Forget ‘sportswashing’: Qatar 2022 is about military might and hard sports power

We need a new word for this thing. Psychologists have sometimes used the phrase “semantic satiation” to describe the process where saying the word “woodpecker” 20 times in a row, or sitting in a circle reciting the phrase “straight-leg easy-fit chinos” will eventually strip those sounds of any meaning, as though the entire concept of straight-leg easy-fit chinos has suddenly ceased to exist.

Something like this has happened to the word “sportswashing”. This was always a hopeful coinage, adopted on the hoof to describe governments or other entities that use elite sport as a propaganda tool. Years of heavy use, first by Azerbaijani human rights activists, then Amnesty International, then by the news and sports pages, have left it looking a little baggy.

By now sportswashing has been adopted among apologists as kind of internet eyeroll, with a vague sense it belongs in the same company as “wokery”, or having feelings or taking offence at an emoji. Here they come. The bleeding hearts. The liberals. The dispossessed and the dead. How serious can something with “washing” in its name really be?

You have to hand it to Qatar 2022. The opening game is just over a month away and still every question, from what words to use, to Ruben Loftus-Cheek’s confusing early-season squad-bolt as an ambling central pivot, leads you back to the same basic ground. Why is the World Cup happening in Qatar anyway?

We still don’t have a clear answer. The consequences and related causes have been examined in granular detail, from Fifa corruption, to human rights abuse to the vainglorious ambition of the hyper-rich. But there is still a blank at the heart of this vast, onerous enterprise; an absence of any real notion of why.

Maybe some numbers will