Well, that’s that then. In the event there were only two notes of jeopardy around Fifa’s extraordinary virtual congress to announce the winning mono-bids, the vote without a vote, for the right to host the 2030 and 2034 World Cups.
First, exactly how disgusting would this spectacle turn out to be in the flesh? The answer to which, perhaps unsurprisingly, was: extremely disgusting. And second, how would the process actually work?
In the buildup there had been talk of bid approval by “acclamation”. A show of applause from the 221 online delegates had been mooted. But why stop at applause? Why not an air raid klaxon, or a silent scream or a howl of despair? Why not the creak of a coffin lid?
Gianni Infantino had appeared on screen some time after 2pm, propped up behind a huge and weirdly swooping illuminated desk that made him look like he was driving around the Fifa studio in an armoured desert speeder. By the time the moment of acclaim arrived almost two hours later he was deep into this thing, hands spread at a vast walnut dais.
Charisma is supposed to attach itself to power. Even Sepp Blatter had a kind of twinkly, Wonka-ish air, coming by the end to physically resemble the World Cup itself, appearing together on stage like twin gleaming golden orbs of power. Infantino is still the same smooth, fish-like figure, with eyes that look strangely flat and painted on. He tends to aim for an evangelical, proselytising, Big Guru energy. It is said that, like Blatter, he genuinely believes he’s going to win a Nobel peace prize. In practice he still looks like a salesman, albeit one with a very fine tempered-leather suitcase full of death in his hand.
“I would like to explain how this will now take place,” Infantino announced as the massed heads of the global football power brokers appeared on screen behind him, going on to state that there would be two separate shows of support, one for the winning bids, one for the procedural circus that brought us here. Yep, there really is no way out of this. Today I feel like a despot. Today I feel like football Jesus. Again. I feel that again.
The best bit was when Infantino personally demonstrated the required style of acclaim, raising his hands to the side of his face and clapping them together adorably, like a 1950s teenager expressing excitement about the appearance of a new dream-boy in town.
“Let me see your hands,” he commanded, and on cue the heads began to applaud vaguely, augmented by a smattering from the off screen inner flunky core.
“Thank you for this clear vote of support,” Infantino bellowed, before turning to the “scrutineers”, who rubber stamped the procedure with a mass of double thumbs up.
And that was pretty much that, a fait deja accompli, now formally acclaimed into existence. All that remained was to read out the names of the victorious bidders from massive envelopes of the type that usually contain samples of cheap cologne, greeted by CGI fireworks and a stock joyful fanfare. It was, in every sense of the word, an utterly pathetic spectacle; if not the most nauseating sporting stage show of all time then certainly the most nauseating yet.
With that football has now committed an extraordinary act of violence. Not to mention a show of total disdain for governance, democracy, care, love, hope and good sense. Everyone is guilty here, from the heads of the world’s football associations, to their political masters, to all of us willing to stand by and watch this happen in silence, which is, it turns out, pretty much everyone on the planet.
Throughout the process there has been a weirdly chilling sense of something coming into sight. Even when it’s lying through its teeth, football is always telling us things. It has been easy to spin this entire episode as simply a culmination of Infantino’s own very obvious egotism and lust for power. But who exactly is out of step with reality here? Who seems to be speaking the correct modern-day language of power? Clue: it’s not the rag-bag of naysayers, charities and human rights organisations on the fringes.
Instead this has all been done in plain sight. The award of the 2034 World Cup to what campaign group Reprieve describes as “one of the world’s most brutal authoritarian regimes” is an act of structural violence under the eyes of the world. “People will die,” Amnesty has said. We know this. We have data. We have 21,000 migrant worker deaths since 2016. We have the absence of proper reforms governing how the next 10 years of feverish construction are supposed to work.
Football is out there making death happen because this is politically and financially expedient. Choose mass executions, torture, enforced disappearance, male guardianship and imprisoning homosexuals. Sport has always been complicit and corrupted. The world has always been brutal. Fifa has now given us this in its most extreme form, wrapped up in a laughable pretence of governance and good intentions. And in the end everyone involved is complicit, every note of online acclaim another rap of the coffin lid, from Infantino himself to our own home football associations.
And so all the fish are now sold. All the fish were already sold. Frankly, the fish were never really up for sale in the first place. There seems little point now in rehearsing how we got here, a process of gerrymandering and fiddled exceptions too tedious to go into again. Clearly, the idea was always for Saudi Arabia to get the 2034 tournament. It is at least a change of style. Previously a bald Swiss man would gather favour and distribute prizes. Now a bald Swiss man will hoard all the chips, frontload the finance off stage and reduce the whole thing to a show trial.
The shamelessness of Fifa’s process was fully on show in Zurich. Even the bid audit process was explained via an amusingly perfunctory video showing words like “transparency” and “integrity” with arrows between them, so, like, you got to figure that’s for real dude. There is literally an arrow between “integrity” and “human rights”. Has there even been an arrow there before? No. We heard that “several meetings took place”. Careful evaluations were held. How careful? A magnifying glass graphic careful. That’s how careful.
It is almost tempting to admire the sheer unapologetic bravado of all this. At least it might be if it wasn’t so opaque. The corruption of the old Fifa was at least vaguely understandable, designed on a human scale. Chuck Blazer apparently wanted two apartments in Trump Tower, one for his cats. Yeah. Get that. We know what greed and vanity are. Jack Warner wanted to watch the world burn from inside his chinchilla-fur handbag of favour.
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What does Infantino want? It has been his career mission to award Saudi Arabia a World Cup, something he has now finally succeeded in doing via the most bizarrely stilted circumstances. Why? Can this really just be greed, power-lust, the personal struggle with Aleksander Ceferin, the desire, simply to win?
There were no real clues down the line from Zurich on an afternoon that kicked off with 10 minutes of mournful deep techno holding music. Infantino did his Dear Delegates bit, then passed graciously to his general secretary, Mattias Grafström, who dresses in full Infantino kit and is equally bald, but also looks like he does YouTube videos about how to make guacamole.
It was Grafström’s slightly saddening duty to reveal there had been a couple of letters, one from the Swiss and one from Norway, “raising concerns about the bidding process”. But don’t worry. “We will resolve and address all concerns raised after the congress.” Also, both letters will be stapled to the notes once this has been shunted through. We got you bro. Your letter is, like, totally included or whatever.
The most exciting moment came towards the end of Infantino’s opening remarks where he gave a glimpse into his own logic around this process, the story Fifa will now tell. Growing suddenly sad and grave Infantino opined: “In today’s divided world when it seems nobody can agree any more on anything, to be able to agree on something like this is definitely an incredible message.”
It is hard not to applaud this. What art! What incredible double-think! In these troubled times, in a world run by despots with democracy undermined, the message we need is a one-candidate vote railroaded through by a dictatorial executive. Only in this way can we truly unite the world.
More interesting is the way this has happened. It would be tempting to call Infantino a useful idiot. But he’s more than this. He’s an incredibly useful idiot. Or rather, he’s an enabler, an amplifier and a deeply familiar figure in his own way. You get the football despots you deserve, or at least the ones that most resemble other people in power around the world.
Infantino knows we went along with Qatar and that we will simply go along with this too. He knows our own domestic FAs, source of so much fine talk over the years, will go along with this, unrelated, no doubt, to the fact the UK prime minister was on a glad-handing mission to Saudi Arabia only last week.
The FA’s logic is that to refuse to support a World Cup you then seek to compete at might be seen as hypocrisy. The reality is that every point of principle, every moral message it has adopted in the past or adopts from here will now look absurd, inauthentic and devalued.
There was time in Zurich for further oddities and ironies. The Argentinian FA president hailed his single-candidate World Cup bid victory as a triumph for democracy, and did so without laughing. And finally the Saudi bid was introduced by some 13-year-olds, thereby offering the wonderfully hopeful spectacle of a child parroting propaganda.
A small girl insisted the message of Saudi Arabia was “anything is possible”. Insert your own male guardianship objection here. A small boy talked about Saudi Arabia’s leaders inspiring him to be anything he wants in life. Except, presumably, if he wants to be one of Saudi Arabia’s leaders and isn’t born into the royal family.
This World Cup will loom at football’s shoulder for the next 10 years. But in many ways it is already here. “This is how we football,” the Saudi bid video assured us, in a montage that made it very clear this is a nation that doesn’t just want to stage football, but to own it and decide its structures. A sport run along absurdly dictatorial lines is now firmly in the hands of the real thing. Give us your acclaim. Or don’t. It won’t really matter either way.
