What do a Saudi Arabian World Cup, inexplicable VAR mistakes, David Beckham pretending Qatar was the best gay World Cup ever because, like, his gay mate told him it was, and the cancellation of the HS2 northern section have in common?
For the first time I can reveal that all these things are indeed connected. Just because you’ve been cajoled into a state of paranoid alienation by algorithm-driven conspiracy theories, it doesn’t mean they’re not actually out to get you. Just not, perhaps, in the most obvious way.
First it is time to see the positives in what is finally a sustainable World Cup. Fifa announced on Wednesday that the 2030 men’s tournament would take place across three continents, with 48 teams travelling up to 6,000 miles between venues in Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Spain, Portugal and Morocco, plans that have been heavily criticised on carbon-footprint grounds alone.
On the face of it this might look insane, perverse and eye-wateringly wasteful. But drill into the numbers and it becomes clear that increased oil revenues from the long-haul migrations of Everywhere 2030 will cover the costs of Saudi’s own World Cup four years later. This is surely the definition of sustainability.
Here we have a World Cup double-header that effectively pays for itself. Not to mention another example of the same joined-up Fifa thinking that led to a war started by the 2018 hosts helping to fund the World Cup infrastructure of the 2022 hosts.
This last bit is not actually a joke. Qatar Energy’s annual net profits rose by $22bn (£18bn) last year due to the gas price surge from a war started by Qatar’s Fifa predecessors Russia (World Cup motto: Play with an open heart). In the words of the great Jungkook: we are the dreamers. We make it happen. Because we believe it.
It isn’t hard to see how Fifa reached its decision on Everywhere 2030, announced out of the blue a year before the deadline. The most persuasive theory is that the host-sharing plan is a way of ensuring that under the rotation rules Fifa can award 2034 to Saudi Arabia, the outstanding Asian candidate now that the Asian Football Confederation has declared its support.
The new regime prefers this kind of political compromise, a far more reliable source of power than the bidding system, with its old-school mobility-scooter-sweep of handbags and fancy watches. In the new Fifa everyone gets a fish.
There will of course be a great deal of double-speak about spreading the game, about the booming promise of the Saudi league. In reality this is about courting the biggest sponsors in world sport and tying Fifa’s fortunes to the endlessly gushing cash tap of Vision 2030.
That relationship is already cosy-close. Gianni Infantino has regularly called on Saudi support for assorted pet projects, from the two-yearly World Cup to club football expansionism. Here we have the quid pro quo, presented to the world without even the light relief of a press conference from the great Gianni himself, who no doubt would have been feeling not just gay or female but like a machine-gunned African border migrant.
There will be a familiar response to this. Saudi Arabia is a repressive monarchy where homosexuality is punishable by flogging, where dissenters are imprisoned and tortured and where human rights organisations are banned. It is clearly wrong that football’s guardians, still parroting stock platitudes of equality and freedom, should reward this state with the greatest sporting spectacle on earth.
There will be attempts to rationalise it. The US, one of three 2026 hosts, also has many failings as a society. One bad thing is the same as all the other bad things. Let’s just watch the world burn. Perhaps in England we should even be celebrating the fact one of our own Premier League members is poised to secure the World Cup. Maybe Newcastle’s ultimate majority owners, the per-capita capital of decapitation, will decide to stage a quarter-final at St James’ Park. Maybe it’s finally coming home!
Zoom out a little, however, and the only reasonable responses to this dual announcement are the entirely logical feelings of alienation and disaffection. And this is where the other stuff comes in.
The other big question of the week is: why is football so vulnerable to conspiracy theories?
Why does it seem reasonable to so many people that the sweaty and incompetent men in charge of VAR are in fact a sinister conspiracy? Why is the bizarre decision to allow referees to moonlight in the UAE being interpreted as proof of direct and demonstrable corruption, as opposed to direct and demonstrable stupidity? Why is football so vulnerable to mass fits of anger?
The answer to this is obvious enough. People feel alienated and disempowered because the world has alienated and disempowered them. They distrust authority because authority has shown itself to be untrustworthy.
Albeit, the problem with actual conspiracy theories is that they tend to disguise the more mundane truth. There is a conspiracy out there. But it’s not a secret thing agreed by a lizard cabal. This is instead an overt and very public conspiracy, a conspiracy of the powerful versus the powerless, of conjoined and self-supporting interests.
This is what football is telling us very loudly and in no uncertain terms. Money and power will simply overwhelm everything in their path. This is why Paris Saint-Germain can sell Julian Draxler to the Qatari league for a budget balancing sum, because it’s just what can happen when you have the means.
It’s why Beckham can get away with talking rot, because it turns out with power and a platform you can say what you want, truth is just spray in the wind. It is why nation-state entities buying clubs in post-industrial cities will use the language of economic abandonment, then talk up their community credentials, because people are vulnerable to this kind of talk right now.
This is what Fifa’s tournament double-header has to tell us, 2030 and 2034 the World Cups of climate death and state-sanctioned death. Now if you’ll excuse me, Darren England is on Rumble talking about getting too close to the truth and being cancelled by a meat-taxing elite. Ask yourself, would we even be talking about this if he was called Darren Germany?
