Poor Gianni Infantino. The Fifa overlord must surely feel he has earned the right to sit back in Qatar’s air-conditioned stadiums, enjoy the show and count the money. It’s nearly seven years since he took over an organisation that his predecessor, Sepp Blatter, had turned into both a cesspit of rottenness and a laughing stock. Infantino’s understandable strategy from the moment he got the job early in 2016 was to aim at the open goal Blatter had created for him—by rubbishing his predecessor and all his doings at every opportunity. That was the easy bit. In his acceptance speech Infantino was after something decidedly more ambitious:
“We will restore the image of Fifa and the respect of Fifa and everyone in the world will applaud us.”
The necessary and justified attacks on the mad, bad world of Blatter’s Fifa were neatly sewn into the new narrative—namely that Infantino’s Fifa itself was a virtuous victim of the previous regime. A little bit of sympathy was thus in order. Two years on and project Infantino was still work in progress:
“No matter how much I prepared myself to face an atmosphere of reluctance, the level of mistrust I encountered around Fifa, and even within the organisation, was unbelievable… Anything involving Fifa was soaked in a presumption of guilt… it is not that easy to accomplish things in an environment like that.”
But sadly for Infantino the world has not ladled out the pity, and he is not swathed in universal admiration. Instead, and as kick off looms, he still finds himself being asked irritating questions by a pesky coalition of human rights organisations, journalists, European football associations and even some players and managers, who can’t bring themselves to echo Infantino’s recent message that now is the time to put aside the human rights agenda and concentrate on what is, after all, the essence of the Qatari World Cup matter:
“Please, let’s now focus on the football! We know football does not live in a vacuum and we are equally aware that there are many challenges and difficulties of a political nature all around the world. But please do not allow football to be dragged into every ideological or political battle that exists.”
The little word “every” is having to do a lot of work in that sentence. There are indeed reasonable limits to how much we can expect Fifa to sort out. We can let Fifa off the hook for, say, how best to narrow Britain’s budget deficit, or the future of Kashmir, or the direction of the Republican Party. But we cannot and should not let it off the hook for the fact that the Qatar World Cup—awarded to the gulf state in a 2010 bidding farce since mired in corruption allegations—is a human rights mess (see my article in Prospect’s June edition).
From the moment he became Fifa’s President, Infantino had a Qatar-shaped problem. He had not himself been part of the Fifa committee that had made the frankly barking decision to let Qatar host the event—originally planned for the summer before enough people realised that the heat would probably kill a bunch of players. And you can easily see why Infantino might have found it difficult to launch a full-frontal attack on the outcome of the 2010 fandango. There would have been lawsuits galore and international football would have moved from a world of constant corruption to one of complete chaos.
But nobody forced him to adopt the entirely opposite approach, voicing enthusiastic support at every opportunity—not least, hilariously, when earlier this year he asked a seated audience to shout out “Qatar, Qatar, Qatar” and “Fifa, Fifa, Fifa”(they weren’t enthusiastic).
Infantino has human rights form—not of the best sort. Fifa’s human rights policy speaks, promisingly, of “addressing differential impacts based on gender and... promoting gender equality and preventing all forms of harassment.” Protections against discrimination are supposedly enshrined in Article 4 of the body’s statutes. But in 2018 Infantino went to Iran to watch a match marking the 100th anniversary of the country’s football association. He agreed to meet President Rouhani and—charming touch—was photographed smiling alongside the beaming president, who was hoisting a football shirt with his own name on it. Infantino said he raised the matter of the total exclusion of women from the universe of Iranian football, but if he did his influence was not very apparent. On the same day the Iranian authorities arrested 35 women who had tried to attend the match.
The following year Infantino turned up in Russia—which had hosted the World Cup in 2018, courtesy of the same rotten Executive Committee vote that had given the 2022 tournament to Qatar. Putin awarded a happy Infantino the Order of Friendship—and he responded in trademark over-the-top style:
“It is an incredible honour and emotion for me to be here today with you and to receive this incredibly prestigious award.”
True—at this stage Ukraine was only a glowing gleam in Putin’s eye and, true, the 2018 World Cup had turned out alright, but Putin was then and now a top-class homophobe with a known fondness for sportswashing.
As for Qatar—it seems that nobody involved in the 2010 vote had given any thought to what was glaringly obvious to anyone with a nodding acquaintance of the place—namely that a huge army of cheap imported labour would construct Qatar’s World Cup and do so without basic protections, and that Qatar’s own version of homophobia went beyond even Putin’s.
Amnesty says that for years Qatar, whose Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy has been working in lockstep with Fifa, did little or nothing to improve the rights of the migrant workers from South and Southeast Asia and parts of Africa, whose economic plight made them take the jobs but only after many of them—and be astonished—had to pay “recruitment fees” for the privilege of working there.
But Amnesty says that in 2017 Qatar began to engage—presumably because the outside noise, above all about migrant workers dying in often unexplained circumstances (presumably the cause was working conditions), was getting too loud for even the more shameless figures among the Qatari and Fifa leaderships to tolerate.
And it has not been a fruitless struggle. There has been progress. Amnesty’s recent report lists at the outset a series of legal reforms that have been introduced—many of them recently. For example—there is a new minimum wage (since 2020), and legislation aimed at improving the protection of workers from extreme weather. There’s a law aiming to protect domestic workers, and the requirement for workers to have their employer’s permission to change jobs or leave the country has been removed—and there’s more.
But Amnesty spots loopholes and shortcomings all over the place. Many employers are not complying with the new requirements and the government has not devoted anything like the level of resources for them to be made to do so. Among the lowlights—security guards and domestic workers remain extremely vulnerable to forced labour, recruitment fees are still very much part of the labour landscape, tens of thousands of workers continue to suffer delayed and unpaid wages—and so on.
And those years of negligence have a price—if not yet for Fifa or Qatar. Huge numbers of workers did not benefit from any improvements, an untold number died unnecessarily and Qatar seems uninterested in doing anything meaningful for them or their families. A Qatari minister recently denounced a compensation fund for migrant workers exploited, killed or injured while working on World Cup projects as a “publicity stunt.” Nor are the Qataris inclined to respond to another demand—that a centre for migrant workers is set up in Qatar itself.
So the pressure now is on Fifa to use its own huge financial muscle to make some amends. And there might just be something rustling—at least to judge from this not-much-reported remark made last month by Fifa's Deputy Secretary General, Alasdair Bell, who told the Council of Europe that it was “important to try to see that anyone who suffered injury as consequence of working in the World Cup... is somehow redressed”. He added that this was “something that we're interested in progressing.” But Bell may not be speaking for his boss. Amnesty’s view is that Infantino is the number one problem: “The decision-maker in all this is Mr Infantino, who has remained conspicuously silent about our proposal… without himself offering any solutions or committing to address the labour abuses suffered by many migrant workers in the lead-up to this World Cup.”
The main European football associations have said that they will not stop putting pressure on Fifa even after the Emir of Qatar and Infantino have handed over the trophy to the winners on 18th December. So Infantino will just have to put up with all the carping. But where will he be? An investigation by a Swiss newspaper in January revealed that for the last year or so he—and his family—have largely been based in Qatar. The move probably baffled many of his Fifa employees in Zurich. But perhaps they too should concentrate on the football.
