Shame on Fifa

Qatari and Russian representatives celebrate their successful World Cup bids with long-time FIFA president Joseph Blatter.

By accepting the World Cup bid of an oil-rich feudal sheikdom, with a population three times bigger than Malta’s, Fifa has behaved like the worst kind of corporation that is only interested in money.

Qatar might have made improvements especially with regards to gender equality in the past decade. But it is still a country where people receive a lashing for indulging in illicit sexual activities, homosexuality is still illegal, and 11 foreign nationals languish in prison for blaspheming against Islam. Its record on the treatment of migrant workers remains dismal.

Added to this is the absurdity of organising the World Cup in the desert where temperatures can rise to 50C. The stadiums will be air-conditioned but will fans be expected to spend the rest of their day in five-star hotels instead of marauding the streets as happens in every other World Cup?

Clearly the United States was a better choice, not just because it is a democratic nation but also because holding the World Cup there would have been a big boost to the game in a country where soccer is still an underdog, despite making enormous inroads in the past decade.

Even more sinister was the treatment reserved to England which lost the bid to organise the 2018 world cup to Putin’s Russia. Three of the Fifa executive committee members who decided the fate of the 2018 World Cup were accused of taking bribes in a Panorama BBC documentary.

It is reported that Fifa President Sepp Blatter, spoke of the "evils of the media", just before they voted on the hosting of the 2018 and 2022 events. Instead Fifa will be organising the World Cup in a country where the state is an accomplice in the murder of journalists like Anna Politkovskaya and more than 300 others murdered since 1993.

Surely the insular world of football will respond that football and politics should not mix. But it is this naive insularity masked as political innocence which has created a fertile ground for Blatter and his kind.