accompli.
For Gianni Infantino, it is the best of both worlds: not only is he railroading through this giant expo of greed and reputation-laundering a decade early, he is also ducking any inquisition on how it has come to pass.
Even at this hugely consequential moment, the Fifa president is offering no press conference to explain his reasoning. In fact, in the 15 months since his organisation orchestrated the sham that left the Saudis as sole bidders, he has taken no questions.
It is as if the inconvenient subtexts to the Saudi coup – the sidelining of any opposition, the looming abuses of the Kingdom’s 13.4 million migrant labourers – are better left unsaid.
There were no displays to advertise the project at this year’s Fifa Congress in Bangkok. The bid documents were handed over, without ceremony, during the Paris Olympics. Even the manner in which the mandatory evaluation report was released, at 12.32am Swiss time on a Friday night, suggested an enterprise that the global governing body would rather you did not study too deeply.
And with good reason, given the manifest absurdities. How can the Saudis’ World Cup receive a score of 4.2 out of 5, the highest ever, when 11 of the 15 stadiums have not even been built yet?
By what metrics is a regime that approved the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi only six years ago classified as merely a “medium” human rights risk?
How can a report compiled by Riyadh-based AS&H Clifford Chance, which makes no mention of the severe curbs on freedom of expression or the imprisonment of women’s rights activists or the 200 executions carried out in the first nine months of 2024, possibly meet anyone’s definition of “independent”?
Infantino refuses to provide any justifications because there are none. The immorality of this tale speaks for itself, with the lawyer who represented Khashoggi’s fiancee calling it a “final betrayal of justice for Jamal”.
And besides, the last time Infantino was put in the position of trying to defend the indefensible, on the eve of the 2022 Qatar World Cup, he lapsed into that ludicrous “today, I feel gay” monologue.
A risible performer under pressure, so tin-eared he likened his first Fifa presidential election win to Rwanda’s recovery from genocide, he prefers genuflecting to the Saudis in the shadows. I recall, while in Jeddah for Anthony Joshua’s second fight against Oleksandr Usyk in August 2022, how word spread around King Abdullah Sports City during the ring walks: “Gianni’s in the building.”
Sure enough, there he was, supping with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on a dimly lit VIP balcony after making a surreptitious late entrance. Even by this stage, he was practically an honorary citizen. In 2020, he had encouraged Italy to support the Saudis’ World Cup ambitions, only to be rebuffed due to an enduring sense of horror across Europe at the Khashoggi killing.
In 2021, he danced with Riyadh dignitaries and brandished a sword in the air, gushing in a video for the Saudi sports ministry: “A lot has changed.” Never one to understate sycophancy to the sheikhs, he elevated Saudi oil giant Aramco in April to the status of major worldwide partner, guaranteeing an estimated £80 million ($176m) a year until at least 2027.
That is chicken feed, of course, compared to the sums at stake for 2034. Bankrolled by the £725 billion ($1600b) Public Investment Fund, this will be a World Cup confounding all conventional parameters. One of the venues planned, a stadium with its own lake perched 200m above the outskirts of Riyadh and carved out of the Tuwaiq Cliffs, belongs to the realm of science fiction.
The more vexed conundrum is who will be found to build such places, or the 185,000 extra hotel rooms, or the road and rail infrastructure needed to traverse vast tracts of inhospitable desert.
We hardly need a distant reference point for our answer. Qatar’s gaudy spectacular was built on the sacrifice of countless workers from Nepal, Bangladesh and the Philippines, all paid atrociously to endure the dust and hotter-than-hell conditions.
Now, two years on, football is rushing headlong into approving such abuses on a far wider scale. A recent report by Human Rights Watch cited a Saudi government figure of 884 Bangladeshis dying in the country in just seven months.
Officially, the majority of deaths were attributed to “natural causes”. But with no trade unions and a blanket ban on protests, that claim lacks credibility.
The travesty is that Infantino has hoodwinked the global game into believing this is a tolerable price to pay. Opposition has been all but crushed, with federations inured to Fifa’s shamelessness concluding that resistance is futile.
The Football Association, which initially approved a plan for Harry Kane to wear a OneLove armband in Qatar, does not intend to speak up against a Saudi government with an even more fundamentalist stance on gay rights.
The Germans, whose players opposed Fifa’s silencing of dissent by placing their hands across their mouths in Doha, are equally fatalistic, saying of the Saudi version: “We take the criticism of the applicant country seriously. Our goal is to work together with Fifa to improve the situation in the coming years.”
Only one country, Norway, is prepared to put its head above the parapet.
“We cannot give acclamation to a process that we consider to be objectionable and not in line with the considerations behind Fifa’s own reforms,” its association declared.
This is a vital point: on assuming the mantle as president in 2016, Infantino said that Fifa was “fully committed to respecting human rights”. Now look at him, merrily consorting with Bin Salman, the leader whom US intelligence agencies said had personally endorsed the 2018 murder of Khashoggi: an atrocity in which the journalist was subdued inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, killed, then dismembered with a bone saw.
This heinous act took place two years into Infantino’s tenure. And now he is handing Bin Salman sport’s most glittering prize on a silver platter.
It is a grotesque affront to the notion of moral leadership, deserving of the fiercest condemnation. Rodney Dixon KC, previously the lawyer for Khashoggi’s widow Hatice Cengiz and author of a legal submission to Fifa with other human rights experts, said:
“By awarding the biggest tournament in the footballing world to Saudi Arabia, Fifa has let off the hook the perpetrators of one of the most scandalous killings of our time. It is the final betrayal of justice for Jamal. It signals that others could commit such blatant crimes and still be awarded the World Cup. Not only does it contravene Fifa’s own human rights policy, it tramples on the basic tenets of international law.
“Despite the numerous calls for Fifa and its leadership to scrutinise the lack of essential human rights protections in Saudi Arabia, it has proceeded regardless, going through the motions as though there are no restrictions on the most fundamental freedoms. And yet political opponents are detained and tortured, women’s rights are grossly abused, repression of free speech is rife, and the rule of law is completely compromised.
“Fifa has sunk to an all-time low in rewarding such reprehensible state conduct.”
Dixon is unambiguous, calling for Fifa to impose minimum human rights conditions on the hosts and to strip them of the tournament if these are not met.
The grounds for optimism on this front are shaky. This is a state so fanatically coercive that Salma Al-Shehab, a PhD student from Leeds arrested in 2021 for retweeting criticism of the rulers to fewer than 3,000 followers, languishes in a Saudi prison after being convicted of sedition.
She is due to be there until 2056. Manahel Al-Otaibi, a fitness instructor and influencer, was sentenced this year to 11 years after posting in support of women’s liberation and showing pictures of herself without an abaya robe. She has since been stabbed in the face with a pen while incarcerated.
The experience of reporting on sport in Saudi Arabia tends to be sanitised, restricted to faceless Western-style hotels or ritzy shopping malls where Cristiano Ronaldo’s matches for Al-Nassr play on a loop. But even in Riyadh’s Ritz-Carlton – the type of palace where you can imagine Fifa executives being billeted in 2034 – you can hardly be oblivious to the history.
For it was there, in 2017, that Bin Salman rounded up 400 of the Kingdom’s most powerful figures, including princes and tycoons, with some detainees allegedly tortured before being compelled to give up large slices of their assets. The Crown Prince said they were guilty of corruption.
In any other realm, this might give cause for sober reflection. But not at Fifa, where value systems are warped in order to achieve the desired result. Just consider how it adapted protocol last year to apparently favour the Saudis.
It was October 6, 2023: 11 years out from the 2034 World Cup, removing any need for haste. And yet with zero warning, Fifa opened the bidding, allowing prospective hosts a mere 25 days to submit their bids. Australia, seriously interested in bringing a first World Cup Downunder, had no hope of putting serious documents together in three-and-a-half weeks.
Saudi Arabia, already Infantino’s preferred option, just so happened to have its ready to submit. Fifa maintains the process was above board.
At a stroke, Infantino, the sole candidate in each of his re-elections in 2019 and 2023, had his favourite outcome: a one-horse race. The Saudis, it is understood, would ideally like their World Cup to be put to a vote.
But this is not quite the Fifa style, where acclamation removes any trace of jeopardy. Infantino knows it will all go through on the nod when his only public opponent is Lise Klaveness, president of the Norwegian federation.
To its credit, her institution is demanding that its objections to Fifa be officially recorded. Such a righteous stand might be doomed to fail, but it should serve as a powerful reminder that not every nation was complicit in this charade.
Infantino has seldom been too discerning about the company he keeps. He has performed keepy-uppies at the Kremlin with Vladimir Putin, and accepted a national recognition award from the Central African Republic, ranked by Transparency International as one of the most corrupt countries on earth.
He exemplifies the preposterous nature of Fifa, a mediocre Swiss bureaucrat elevated to absolute power by a pliant council, apparently hovering above any accountability in his custom-made trainers.
And in many ways Saudi 2034 represents his masterpiece: a first World Cup in a land where oversight is negligible and where the cash taps never stop flowing.
This is one surrender where sport has no choice but to stand by and watch. After all, it has long since made its oil-drenched bed, to the point where an over-the-hill Phil Mickelson can take a nine-figure sum from people he calls “scary motherf*****s” and where boxing is so pathetically grateful for Saudi largesse that it makes circus master Turki Alalshikh its “man of the year”.
It was only a matter of time before football took its crown jewel to the same destination. For when there are no longer any ethical lines left to cross, all roads lead to Riyadh.