The Future of Football
by Thomas Harrison '24
The FIFA World Cup, referred to colloquially as The World Cup, is an international sporting event that takes place every four years. Watched by billions of veritable armies, the tournament draws worldwide attention to an intense game of strategy and skill between thirty-two qualifying national teams. For one month of seeming respite from the constant onslaught of conflict and geopolitical tensions, thirty-two national teams of twenty-six athletes compete under the same rules.
​
At least objectively, there are no politics to football. Each team must field eleven players including a goalkeeper and a team captain. Every player, regardless of their upbringing, race, age, height, or nationality (given their national team’s qualification), has the ability to win national honor and pride in the largest sporting event in history. Every four years new tears are shed (look no further than the “national tragedy” that was Brazil’s 1-7 loss to Germany in 2014), rivalries are formed, and the tussle for national pride begins anew.
​
Like all things that have immense popularity and marketability, however, money quickly becomes a gigantic factor in the operation of football. In the case of 2022’s World Cup, the decision for the tournament to be hosted in the nation of Qatar had already pre-ruffled feathers before the first kick-off had even happened.
​
For starters, the decision to give the tournament to Qatar in the first place was controversial. For the process of choosing the host of the World Cup, FIFA (The Fédération internationale de football association) utilizes an exhaustive ballot system in which members of the FIFA “Congress” submit ballots to a vote with their choices of prospective host countries, which will be tabulated for a decision made around seven years prior to the event. A simple majority of votes is required for a nation to be chosen to host the tournament.
​
A lawsuit emerged in 2020 (ten years after Qatar was chosen to host) led by American prosecutors alleging that money had been paid out to several FIFA officials in order to vote for both Russia and Qatar (Russia hosted in 2018), and in 2022, after years of investigations and indictments, the United States Department of Justice said for the first time that representatives working for both Russia and Qatar had bribed FIFA officials in order to secure hosting rights for the World Cup.
​
Irrespective of culpability, however, both World Cups proceeded. Russia 2018 was a fairly uneventful tournament with little political discourse backpacking off of the football played.
Qatar 2022 was not.
​
Construction on Qatar’s glittering array of football palaces began in 2010. Since then, an estimated 6500 workers have perished constructing them, coming largely from struggling populations of foreign nations. In 2016 Amnesty International, a nongovernmental humanitarian organization, alleged that workers had been forced to pay “huge recruitment fees” and struggled constantly with “punitive and illegal wage deductions.” Even ignoring these claims, which could be unsubstantiated, there is a serious and unyielding death toll of marginalized migrant workers associated with Qatar’s construction nightmare.
​
2700 perished from India alone. Nepal, 1600. Bangladesh, 1000.
​
With death tolls as severe as these, it would seem strange for an event such as a World Cup to even continue. Nevertheless, Qatar got the World Cup of their dreams. Nearly everything went smoothly with the World Cup. So smooth in fact, that the biggest controversy surrounding the event had nothing to do with human rights violations, but rather concerned the“Video Assistant Referee,” which debuted in Qatar, disrupting some games with its frustrating precision (e.g. teams not getting away with things a referee would simply not have the capacity to catch as a human being).
​
The World Cup Final Qatar got was both intense and well-viewed. 1.5 billion viewers tuned in to see Lionel Messi, arguably the greatest soccer player of all time, and his Argentinian team triumph over twenty-four year old super-prodigy Kylian Mbappé’s France, who won the previous World Cup in Russia, where Mbappé won best young player of the tournament.
​
As the final icing on the cake for Qatar as a host and nation as a whole, Lionel Messi, one of the most well known and beloved figures in all recorded sporting history, donned a traditional Qatari ‘bisht,’ a traditional Qatari cloak typically worn as a status symbol, to raise the prestigious World Cup. Messi’s victory was made especially sweet by his history in the tournament. For context, Messi, despite being one of the best players of all time, had failed to clinch a World Cup title before 2022, falling just short in a 0-1 loss to Germany in the 2014 final. Aging though he was, Messi took to the field for what will most likely be his “last dance” as a member of the Argentinian national team and won everything for the “sky white and blues.” All of this Qatar was able to give him.
​
For all intents and purposes, the image of Messi cloaked in a bisht raising a football player’s greatest achievement was Qatar’s three hundred billion dollar crowning picture of perfection. Though innumerable human rights violations and the death of thousands of migrant workers stain the history of Qatar 2022 as a tournament, the outcome was an overall success for the nation of Qatar simply because of the PR heaven that was the final.
So what happens next for the sport of football?
As it turns out, not much that isn’t already happening. Qatar has been out of global focus since the World Cup concluded, and yet football remains a politicized mess of power and money. Just recently the English Premier League (the top flight of English football) team Manchester City were charged with numerous breaches of Financial Fair Play (FFP) rules reaching as far back as 2009. For context, Manchester City was purchased in 2008 by a member of the ruling family of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mansour. Since the purchase and subsequent influx of money, City has become a trophy winning and superstar-snatching team, winning four of the last five Premier League titles-- and while there is certainly no issue with new ownership or winning titles, City has allegedly broken countless financial fair play rules, which were put in place by the Premier League for the explicit purpose of preventing superteams like Manchester City from existing. Essentially, the gigantic sums of money they (Manchester City) had been using to form a world-beating squad of superstar players made a team that was intentionally monopolistic in intent.
So why care?
Football, like many other sports, passions, and hobbies, is an art form. Though some will disagree in finding meaning in athletics, the fact of the matter is that the sport transcends boundaries. Billions tuned in around the world last December to watch a simple game of football on TV, and for what? Billions of human beings are united playing and watching the same sport, as one. Entire cultural identities are built around expressive athletes that are, in many ways, artists.
​
Financial inequality and the commercialization of such an art form and example of unity is, essentially, a human tragedy. As more money flows in, the sport is diluted and homogenized to bland revenue-generating cash streams, and if FIFA/the football industry cannot figure out how to handle the modernization of “The Beautiful Game”, the world could lose one of the greatest examples of human oneness, and the joy of billions.