This is “Black Friday” and then some. Thanks to the huge numbers of office Christmas parties, paramedics, bouncers and doctors are struggling to scrape binge drinking Britons off the pavement.
Tuesday saw a commission set up by FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, recommend what was already the worst held secret in sport: that the 2022 World Cup finals in Qatar should be moved from the oppressive heat in the summer to the cooler winter months. Some initial reports suggest that December 23 could be the day of the World Cup final.
If the right-leaning British tabloid Daily Mail thought Black Friday 2014 was bad, it might find December 23, 2022 really will signal the end of days.
At least that’s the impression you get from the reaction to a possible winter World Cup. Discounting the fact that “winter” is a relative term (there have already been six World Cup finals hosted during winter months in the southern hemisphere,) the reaction has been almost universally negative; a sign not just of Qatar’s perceived ability to change the rules of the game, but also of FIFA’s mendacity.
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And then there’s an issue of migrant worker rights. Qatar has promised changes to the Kafala system and rightly so. No World Cup should ever be built by workers with such a tenuous grasp over their own destinies.
But Qatar winning the bid to host the 2022 World Cup has, by accident and under pressure from the intense media glare that followed it, enhanced visibility of this exploitation, not diminished it. The World Cup has made reform of the system more likely, not less.
Until Qatar won the bid in 2010, reporting on the issue was negligible. Previously the Kafala system would be routinely dismissed as a necessary step towards global development, like migrants arriving in the U.S. to build the American dream. That view is now not heard.
Take Qatar out of the equation and you are left with one question: what would actually be wrong with a winter World Cup? We talk big about football being a global game, why not make it truly global? Worry less about the cash-rich English Premier League having to make alterations to their schedule, and worry more about the paramedics, bouncers and doctors on 23, December 2022. And brace yourself for the blackest of Black Fridays.
