Welcome to the Fake World Cup

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Has there ever been a more surreal start to a World Cup than last night’s peculiar opening ceremony and game? 

Perfectly manicured lawns surrounding a stadium built with the hands, and blood, of thousands of immigrant workers — in the middle of a desert; with vast air-conditioning units necessarily cooling the air for players and fans, a section of whom were apparently complete fakes. 

Earlier in the day, in Sharm El-Sheik in Egypt, world leaders had staggered and stuttered their way to a wholly inadequate new climate deal at COP27, despite a marathon final negotiating session that went 40 hours past its original deadline. 

If you needed a symbol of excess, and carbon recklessness, here it was, just 2 000 km across the Saudi desert. 

Since all sport — and especially football — is an escape from reality, this World Cup is the ultimate suspension of all disbelief. 

Qatar 2022 runs against the grain of human progress myriad ways: the excessive opulence and gross inequality, financed by the fossil fuels that have left humanity “our planet in the emergency room”, as United Nations secretary-general Antonio Guterres yesterday; the strident refusal to accept the rights of workers and the LGBT+ community. 

The hopeless Qatari national team provided a World Cup precedent: the first host country team to lose an opening match of the tournament. The team played like a pub team caught in the headlights of their own big moment; completely overwhelmed, they lost 2-0 to Ecuador. 

The air-conditioning wasn’t needed; the South American team barely broke into a sweat. 

Money can’t buy you love, they say. Nor, apparently, can it buy you a decent football team. Many of the Qatari elite started to leave at half-time, humiliated by the meek showing of their national side. 

Usually your average football fan would be rooting for the host nation, especially if, as with South Africa in 2010, they are an underdog and representing a continent that has been subject to so much colonial injustice. 

This was different. In my living room, there was an unending stream of sardonic commentary. When the video assistant referee turned over the first Ecuadorian ”goal” in the third minute of the game, after an especially comic piece of play by the home team’s goalkeeper, it was greeted with cynicism. Qatar, it is widely assumed, bought this World Cup with bribes to Fifa, an organisation that lacks any credibility, so of course the VAR would step in 

The fact that the goal was offside and correctly overturned was irrelevant:;this is a World Cup that is deeply disliked and distrusted.

This is a country where a small number of Qataris buy in everything that they don’t like doing themselves, from cleaning toilets to building their own stadiums. 

Singing for their own national team is also, apparently, below the Qatari elite. Hence, the bizarre optics of having a group of “ultras” flown in from Lebanon for the assignment — surely the biggest stretch in credibility for the “global game”. 

Qatar 2022 will be known forever as the Fake World Cup. 

It feels as if the enormous investment in soft power influence and footprint has been wasted; that the tournament has damaged, rather than advanced, the global reputation and standing of the small Middle Eastern nation.  

Is there any chance that the game can turn things around and create a set of memories to eclipse all of the gory nonsense and injustice that has so far been the hallmark of this World Cup? 

Perhaps. But, more likely not. For players and fans alike, it seems like an inconvenience, disrupting the flow of the European leagues, such as the English Premier League — especially if you are an Arsenal fan.  

These city-state leagues are where the power really lies now in the “beautiful game”. The World Cup feels like a grotesque irrelevance.

Today, England have to decide whether its captain, Harry Kane, will wear the “One Love” badge on his shirt and thereby risk a booking. Kane should do so; England should take a principled stand. But I doubt they will. 

Either way, the real story — the real drama, even — would appear to be not on the field of play, but in the surrounding context. 

Yes, the Fake World Cup is what this is.