I wouldn’t really call myself a sports fan. Of course, I enjoy the occasional cricket or football match, but I’ve never been into sports to the extent that I’m into cultural things such as James Bond, Star Trek and the work of Tolkien. I do, however, have a great fascination with sport on a cultural level, as a cultural phenomenon: Sports events have a great, and probably unique, capacity to bring people together. People from all over the world converge onto one spot to support the team or athletes representing their country. The world’s media joins them at such events, so that for a time it seems that the entire world’s attention is focussed onto one geographic spot. This gives places the chance to show them selves to humanity, giving them the opportunity to step onto the world’s stage and big itself up. What interests me is how places use that opportunity to present itself to the world. London had it’s turn with the 2012 Olympics, and we’re currently seeing it happen in Qatar.

In hosting the World Cup, Qatar has the opportunity to hold the World’s attention. By selecting Qatar to host it, FIFA effectively awarded the tiny Middle-Eastern state a form of recognition it probably craved. It’s like when a city is chosen to host the Olympics: in a way it becomes a ‘world city’, a global big-shot. That’s what interests me so much about such decisions: they carry a lot of power, and can say a lot about which places are doing well, or are in the global good books. By giving the world cup to Qatar, however, FIFA has given it a type of global green light; it has given a tiny country with some completely anachronistic human rights laws the okay to behave in front of the world as if it was any other modern, progressive, liberal state. It can perform it’s opening and closing ceremonies for us while brushing the fact that it still has the death penalty and totally regressive LGBTQ laws to one side. It has been asked to join the club of advanced, tolerant democracies which are capable of hosting such events as if the fact that it is a tiny dictatorship doesn’t matter.

To be honest that appalls me, and I can’t help but smell the acrid whiff of corruption behind this selection. FIFA obviously want us to forget about politics and just concentrate on the ball-kicking; yet I don’t think you can disentangle one from the other. By making Qatar the temporary centre of the world’s attention, Football’s governing body implicitly also gave it the world’s approval. While it could be argued that we should respect the views of people in other places and not force our values onto others, I cannot approve of a theocratic dictatorship with utterly abhorrent human rights laws; surely some values must be universal when it comes to global events. Frankly, part of me seriously thinks that the English team should not be there, as we are just implying that we believe such countries have just as much right to global centre stage as anywhere else. While admittedly I’ll probably watch England’s matches just as I watched their match earlier, it will be with a very nasty taste in my mouth. Sport may have a great ability to bring the world together, but as when Berlin hosted the 1936 Olympics, that ability can be usurped and bent towards something far more insidious.