Only 12 years after everybody else knew it, former FIFA president Sepp Blatter admitted this week that the organisation’s decision to award Qatar the 2022 World Cup was a “mistake.”
The timing of this admission from Blatter is farcical: far too late for anything to be done about it and close enough to the tournament (which starts on Nov. 20) to undermine the efforts of those left to make the best of a bad situation.
The only person who really benefits is Blatter himself, still scrambling to rescue a reputation mired in ongoing allegations of corruption, the nadir of which saw a tiny Gulf state with no football heritage handed the biggest sporting show on Earth in 2010. Having said that, Netflix will be pleased by the 86-year-old providing a timely promotional boost to the streaming service’s new four-part documentary “FIFA Uncovered,” released on Wednesday, which outlines alarming levels of unsavoury and clandestine dealings permeating football’s most prominent administrative body for decades.
“It [Qatar] is too small of a country,” Blatter told Swiss newspaper Tages Anzeiger. “Football and the World Cup are too big for it.”
Yes. Yes they are. Obviously. And it reflects badly on Blatter that there was no mention of the country’s poor human rights record or treatment of the LGBTQ+ community when explaining why Qatar was a bad choice.
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FIFA may have changed its host country criteria in 2012 as concerns emerged about worker treatment during the construction of stadiums in Qatar, but what does it say about FIFA that provisions of such basic human rights were not considered before then?
Years of deflection and misdirection make Blatter’s comments this week all the more infuriating. In November 2013, he told delegates at the Asian Football Confederation: “It is not fair when the international media, and especially European media, are taking up the focus of an Arab country here in this, Asia, by attacking, attacking, criticizing this country. We are defending it.”
A month later, he said of migrant worker treatment: “We have met with the ITUC [International Trades Union Confederation] and the ILO [International Labour Organisation] and now is the time to calm down.”
