Why Fifa chief's is right about Qatar's critics

If there were any doubt the politics of world football is performance theatre, Gianni Infantino laid it to rest 24 hours before the World Cup kicked off in Qatar. In an extraordinary 57-minute monologue to journalists assembled in Qatar, the president of Fifa, world soccer’s governing body, conflated 12 years of sustained and hostile criticism of the West Asian country’s many failings with colonialism, Eurocentrism and Western hypocrisy. “I think for what we Europeans have been doing [for] the last 3,000 years we should be apologising for [the] next 3,000 years before starting to give moral lessons to people,” he said. The comment suggested a somewhat skewed notion of timelines (3,000 years of European dominance?) but then Infantino is neither historian nor philosopher. He’s a trained lawyer, a career sports administrator, a Swiss-Italian man with a shiny pate and a face as smooth and creamy as a Caucasian baby’s bottom.Overall though, he had a point, one first made clear by the stinging headline in a German tabloid back in 2010, right after Fifa picked the 2022 World Cup host. “Qatarstrophe”, the paper declared, alleging that only petro-wealth and corruption could have influenced the Gulf kingdom’s selection.It’s worth noting that even now, despite all the incessant rumours and intrepid reporting, there is no clear chain of evidence to link the Qatari authorities with any act of impropriety or graft in securing the right to host world football’s biggest contest.Maybe it’s yet to be revealed, but without evidence, it does seem rather prejudiced to suggest that an Arab country can only win something because it offers big bucks in brown envelopes for it, rather than on account of any driving aspiration or abiding ambition. The onslaught has not let up in the 12 years since, with Qatar continuing to be hit by caterwauling over everything – its record on human rights, labour standards and LGBTQ+ people, its desert conditions, even its immense wealth with all the dismal market-distorting implications of being able to buy European football clubs as well as the world’s best players, form its own national football team from scratch and bankroll $220 billion worth of new stadiums, roads, train systems, hotels and other infrastructure. All along, the campaign against Qatar has basically seemed to attack it for being Qatar. But wasn’t that why it was awarded the World Cup in the first place, to blaze a new trail for football in the sands of Arabia? medium nocaption95666110 In the circumstances, Infantino’s musings – half-lament, half-criticism, partly angry, partly meditative – served as a mash-up of theatrical forms at a critical moment for the debate over ownership of something that was once the exclusive domain of European states and their erstwhile South American outposts. It was simultaneously immersive and expressionist and could have qualified as a one-person multimedia play, a piece of theatre that pushes the boundaries in a daring and unpredictable way. It was reminiscent of Yoko Ono’s 1964 performance art, ‘Cut Piece’, in which the Japanese artist who would later marry John Lennon, knelt on an empty stage with a pair of scissors in front of her and encouraged members of the audience to come on stage one by one and cut off any piece of her clothing. Like Ono, Infantino offered up himself to be savaged. “You want to criticise, you can crucify me,” he said.“I’m here for that. Don’t criticise anyone. Don’t criticise Qatar. Let people enjoy this World Cup.” With the actual football having finally begun in Doha, chances are that people will eventually come to enjoy the World Cup because every four years, it breaks records as the planet’s most watched sporting event. Even so, the sum and substance of Infantino’s performance theatre raises as many questions as it answers. It presents a stark narrative of historic alienation, an othering that can never be overcome, albeit with so comedic a juxtaposition the original point never hits home. Infantino started with a bizarre medley of hypothetical figures that stood outside the golden circle of universal approval: “Today I feel Qatari. Today I feel Arabic.Today I feel African.Today I feel gay.Today I feel disabled.Today I feel [like] a migrant worker.” But then Infantino acknowledged that despite being none of those things, he still knew “what it means to be discriminated [against], to be bullied, as a foreigner in a foreign country”. Apparently Gianni, the boy, growing up in an Alpine town in Switzerland close to the Italian border, had been bullied by peers because of his red hair and freckles. To compare the Fifa president’s boyhood travails with Qatar’s experience as the much-reviled World Cup host may have been artistic licence taken too far. But it is valid to examine the fury that has enveloped a country for its awesome ambition, which has taken it from dusty pearl-fishing backwater and former British protectorate to a global cultural marker of change. Rashmee Roshan Lall is based in London and writes on international affairs