FIFA: Insanity Prevails

Sepp Blatter: Asleep at the wheel. Source: Guardian

“The winner, to organise the 2022 FIFA World Cup is…. Qatar.”

Those words from Sepp Blatter will go down in history as the most infamous words of his FIFA presidency. Until a few days ago there at least seemed hope that the organisation would see sense and decide that football’s greatest event should be taken away from Qatar and moved to a nation not under a gigantic cloud of corruption allegations. But as it turns out, that was just a pipe dream.

It’s clear to anyone not among the FIFA elite that Qatar is simply unfit to host the tournament.

The temperatures in December in Qatar are still in the mid to high 20’s, so the players are still playing in warmer weather than they are used to in their domestic leagues. Not to mention they will be leaving for camps just as the European winter starts, so the temperature difference will be stark. The prime motivator for moving the tournament to the Qatar winter was player welfare, yet the tournament is now 4 days shorter than a normal world cup with the matches are squeezed into an ever tighter window at a time when players already suffer burnout from an almost yearlong calendar of football.

Expect the second half of the 2022/23 season to be flat, as players are fatigued both mentally and physically from the exertions of a world cup campaign.

Then of course you have the moral issues surrounding hundreds of migrant workers dying while building the infrastructure necessary to host the tournament. An issue that FIFA conveniently ignores.

The problem that most of us have is simply the way this entire situation has been handled. The end result here – a gulf nation hosting a world cup in November/December – isn’t an issue. FIFA have long held the desire to spread the gospel of football to all corners of the world, and most fans would see the merits of scheduling the tournament in this way. Personally, even if FIFA had mandated that the world cup was to be held in this region I wouldn’t have much of a problem with it. Again, I’m all for spreading the gospel, but it’s the way this entire process has been clearly rotten from the start that has fans in an uproar.

Having nations spend millions – even billions – of dollars on bidding for a tournament to be held in June/July, FIFA themselves spending millions on technical committees to assess these bids, and then to hand the tournament to a nation totally unfit to host based on those parameters. Only to then decide that they will change the dates to suit the host nation under the thin veil of player welfare. It’s just plain farcical.

This decision from FIFA massively impacts virtually every major professional league around the world as well. The English Premier League, Spanish La Liga, Italy’s Serie A, and the German Bundesliga; all of these competitions will need to stop for a minimum of two months in the middle of their season just to accommodate the 2022 world cup. It will put our very own A-League in a difficult position as well.

It won’t just be that season though. If the league’s themselves don’t want to diminish their product hugely in the following seasons, the years previous to the tournament will need to be managed and scheduled with the world cup interruption in mind. Professional footballers are extremely finely tuned athletes, and the huge break of the world cup along with the extra in season workload for players involved in the tournament will play havoc with their fitness levels. At the very least you can expect the second half of the 2022/23 season to be flat, as players are fatigued both mentally and physically from the exertions of a world cup campaign.

However, president of football’s European confederation (UEFA) Michel Platini has come out assuring that UEFA can reschedule the Champions League – the most prestigious club competition in the world – without too many issues. At the same time, he announced that his home country of France is successful in their bid to host the 2019 Women’s World Cup – a decision that was reached on the same day as the rescheduling of the Qatar tournament.

What a startling coincidence.

Given FIFA’s – how do I say this properly – “chequered history” this is just a little too convenient no?

Change is needed now, before the game itself is brought down from the inside.