WORLD CUP TALK: Savour greatest final ever, but let’s not repeat the tournament

THE World Cup of whataboutery and uncomfortable contradictions ended the only way it could. Awkwardly. The colossal and the crass had to come together, one more time, to sign off on Qatar 2022’s dubious achievement.

There was Lionel Messi and his legacy. Untouchable. There was the Emir of Qatar, Tamim Hamad Al Thani, and his legacy. Uncertain. And there was the black bisht, a traditional men’s cloak, being draped across the shoulders of Argentina’s captain. Unexpectedly.

But it wasn’t unexpected, was it? Qatar dominated all aspects of this tournament, through 12 years of Fifa corruption allegations, geopolitical manoeuvres and deaths in the desert, right up until the purest moment of them all. The trophy presentation. And the hosts took charge there, too. This is what US$220 billion really buys. Control. Until the very end.

Naturally, defenders of the symbolic gesture are insisting that it’s just that. A respectful symbol, the black bisht is paying Messi the highest honour. The Qataris consider him one of their own. But he isn’t. He belongs to the badge that was covered by the cloak. And like the empty seats in the opening game, obscuring the Argentina jersey in the last game ensured a wearying theme endured.

Limitless cash really can buy just about anything. It can buy Messi and Kylian Mbappe, the poster boys of Qatar Sports Investments, via their ludicrous contracts at Paris Saint-Germain. It can build an opulent stadium – and a city to host the stadium – to showcase Messi’s coronation. It can even buy the greatest World Cup final of all time. But it cannot buy the ingrained instincts and self-awareness of a sports culture.

This was Argentina’s moment. This was Messi’s moment. In that order. That’s the accepted hierarchy of international team sport. It was not Qatar’s moment.

But the trophy-lifting photographs will say otherwise, indefinitely, a surreal, slightly tarnished snapshot, trapped in an ugly period of football’s history that can never be repeated. Even a final for the ages isn’t worth the price paid for this one.

From calendar shifting to cloak wearing, Qatar has danced to its own tune of rhythmic sportwashing for 12 years, breaking promises pretty much whenever it liked, as long as the geopolitical dream was realised.

When a World Cup evaluation report expressed concerns about safety in Qatar's summer heat, the bidders said they’d build air-conditioned bubbles (they didn’t) and would not move the tournament to the winter (they did).

Building stadiums, accommodation and highways from scratch required a huge influx of migrant workers, but they would not be exploited (they were). They would be spared the hazardous summer conditions (they weren’t). There would be no deaths (there were).

And we are all complicit and hypocritical here. Unlike Argentina ’78, the latest figures are just a Google click away. We were supposed to learn from Russia 2018. Never again, we said, until the next World Cup. Qatar required round-the-clock construction to complete projects in record time. Seriously, how did we think those steely white elephants, looking resplendent on our 4K screens, were being built?

And, yes, indignant Qataris are right to be irritated by the relentless coverage on human rights. Complicity and hypocrisy are like Messi against the French. Everywhere. Lurking in the shadows, forever looking over one’s shoulder. Once the ghosts of Qatar have been exorcised in the next news cycle, we’ll move on to more tolerant, western World Cup hosts, where it’s often easier to control a woman’s womb than gun ownership.

Let’s hope the same journalistic rigour and condemnation applied to Qatar is replicated in the United States in four years.

It's not Qatar or Fifa that made this World Cup special

But in this regard, Qatar 2022 has been a success of sorts, if not in the way anticipated by the hosts. The World Cup can instigate change for good, not in a staged, theatrical way, with a bald Fifa boss doing his best Bond villain whilst declaring himself to be gay, disabled, ginger and deranged and so on. The tournament shines an unremitting spotlight, albeit for a month in so, in less salubrious areas.

In this case, it went after the global labour market, a system that has driven the planet's poorest to accept meagre wages and repressive conditions elsewhere. We all benefit, marvelling at World Cup matches built by faceless workers before throwing our trash in chutes cleaned by faceless workers sitting on the backs of trucks in the rain. We can’t say we didn’t know anymore. That’s on us.

Pretty much everything else is on Fifa. Apart from a dodgy bid, a winter tournament, empty seats, armband censorship, detained journalists, flag bans and stadiums built on the bloodied backs of dead and injured migrant workers, what have the Fifa folks ever done for us? Well, they gave us the greatest World Cup final of all time, didn’t they?

No, they didn’t. Messi’s seven goals, two feet and one beautiful mind did that. He spent the final like a distracted maths professor strolling through Oxford, crunching numbers in real time, calculating angles and fractions, seeing things we’ll never see. And we’ll never see anyone like him again.

Sure, we’ll have Kylian Mbappe, France’s Road Runner always looking for a coyote to play with. We even had lovely glimpses of Angel di Maria, reminding us of his elegance, grace and dignity, not terms typically associated with World Cup organisers. But then, they did not give us this final.

Fifa president Gianni Infantino may claim that Qatar 2022 is the best tournament ever, but he sounds less convincing than a rich kid insisting that he's put on the hippest party when his only contribution is to let his friends run riot in Mummy and Daddy’s penthouse. The final was about Messi, di Maria and Emiliano Martínez’s delightful shithousery between the sticks and the delirious Albiceleste in the stands.

The tournament was about ageless Croatia and defiant Morocco. It was about Japan fooling Spain, the Aussies reaching the knockout stages, Christian Eriksen recovering from his near-death experience and Louis van Gaal beating cancer. It was about de Bruyne’s decline and Ronaldo’s fall. It was everything, everywhere all at once. It was movie football as long as it was just that. Football.

When it wasn’t, when it was Infantino practically lifting the trophy with Argentina, when it was the hosts obscuring Messi’s colours with their own, it was something less palatable.

Remember Messi. But never forget how this World Cup came to be. And then, hopefully, it’ll never happen again.

Neil Humphreys is an award-winning football writer and a best-selling author, who has covered the English Premier League since 2000 and has written 26 books.

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