- World Cup hosts will be ratified during the Fifa Congress
- A history of World Cup sportswashing | And email Niall
Here’s Barney Ronay’s excellent long read on Saudi Arabia and the human cost of building the 2034 World Cup.
Gianni Infantino has both executive control and full knowledge of the possible consequences. This isn’t a hijacking. It is instead a considered and managed process. Let us sponsor the building of your hardline leisure state. Let us take the rewards, nourish ourselves on suffering in plain sight, while pretending to an almost satirical degree that it is all for love of the game, that this one’s for the children.
At which point two things can be said. First, this will stand as surely the most wretched, bloody, damaging act in the history of global organised sport. If not causing death were your starting point, your one non-negotiable, Saudi Arabia wouldn’t even be on the table. And yet Infantino appears to have actively sought this outcome, aligning his Fifa with the world’s most ruthlessly ambitious carbon power; and as a consequence taking choices that will, it can be assumed, cause demonstrable death and suffering.
