Robbie Rogers World Cup Qatar Russia

January 21, 2015 8:38 AM

Russia and Qatar World Cups are 'insane' due to homophobia, says Robbie Rogers. Soccer/Football's first openly gay player, RR has things on his mind. Will Klinsmann come around? On Mefi Previously.
posted by josher71 (36 comments total)

I've already made a pact with a friend whose interest in and love of football is exponentially greater than mine that we will not under any circumstances watch a minute of the Qatar World Cup. Our hope is that somehow it winds up getting moved to a different, less evil location between now and 2022.
posted by The Card Cheat at 8:44 AM on January 21, 2015 [2 favorites]

Good for Robbie Rogers, especially on getting the issue out there sooner than was done for the most recent Winter Olympics. By all accounts from this outsider, FIFA is horrible, and this is only one of the many things to complain about regarding them, but I'm glad he's doing it.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 8:52 AM on January 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

Seriously. At this rate, we'll be seeing Worlds Cup 22026 on the Death Star. Zlatan Ibrahimovic (clearly a fake name made up by George Lucas) will accidentally kick the lightball through a small unshielded exhaust port, killing thousands.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 8:53 AM on January 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

You know, I used to think that American sports leagues were really gross, but after a year of reading about FIFA, F1, and the UCI.... just fuuuuuck.
posted by selfnoise at 8:54 AM on January 21, 2015 [4 favorites]

Honestly, at this stage (and I've only been following the sport in any way for 5 years), I wouldn't be surprised to see FIFA officials with ridiculous mustaches tying widows and orphans to railroad tracks.
posted by GenjiandProust at 9:06 AM on January 21, 2015 [2 favorites]

Our hope is that somehow it winds up getting moved to a different, less evil location between now and 2022.

May the good fairy wot live in the sky grant yer every wish, The Card Cheat.
posted by Purposeful Grimace at 9:07 AM on January 21, 2015

Professional Football (soccer, to Americans) is disgusting racist, homophobic, and corrupt.
Fans generally support these things.
posted by Flood at 9:16 AM on January 21, 2015 [2 favorites]

Don't worry, I'm not holding my breath.
posted by The Card Cheat at 9:22 AM on January 21, 2015

Hypothetically what if someone were to watch it anyway but they feel really bad about it the entire time.
posted by poffin boffin at 9:24 AM on January 21, 2015 [4 favorites]

That's what I used to do with American football. It worked for quite a while.
posted by The Card Cheat at 9:26 AM on January 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

Seriously. At this rate, we'll be seeing Worlds Cup 22026 on the Death Star. Zlatan Ibrahimovic (clearly a fake name made up by George Lucas) will accidentally kick the lightball through a small unshielded exhaust port, killing thousands.

Football team owning Russian oligarchs have already done the killed thousands thing back when they started oligarching.
posted by srboisvert at 9:33 AM on January 21, 2015

Mostly I think FIFA only exists to make the IOC look good, but then sometimes I believe that the IOC only exists to make FIFA look less horrifically bad. Everything is terrible.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 9:52 AM on January 21, 2015 [5 favorites]

Yo Grauniad I know acronyms are done differently between the US and UK* but you do not abbreviate "Los Angeles" as "La".

* Actually, they're doing it wrong.
posted by Lexica at 10:09 AM on January 21, 2015

So I really get excited about soccer/football when the World Cup comes around, but would love to boycott them in Qatar. So here's what I'm asking for, entertainers of the world: Give me something else I can be excited about that will take place at the same time, something that has at least a part of the drama and scope. Because I know that if some friends are going down to a bar to watch some world cup matches, I'm not going to be able to blow it off for staying home and reading a book. But if I can say "No, I'm doing Event X instead" there's some chance. Plus, if Event X, whatever it may be, is underway by, say 2016, people can say "I'm skipping World Cup Qatar. I'm doing Event X!". That's an affirmative statement that's harder to ignore than a threatened boycott.
posted by benito.strauss at 10:12 AM on January 21, 2015 [2 favorites]

You know, I used to think that American sports leagues were really gross, but after a year of reading about FIFA, F1, and the UCI.... just fuuuuuck.

The NCAA still looks pretty bad, at least FIFA lets the players make money.
posted by Area Man at 10:18 AM on January 21, 2015

" I wouldn't be surprised to see FIFA officials with ridiculous mustaches tying widows and orphans to railroad tracks."

Look, FIFA appointed an independent ethical rail-road use commission who has released a short summary of their investigation. They found both the top hatted, moustache twirling gentleman AND the train completely free of any ethical wrongdoing. There were however accusations that the orphans and widows had repeatedly used their position to try and gain personal benefits (primarily by crying and screaming) which they feel might have brought the tying people to rail-road tracks process into disrepute.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 11:06 AM on January 21, 2015 [7 favorites]

The thing that makes Qatar, especially, a tempting boycott choice is not only that they are are a despicable government well worth avoiding, but it's also nearly impossible to see how the football on display could even be any good. Not only is the average summer temperature over 100F, but Qatar is automatically one of the 32 teams qualified for the finals, and they will very likely be the absolute worst national team anyone has ever seen at the World Cup. Even with all the garbage around Brazil, and there was a lot of really terrible stuff including terrific financial corruption and forced relocation of favela residents, you could always sigh and say "at least the games will be good". But there's a very strong chance that Qatar won't even be that, and it's impossible to see how anyone could think they would have any chance of being good without wearing billion-dollar blindfolds. None of this is to say that protesting / boycotting Qatar is cheaper or easier or less meaningful; rather, it's to say that FIFA has to have fucked up so, so badly to convince football fans that boycotting a World Cup is such a viable, even preferable, option.
posted by Errant at 11:08 AM on January 21, 2015 [3 favorites]

Qatar is currently 92nd in the FIFA ratings but South Africa was 83rd in 2010 and I'm not sure their inclusion made it a worse world cup.
posted by josher71 at 11:23 AM on January 21, 2015

Ok but imagine south africa won each match before halftime because the other team died of heat exhaustion.
posted by poffin boffin at 12:09 PM on January 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

Professional Football (soccer, to Americans) is disgusting racist, homophobic, and corrupt.
Fans generally support these things.

What a ridiculous generalisation.
posted by Pendragon at 12:16 PM on January 21, 2015 [2 favorites]

South Africa at least had some individually talented players with international club-level experience, and they were eliminated from the group stage on goal difference to Mexico and finished ahead of (a woefully inept) France. Plus they had decent crowd support and made the tournament fun. Somewhere around a million people travel to the World Cup every tournament. Qatar has just over 2 million people in the whole country. This is a joke.
posted by Errant at 12:22 PM on January 21, 2015

Does anybody have a decent estimate on the bribe totals that Qatar is putting up?
posted by bukvich at 12:29 PM on January 21, 2015

I am 100 percent against the Qatar WC but I don't think a poor host national team is a death knell as certainly no one saw France sucking as badly as they did in that tournament and there are always surprises.

We will see what happens with this proposal.
posted by josher71 at 12:31 PM on January 21, 2015

I used to think that American sports leagues were really gross, but after a year of reading about FIFA, F1, and the UCI

F1? I don't know what you have been reading, but I would have assumed that Bernie liking money and bribing people to make more money and not giving teams money because he likes money is the American Way.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 12:32 PM on January 21, 2015

When a group of my friends talked about going to Brazil for the World Cup last summer I felt like a killjoy when I started talking about FIFA politics, but it's impossible for me to ignore. That said, it's also damn near impossible for me not to pay attention because it's the World Cup.

Qatar's national team being so weak isn't an issue. South Africa (and hell, even the USA or Japan and Korea) sort of negate that. And it's not like Russia has had a great record.

It's all the different flavors of human rights violations and FIFA corruption. I am happy the Guardian keeps reporting on it, and I'm happy more people are talking about it, but until there's a better product out there what can football fans do? Maybe if big nations, like Germany and Brazil, boycotted? That would never happen.
posted by kendrak at 1:24 PM on January 21, 2015

Qatar's national team being so weak isn't an issue. South Africa (and hell, even the USA or Japan and Korea) sort of negate that.

Hey, the U.S. made it into the Round of 16 in 1994, and there were other teams there with lower pre-tournament rankings.
posted by Area Man at 1:42 PM on January 21, 2015

South Africa's weakness as a team was a major talking point going into 2010. South Korea had qualified for the previous 4 tournaments when they hosted, and Japan was co-host largely because they combined bids with South Korea who didn't think they'd be able to get it by themselves. The USA advanced to the round of 16 only because of a Colombian own goal, and that was a World Cup with 24 teams, so it's more that the US were not one of the worst third of teams, rather than being one of the best half.

Most of all that is beside the point, though: in each of those World Cups, the aim was to bring international football to a wider market, and the relative paucity of the national team took second fiddle to the promise of showcasing football in a new continent. What is the larger fanbase to which the Qatar World Cup will appeal and which justifies a relatively poor hosting national team?
posted by Errant at 1:52 PM on January 21, 2015

The USMNT didn't qualify for a World Cup between 1950 and 1990, were not yet qualified for 1990 when they were awarded the 1994 World Cup. If anything. 1994 is the turning point when WC bids were awarded for legacy more than anything. Which is where we are now with these megaproject bids that only make money for FIFA and their friends.
posted by kendrak at 1:54 PM on January 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

I mean, when we're talking poor host football teams, we're talking about the past twenty years and, not coincidentally, pretty much the entire Sepp Blatter reign, which means we're talking about the rise of FIFA as an absurdly corrupt organization given more over to money and merchandise than quality sport. So to say that the national team being so weak isn't an issue strikes me as inaccurate. It is in many ways the issue: why is a country this bad at football being given the premier football showcase?
posted by Errant at 1:56 PM on January 21, 2015

Good point. I know historically hosts weren't necessarily top footballing nations - think Switzerland and Sweden. Hell, England's hosting was as much about a nod to history as much as anything. (English exceptionalism dwarfs American exceptionalism in footie entitlement.)

But back to the link, FIFA has always had a lazy attitude when it came to human rights and tournament hosting. They've always danced between being apolitical and rubbing shoulders with elites and it often fails. I mean the 1934 World Cup in Italy was Mussolini's big party that Hitler wanted to copy with the 1936 Olympics. And then of course there's 1978 in Pinochet's Argentina.
posted by kendrak at 2:28 PM on January 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think having a weaker nation host it is actually a plus. We already know bigger footballing nations will qualify, so let's have a nation that wouldn't have a hope of qualifying normally in the mix.
posted by josher71 at 2:54 PM on January 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

That's just as easily and more consistently accomplished by not weighting the berths to Europe and South America so heavily.
posted by Errant at 3:29 PM on January 21, 2015

I was going with the FIFA we have, not the one we wish we had.
posted by josher71 at 3:31 PM on January 21, 2015

Haha, well, I think you're going to get the FIFA you wish with the one we have, as long as the weaker football nations you're thinking of are Dubai and Qatar and Dubai again.
posted by Errant at 3:37 PM on January 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

For the record, Robbie Rogers isn't the first out footballer. It was Justin Fashanu. Then Anton Hysén (well, he was the next out man--there are a bunch of women who were out before him). Then Rogers.
posted by hoyland at 6:13 PM on January 21, 2015 [2 favorites]

Qatar have just been drummed out of the Asian Cup with three losses in the group stage, including a 1-4 loss to UAE in their opening game (losing to Iran was fair enough, but Bahrain?) . I'm sure we're hoping that our team of choice is drawn in their group in 2022. It's going to be embarrassing frankly.
posted by Hello, I'm David McGahan at 9:36 PM on January 21, 2015