Matt Maher: Does money-grabbing Fifa have a line it won’t cross?
What would it take, you wonder, for Fifa to ever draw a line?
Nearly a year on from staging a controversial World Cup in Qatar, football’s governing body continues to do as it pleases, apparently without much of a care for its own reputation or that of the sport it is responsible for running.
This week it delivered a double whammy after plans for the 2030 World Cup to be staged in six countries across three continents was followed by confirmation the 2034 tournament will be staged in either Asia or Oceania, opening the door for Saudi Arabia, another nation with an appalling human rights record, to launch a bid for an event many assume to already be theirs.
“In a divided world, Fifa and football are uniting,” Fifa president Gianni Infantino declared.
Suffice to say, not everyone agrees.
“[It’s] horrendous for supporters, disregards the environment and rolls the red carpet out to a host for 2034 with an appalling human rights record. It’s the end of the World Cup as we know it,” was the view of Football Supporters Europe, who also accused Fifa of engaging in a “cycle of destruction against the greatest tournament on earth”.
In many ways the plans for 2030 are simply a logical continuation of Fifa’s belief that bigger automatically means better. The preceding tournament in the USA, Canada and Mexico three years from now is already set to be the biggest World Cup ever, with 16 extra nations and 104 matches – an increase of 40 from Qatar last winter. The fact that is 24 more matches than originally planned, with Fifa having had to hurriedly scrap its original idea of having teams split into 16 groups of three, after some bright spark realised the potential for dead rubbers and skullduggery, matters little to an organisation whose chief motivation always appears to be dollar signs.
