Infantino’s platitudes about ‘feeling gay’ are in sharp contrast to his appetite for Saudi’s fossil-fuel fortunes
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The 110 pages in Fifa’s report into Saudi Arabia’s bid for the 2034 World Cup finals discuss everything from hotel provision, referees’ training camps and climatic conditions to food and beverage revenue projections and even human rights. Of the LGBT community and how they might be accommodated in a kingdom where homosexuality is illegal, there is not a single mention.
One can only guess that when Fifa president Gianni Infantino approved the completed draft of the biggest act of sportswashing in his organisation’s history, he just did not feel very gay.
A sharp contrast to his opening address at the 2022 Qatar World Cup finals when the Fifa president monologued in surprising fashion about his various identities as the world stood on the brink of another Fifa-Middle East collaboration. Then he said he “felt gay”, as well as Qatari, African, disabled and “like a migrant worker”. But the years have passed and Fifa’s appetite for the Saudi fossil fuel fortunes have sharpened more than ever.
Fifa has a Club World Cup to fund next summer, with European clubs grumbling over the fees and no major broadcast contract yet announced. Fifa is in a global battle with Uefa and the Premier League for a greater share of the broadcast rights’ billions. Its four-yearly showpiece money-machine event is now a 48-team monolith for which qualification is harder to fail than pass for any major football nation.
Of course, everyone knows that it would be impossible for the devout kingdom of Saudi to associate itself with gay rights, even amid the banalities of a Fifa report. What grinds away is the sheer hypocrisy. As with Qatar, the signalling has to be couched in terms more palatable for the putative host nation. There are vague references to “non-discrimination” but nothing explicit. With a nervous clearing of the throat, the bid meekly notes “gaps and reservations in the implementation of relevant international standards, in particular where they are seen to contradict Islamic law”.
Had Fifa just ditched the talk about values and confessed it was into Saudi for the money, one could have at least noted its honesty.
Most of the time Fifa can ride two separate horses: championing LGBT rights, as it does on its website for a Western audience while discreetly avoiding the issue with its wealthy partners in the Middle East. But at some point those two worlds must collide and here it was in the Saudi bid report, slipped out at 12.32am Central European Time in the small hours of Saturday morning like an illegal fly-tip.
Fifa had succeeded in getting Saudi at least to acknowledge human rights, although none of it retrospective. It had secured a pledge that there would be no World Cup-adjacent torturing of dissidents. There would be freedom of the press. That was as far as it would go.
Once more it was all about the refusal to acknowledge what is not being said, rather than the thousands of words that said very little. But this is the deal that Infantino has struck with Saudi, and he is in so far now that there is no going back. “A catalyst for some of the ongoing and future reforms” was the oft-repeated deathless corporate-speak relating to human rights.
Where Saudi 2034 will certainly be a catalyst for change, is the revenues of Fifa. The report forecasts a drop in costs in some areas of as much as $450 million (£353 million) from baseline figures. For ticketing and hospitality Fifa predicts revenues up 32 per cent on the baseline, as much as $240 million (£188 million) in real terms. Little wonder that Fifa redesigned the bidding process last year to give potential hosts only eight weeks to commit to the tournament – which forced Australia out of the running and left Saudi as the only candidate.
These are very encouraging numbers for Fifa, and with 15 stadiums, including eight new-builds across five cities – including the new-build city of Neom – one suspects it will all look fantastic on television. Of the proposed designs, the Roshn Stadium in Riyadh looks like a giant version of the kryptonite from Superman III. The Neom Stadium? A very expensive infinity pool. The Jeddah Central Development Stadium? Goodison Park recreated on Minecraft.
Of course, people will be needed to build these stadiums, hotels, roads and metro systems, and Fifa has some reassuring words for them, too. A “worker welfare system” drawn up by the Saudis themselves and with some monitoring from the United Nations agency, the International Labour Organisation. When it comes to human rights, Fifa’s official overall risk assessment of Saudi is simply “medium”. It is worth noting that in no category, from broadcast facilities, to anti-doping, is the risk ever assessed as more serious than medium, and most of it is rated low risk.
The report is a simple rubber-stamping of Saudi’s anointment at Fifa Congress in Zurich on Dec 11, which Infantino needs desperately to happen. The report does not even concede Saudi must hold the World Cup in the winter although once again, the unwritten truth is that there is no way it can be held in the summer when temperatures in Riyadh, by Fifa’s own admission, can hit 42 degrees Celsius.
“In light of the climatic conditions … the bid has been assessed as presenting an elevated risk in terms of event timing,” Fifa delicately concludes. As well as the heat, there is a hint of warning that the World Cup will not be permitted to “overlap” with other “sporting, cultural and religious events”. The calendar for 2034 has not yet been decided and Fifa makes clear that it will bend to whatever requirements Saudi has for that year to accommodate this World Cup at a time of the hosts’ choosing.
For Infantino one assumes it is all worth it. He must by now have some agreement as to what Saudi will do for Fifa over the next 10 years, just 11 days out from handing the kingdom and its ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, sport’s greatest global event. If the Saudis are on the hook to fund the Club World Cup next summer for instance, those assurances must be cast-iron. Because as this report suggests, Infantino has given Saudi everything he can.
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