A better World (Cup) is Possible

With the 2022 World Cup kicking off in Qatar on Monday, Rupture contributor Ciarán Mac Aodha Bhuí analyses the spectacle surrounding the tournament, the recent trend of sportwashing, and the need for a turn towards grassroots sports to counter football’s continued commercialisation.

Despite years of controversy, our collective attention was drawn towards Qatar on Monday - with the host nation’s 2-0 loss to Ecuador bringing a start to the 2022 World Cup. While almost every major sporting event ushers in weeks of endless discourse, the current World Cup seems notable on account of how brazenly cynical it feels, a feeling captured by endless media references to how the real story is taking place off the pitch. Even though the recent conversation about ‘sportwashing’ was in part started by the decision to give Qatar the tournament, actually sitting down to watch this artificial tournament feels like its logical conclusion - with shallow pop music and advertisements for gambling websites papering over stories of abuse and oppression. As the media circus around the tournament reaches full speed, I think it is important for us as socialists to analyse the nature of this tournament, the wider commodification of football it personifies, and what a fairer alternative would look like.

As article after article has outlined, the current World Cup serves as one of the most manufactured and plastic-feeling spectacles in sporting history, with the Qatari state spending billions to rapidly construct the facade of a footballing history. The state has spent the last decade struggling against the impracticalities of hosting the tournament - pushing for the tournament to be played in Winter on account of Qatar’s climate, using exploitative labour to build the necessary infrastructure to host, and naturalising players to put together the squad that lost on Monday. Watching the synthetic bombast of the opening ceremony borders on feeling offensive when you remember that the Qatari state has the power to detain LGBTQ+ people without any trial and that homosexual activity can lead to a seven year prison sentence. Once your mind turns to the recent statement from a World Cup Ambassador claiming that being gay was “a damage in the mind” and FIFA’s cowardly choice to threaten England and Wales out of wearing anti-discrimination armbands, it becomes almost impossible to solely focus on the football. This feeling has been worsened by the approach taken by FIFA and UEFA, with president Gianni Infantino’s absurd speech personifying an urge to muddy the waters and only support LGBT rights when they are immediately profitable.

However, it would be wrong to portray this plastic spectacle as a unique excess - with the current World Cup instead serving as a grotesque personification of sportswashing. This term is used to describe attempts by large groups or corporations to use the spectacle of sports to improve their image and build soft power, a process that we’re all painfully familiar with. In recent years, we’ve seen shady corporations and states throw billions into acquiring football teams, often going against the interests of grassroots fans in their attempts. For example, we’ve seen energy drink brands bend the rules in order to advertise in Germany, Saudi Arabia spending billions to take over Newcastle, and an infamous failed attempt to form a European Super League that nobody actually wanted. Time and time again we see a fundamental rupture between the interests of the “prawn sandwich brigade” who believe they create value and the players and supporters that actually do.

In his cutting analysis of the 2012 Olympic Games, Mark Fisher notes the fundamentally antagonistic relationship between sports and capitalism - arguing that “PR boosterism cannot tolerate the very thing which makes sport so fascinating - its unpredictability, the fact that high drama is not guaranteed”. If we are to break from the excesses of sportwashing and recover grassroots sports, there is a need for us to place this trend within its wider context and realise how inseparable sportswashing is from the capitalist system. It is also important for us to note the West’s complicity in this process, with Britain’s close relationship with the Qatari state enabling continued repression to occur. As powerfully argued by David Wearing in ‘The Guardian’:

“As a Potemkin village of 21st-century capitalism, the 2022 World Cup is not a phenomenon separate from or alien to the west. It is a representative example of the world that western power built. The western brands sponsoring the tournament benefit just as the regime does from the continued exploitation of migrant labour that is making the tournament possible. And to the extent that the tournament serves to sportswash authoritarianism, it will be sportswashing an authoritarianism that has long been a joint venture between the west and Qatar”

Rather than being an outside threat, the real causes of the continued commodification of sports are coming from inside the house - with the logic of capitalism bringing us to this current point.

But where are we to go from here? Returning to Fisher’s words, he makes the argument that we need to separate sports from the spectacle, noting that what makes people enjoy events like the World Cup “is everything for which Capital is not responsible: the efforts of the athletes [and] the experience of a shared publicness”. As socialists, it is important that we learn from the work of people such as Julius Deutsch and push for non-corporatised forms of this experience, organising working-class alternatives to these corporate celebrations. In the Irish context, lessons can be drawn from the early history of the Gaelic Athletic Association - with an amateur, community-focused ethos serving as a counterweight to creeping commercialisation. On an international level, it is also important for us to look back at the work undertaken by the Socialist Worker’s Sport International - with their alternative Worker’s Olympiads drawing out spectators in the thousands. Regardless of whether we end up watching the next few weeks of football, there is a need for us to imagine and build towards an alternative system of sport that places the interests of athletes and their wider communities before profit. Only through a clean break from the profit motive will we be able to find new ways to watch and play.