It was on a freezing night in Zurich in December 2010 that the International Football Federation decided that the 2022 World Cup would take place in one of the hottest spots on the planet, the small gas state of Qatar. Protests and suspicions of corruption arose the next day, but are reaching their moment of truth now. The call to boycott this great world fair could be endorsed by the Norwegian federation on June 20, and many German players are asking their federation to do the same. Should we play football in a cemetery? Because that is the question. According to the revelations of our colleagues from Guardian, more than 6,500 workers from Asia have died in Qatar since that dark Swiss night. The organizers reject this accusation, based on a count of the registers of the countries of origin, and put forward the figure of 37 workers actively dead on the sites, the rest being considered as natural deaths. 80% of Indian workers, for example, have succumbed to “Acute cardiac or respiratory failure”.
Transparency itself visibly suffers from insufficiency, but for all that, the call for a boycott lacks consistency: the previous World Cup took place in Russia, champion of stadium racism and the persecution of LGBT +. We remember that the racist chants of Russian supporters against Paul Pogba were punished by Fifa with a fine of 30,000 Swiss francs, a ridiculous sum in the standards of corruption of this organization.
Does Qatar suffer from an anti-Arab bias compared to previous host countries? It is more likely that he is a victim of the rapid changes in sports culture, where more and more players do not hesitate to express themselves politically. On June 20, they will be speaking, and they will not be speaking anytime soon.
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