The twenty-second edition of the men’s football World Cup is over. There has been some good stories throughout the tournament, with the underdogs playing their part and getting some headlines for themselves. Saudi Arabia beat the eventual winners Argentina in the first round, Japan and South Korea showed Asian football to be both well organised and fun to watch, Morocco became the first African and Arabian team to reach a World Cup semi-final. All of this and more provided good copy for sports journalists around the globe. We’ve also had a Grande Finale befitting of the fixture, as France staged a comeback to push Lionel Messi’s Argentine team all the way to penalties, only for the greatest player of his generation to finally win this competition at his last time of trying. This sort of fairytale is like catnip for the journalism that’s prevalent in the mainstream sports media. It provided something for pundits to talk about for years to come. Future generations will look back at the imagery and think, ‘what a time to be alive, a football fan and to have access to a television all at the same time’. However, there are a couple of points that we should also remember going forward…

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Firstly, and this is what FIFA and Gianni Infantino would like us to focus on, is the standard of football. Unlike the President of world football, though, I haven’t been overly impressed with the spectacle across the board. Apart from a few matches and a small handful of teams most of the time it would have been more entertaining to watch recently painted walls dry off. Broadly speaking, the big teams have failed to have as big an impact as they would have liked. There were a couple of thrashings, from pre-tournament favourites, but each time it was against poorly organised, lower ranked sides, who unfortunately just got the tactics wrong on the day, or at least in the first half. Whenever I watched Spain, the European team generally expected to play a pretty variation of the game, they looked toothless and rather boring. The only time that they scored more than one goal in a match was against Costa Rica in their opening match, an opponent that were not expected to, and did not, get out of Group E. They eventually went out to a determined Moroccan side on penalties, after two hours of a second round goalless stalemate. 

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Brazil are considered to be the purveyors of the ‘beautiful game’. A team that is expected to play brilliantly and electrically all the way up to the final. This year they went out at the quarter-final stage for the fourth time in their last five attempts. There was some good football played at times, but as soon as they met a team of equal worth to their own, they struggled. They went out to Croatia, who seem to have become the experts in recent years of grinding opponents down through extra time and penalties. They came out winners this time 4-2 from spot kicks, having won their second round match in similar fashion. In fact one of the more exciting teams in the tournament was England, which as a fan of the side, I found quite pleasing. However, one of the few criticisms of the national team coach, former defensive player Gareth Southgate, is that his tactics are far too conservative and that he has a predilection for full backs over wingers. Being that the English were one of the more high scoring sides at these championships perhaps says something about the flavour of the finals. 

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My favourite teams to watch as a neutral were Morocco, South Korea and Japan. They were well organised, didn’t give much away (apart from a misjudged tactical switch from the Koreans against the Brazilians), were fast on the counter attack and looked to use some good players upfront when going forward. It was the closest style of play that we saw to swashbuckling football in the World Cup and I was glad to see an African team get to the semi-finals for the first time playing this way. Yes, they were defensively organised most of the time, but at least they were honest about it, unlike a Spanish side that made me want to perform amateur dentistry on myself whenever I watched them play.

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Secondly, we should also keep talking about the awarding of the of the World Cup finals to a nation state with an undemocratic government, a dodgy human rights record and terrible legal policies around homosexuality and the LGBTQ+ community. Qatar 2022 is the second championships in a row to be awarded to such a country with the Russians, led by former KGB agent and autocrat, Vladimir Putin, hosting the championships in 2018. This begs the question, of what is going on in the corridors of power at FIFA HQ?

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Football, at the elite level, is no longer a community based sporting activity. It is now a fully fledged part of the entertainment industry and one that can bring in millions, if not billions of pounds in revenue. It is a big business, which investors around the world are getting themselves involved in. It is no surprise to me that the 2026 World Cup is going to be co-hosted across North and Central America, with most of the matches to be held in the USA, home of many sporting franchises and conglomerates. American politics, as well, has had a variety of issues around equal opportunities for the LGBTQ+ community and women’s reproductive rights. It’s not only the Americans who have a lot of money floating around the sports entertainment industry. Up until the recent invasion of Ukraine, Russian oligarchs had been putting money in to football for years. Most famously Roman Abramovich was in charge at English Premier League side Chelsea, but there has been others dotted around Europe. Anton Zigarevich, formerly at Reading FC, latterly invested in Bulgarian team Botev Plovdic. Additionally, there has been Maxim Demin at AFC Bournemouth, as well as Dmitry Rybolovlev, who has been listed on the Forbes rich list and was involved at AS Monaco, on the French Riviera. Members of the Russian elite only maintain their positions by working alongside the strongman at the top of their government and it is feasible to assume that there is some door opening for political diplomacy through sporting involvement. 

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Qatar 2022 has thrown up similar concerns. Although there has been no evidence of bribery or corruption in the decision to award the World Cup finals to the country on the Arabian Peninsula, it comes alongside a range of endeavours to bring sporting and entertainment revenues to the Gulf State, or investment is done so elsewhere in its name. Government owned Qatar Airways has, in recent years, been a major shirt sponsor for football clubs including La Liga’s Barcelona, Boca Juniors in Argentina and Italian giants AS Roma. As well as the World Cup, Qatar has hosted a number of other events, including the FIFA Club World Cup, a tournament for the best domestic league teams from each continental federation, as well as multi sports festival the Asian Games and championships from other sports such as handball, athletics and cycling. Through the government’s financial investments in sports comes with it the potential to keep the larger profits from the income revenues that they provide, as well as the large amounts of prestige that comes with being involved with these events. All of this has led to accusations of sports washing. This is the act of cleansing from controversy and moving the conversation on from those who wish to speak about the negatives around certain acts, or policies. Regarding the Qatari Government, the inference here is that they want people to forget about their human rights record, the manner in which they treat women and their laws on homosexuality. This should not be forgotten just because the World Cup Final was a bit of a ding dong affair, with some fun football on show.

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As I begin to wind up this essay, I will encourage football fans to think about how they spend their money. Look into the ownership of the local club, to see who benefits from the ticket revenues on any given match day, have a think about who is sponsoring the team that you are watching, or the competition of which they are involved. Ask yourself why a fixture or a tournament is being hosted in a certain location and what the ramifications of your support might be. Football is a fantastic sport that can bring plenty of positives with your involvement in it. Whether you are a player, a coach, or a fan, there are plenty of ways to engage in local and global communities. You can help organise a youth team, play Sunday league, or even be a part of a fan group. All are ways in which you can have an impact on the sport. We can all make positive changes within football. 

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