World Cup column: John Barnes shows that this World Cup can be whatever you want it to be
This World Cup can be whatever you want it to be. Effectively played in an avant-garde shopping centre in an authoritarian surveillance state with no real footballing culture or history to speak of, it feels even more detached from reality, even less definable and easy to comprehend, than any other football tournament that has ever taken place.
The commercialisation of the competition means it now usually looks and feels the same regardless of whether the final takes place in Moscow or Rio. Modern World Cups have effectively been removed from the constraints of time and place, allowing the football equivalent of Disneyland to move from country to country every four years. Infantino or Blatter or Havelange has his picture taken with a murderous dictator in a modern identikit stadium in front of advertisements for the same sponsors providing the same refreshments, adverts for energy and cryptocurrency delusions.
This World Cup is different, but possibly even more lacking in genuine substance. It is essentially a blank canvas, an amorphous tournament. It has most of the recognisable parts that World Cups are made of, but the instruction manual to put it together does not match. Qatar 2022 is a build your own monstrosity instead of an ultra-specific Lego set.
You can try and portray it as the first carbon neutral World Cup despite FIFA admitting the month-long tournament will produce more carbon dioxide than some countries release in a year . You can say stadiums are so full, brimming with a fervour for football, that means they in fact exceed their official capacity. You can suggest that only three people have died building those stadiums when all evidence indicates the true number is in the thousands, and then change that official number to one that lies somewhere in between ten days after the football starts. You can claim that all are welcome, and then re-define who ‘all’ are at a later date.
You can even make it the battleground for the culture war of your choice should you so desire.
John Barnes has proven himself to be an informed and engaging speaker on issues of race, capable of posing uncomfortable questions in a way that is easy to understand. He applies the sort of logic that could realistically help to challenge a dominant paradigm that often treats racism as a problem solved.
One of the central pillars of his idea is that a middle-class, white individual does not inherently have the socio-historical grounding to relate to the experience of discrimination on the basis of race, and his segment this week on Good Morning Britain discussing criticism of what Amnesty International has described as a ‘World Cup of shame’ shared a similar sentiment.
Applying the logic of Barnes to a situation that can be said to share some characteristics should you squint in its direction to just the right extent, but has undeniable, foundational differences is essentialist. Not only is it a reductionist way of understanding separate issues with their own specific characteristics, intricacies and contexts, it also plays perfectly into the indecipherable version of this World Cup that the organisers have created.
Since the first intimation of criticism, Secretary General of the Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy Hassan Al-Thawadi has linked any critique of Qatar as hosts to racism. Genuine concerns about the rights of workers and minority groups in the gulf state is left unaddressed, instead repurposed as an example of Western exceptionalism and redirected to highlight supposed hypocrisy in countries that have somewhat similar but ultimately unrelated issues of their own.
This of course misses the point of the criticism. If Qatar wants to host a World Cup it has to accept that its practices will be scrutinised using a brighter spotlight, investigated with a microscope lens of the highest magnification. As this tournament is hard to define, it naturally follows that ways of talking about it are not always straightforward, yet it cannot escape the fundamental issue of human rights.
With the viral clip of Barnes’ appearance on Good Morning Britain centring on what is effectively a non-issue in access to alcohol at the tournament, a similar process of avoiding the issue at hand by creating a superficial debate in its place takes place. It was exactly the type of morning talk show chat that helps to generate exactly the sort of conversation TV producers want between exactly the sort of people they want it to take place between, but has any genuine critique of this World Cup centred on the difficulty of where and when you can treat yourself to a £15 Budweiser?
On Twitter, Barnes has implied that because the customs and culture of Nazi Germany were not challenged in the 1930s (which is patently untrue), we therefore should not question Qatari customs over the course of this World Cup. It is easy to understand this as a problematic re-imagining of the past used to attract eyes and create controversy, although it also plays into attempts to create so much inconsequential noise around this tournament that genuine issues can be consumed within it and forgotten about.
Qatar, as is the case with all countries, has a rich and varied history that has to be appreciated in the way that the histories of near-enough all nations do. But it was not given the right to host this competition because of this history, and cultural factors alone are not enough to ascertain whether or not somewhere is fit to host a tournament that claims to welcome everyone from every background.
The cultures of others do not have to be accepted as a whole. There can be parts that should remain sacred and respected, but that does not mean that elements cannot be criticised, not only in Qatar and the Middle East but anywhere across the globe.
As someone who had to suffer discrimination due to what was, and undeniably still is just in other forms, a part of British culture, you would hope that Barnes would find it easy to show empathy to those who have suffered due to the Qatari state. But an unfamiliar form of World Cup was always likely to generate an abstract discourse, if it can convince a 79-cap England international of its merit quite who might be next remains to be seen.
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