Fake World Cup

I've been waiting for someone to ask me if I'm enjoying the World Cup so that I can tell them that I'm boycotting it.  But nobody has, so I'm going to tell you instead.  I'll be honest here, my boycott started accidentally - I completely forgot that England were playing their first match last week, so missed it completely.  Not only did I find that I was completely unbothered by this, but it brought home to me my complete disinterest in the charade tat is the 2022 World Cup.  I had already barely noticed that the opening match was taking place the day before the England match, so muted has the UK media been in the build up to this event.  Which, to be honest, is as it should be - the decision to award the 2022 World cup to Qatar was a travesty from the outset.  A nation with no footballing tradition, (not to mention only one stadium when the event was awarded), a highly dubious human rights record, unable to stage the event in the summer, (despite this being a criteria when it was awarded), but lots and lots of oil money.  This is the ultimate in 'sportswashng, using a sporting event to rehabilitate and legitimise a repressive regime in the hope of bringing it international respectability, with FIFA fully complicit in the exercise.  Qatar has no business staging this, or any other major international event.  But, of course, such decisions aren't guided by things like morality, but rather by money and politics.  Hence the fact that we've had the Olympics, (both summer and winter), held in such paragons of human rights and democracy as the Soviet Union/Russia and China.  Not to mention a recent World Cup in Russia.  One might also point at the chequered histories of several South American hosts of the World Cup with regard to democracy and human rights.

So here we are in Qatar in 2022, with local officials trying to tell us that people wanting to wave rainbow flags, wear rainbow hats and armbands in support of the LGBQT community that is severely repressed in his country as 'divisive' and how everyone should be respecting local 'customs and traditions'.  Not to forget FIFA happily coercing participating teams into suppressing even the mildest and most peaceful protests.  But getting back to those 'local traditions': let's not forget that these include locking up LGBQT people simply for being 'different' and working poorly paid migrant workers with no health and safety protections to death.  Yeah, we all should be respecting those, shouldn't we?  You know, I've surprised myself as to just how strongly I feel about these issues. On top of all that, we've also had FIFA bending over backwards to accommodate their oil rich buddies by disrupting football leagues the world over in order to stage the event in the winter, despite Qatar having won it on the basis that they could stage it, as normal, in the summer.  Consequently, it simply doesn't even feel like a proper World Cup.  Indeed, I've come to think of it as a fake World Cup, like how they sometimes used to have fake Popes who would set up shop somewhere other than Rome and claim to be the 'real' Pope.  Or those pretenders to the throne you used to get - fake Kings desperately trying to establish their legitimacy.  Like those, all of Qatar and FIFA's attempts to convince us that this World cup is the real thing and actually legitimate are ultimately unconvincing.  For FIFA, especially, this has been a PR disaster, with their apparent propping up of a repressive regime by lending them the 'prestige' of staging their premier event completely undermining all their attempts that, since the corruption scandals that swept away Sepp Blatter and his cronies, they are a reformed, corruption free, organisation.  Personally, I think that the best thing they can do is simply expunge this World Cup from the records altogether and hope that people forget about their pandering to Qatar's Sheiks and their oil billions.  Because it really is easy to ignore right now, as I've found.