An event like the World Cup is totemic. Our collective arrangements, exclusions and beliefs about who matters in the world get concentrated into a single tournament.
Held six months on from FIFA presenting Trump with its new peace prize, it has always been evident that this World Cup would expose our veneration of power.
One of the most troubling dimensions of this is blatant racial discrimination. There is a tiered system for prospective attendees. Fans from 42 (generally wealthier) nations can travel on visa waivers costing $40 dollars. Not one of these nations is African. Meanwhile, fans from other countries must pay for the recommended fan visa at $185, complete an in-person interview, and demonstrate they can pay associated travel costs.
Donella Meadows observed that the purposes of a system are best deduced from its behaviour, not its rhetoric or stated goals. On this basis, the purpose of the World Cup is not to share football with the world. It is to sell football to the world’s wealthy (and preferably white).
That is why the head of Jordan’s fan association, Abu Kass, was refused entry. It didn’t matter that he brought forty-two documents to his interview . Kass knows of not one Jordanian supporter who received a visa. This World Cup “is not for Arabs” he said. “It’s for them.”
The most high profile instance of this discrimination has been the denial of entry to referee Omar Artan. He had travelled from Mogadishu with a diplomatic passport, a valid visa, and the expectation that after years of work he was going to make history: the first Somali to officiate at a World Cup. He was detained and questioned at Miami for eleven hours and placed on a return flight.
FIFA’s response was a masterpiece of insincere PR. “FIFA is not involved in host country immigration processes,” it said, which is remarkable, given that FIFA has previously pressured Russia to grant visa-free entry to fans, threatened to strip Brazilian cities of hosting rights when stadiums fell behind schedule, and intervened to overturn a press ban in Russia for a German journalist.
Power is often self-effacing. Visibility supports accountability; obscurity allows for impunity. It is why power is happy to hide behind the idea of bureaucracy or “complex visa arrangements”, or in this case the charade that “FIFA is not involved in host country immigration processes”.
This World Cup is happening in the midst of worsening global inequality, starting in the same week that Musk became the world’s first trillionaire. FIFA projects $8.9 billion in revenues from this tournament alone, generated not from a wide base of global football fans, but from an ever-narrower constituency of wealthy corporations and individuals. The price of following a team to the final is five times what it cost in Qatar.
Musk’s obscene wealth is achieved even as the cuts he was responsible for at USAID have been assessed as likely to cause 14 million deaths. These facts describe a world in which wealth has become so concentrated that its holders can, with apparent impunity, determine who lives and who dies — and in which institutions like FIFA, capitulate to power and arrange themselves accordingly.
The last World Cup had the strapline “football unites the world”. Football does not unite the world when fans from more than a quarter of the qualifying nations face travel bans, visa restrictions, or rejection rates above forty percent. We should judge the purpose of a system by what it does.
A member of Ivory Coast’s fan association judges it thus: “a form segregation that doesn’t dare speak its name“.
thejoyofrachel 