Commentary: World Cup Qatar will be great football but an ugly game

LONDON: When the World Cup kicks off next weekend, a Western sense of fair play will be outraged that a country without any native tradition in the game has won the right to host the tournament through financial muscle.

Insult is added to injury too – due to Qatar’s extreme temperatures, the World Cup isn’t being staged during the usual summer break but in November, disrupting domestic soccer competitions in the northern hemisphere for six weeks. Fans and players just have to lump it.

The next few weeks will be a reminder of how the clash in values of the liberal West and the rich Arab states can play out in the international arena to everyone’s dissatisfaction.

First off, Qatar’s human rights record is patchy. A democracy in name only, the country is ruled by the Al Thani dynasty, which imprisons LGBTQ people who engage in consensual sex.

The UK’s indefatigable human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell was kicked out of the country last week after he mounted a one-man demonstration outside Qatar’s National Museum. On German television last week, Qatar’s official World Cup ambassador Khalid Salam chose that moment to call homosexuality a form of “damage in the mind”.

Then there is the human toll. About 6,500 migrant workers have died while building the tournament’s gleaming, purpose-built infrastructure in Qatar, including superhighways, hotels and eight showcase stadiums (one designed like a Bedouin tent, another built out of 974 recycled shipping containers). The authorities say they have cleaned up labour practices since.

Even Sepp Blatter, the former president of FIFA, football’s top international authority, now describes his decision to award the World Cup to Qatar in 2010 as “a bad choice”. Blatter recently told Swiss paper