Qatar 2022 raises more questions of how to navigate modern football’s moral maze

On 2 December 2010, I was hosting an event on behalf of the England 2018 World Cup bid outside City Hall in central London. It was toe curlingly cold. My co-host Charlotte Jackson and I were joined by Peter Crouch and David Ginola among others to celebrate England’s certain success – the first World Cup on home soil since ’66. We were favourites. It was a good bid, albeit laced with that hubris that we often fail to acknowledge. They do actually play football in other countries.

A small crowd were sitting in some temporary seating as we beamed pictures back from Switzerland. We got word of the result 20 minutes before it was officially announced. The crowd had already started to ebb away when Sepp Blatter stood at the lecturn and laboured over opening an envelope with the word Russia written on both sides.

The director shouted down my earpiece. “Just fill for the next 10 minutes so the crowd stay for the 2022 result.” Trying to retain a withering and despondent crowd in sub-zero temperatures proved too much for my broadcasting abilities. By the time Qatar was officially given the tournament we were talking to a couple of unsuspecting dog walkers. The hot chestnut seller by the river had a bigger audience. Even our guests had gone inside.

We have heard a great deal about Qatar in the following 11 years. We’ve been through the corruption allegations, the realisation that it’s hot in the summer in the Middle East and the tragedy of the (disputed) number of migrant worker deaths.

And now we have the complex job of working out how to cover it. On the Guardian Football Weekly podcast the other day I asked an open question about what we should do. I genuinely don’t know the answer. Do we record one episode about human rights at