FIFA World Cup: Infantino comes out with guns blazing, and some ammo from India | Football News – Times of India

DOHA: Is football – fandom, emotion, hope, disappointment, glory, and identity – the preserve of a select few, and only they get to decide who can partake in this global communion because they run the show, decide the TV times?
Football’s version of the European refugee crisis, where boatloads of Africans were being turned back by the First World, you could say, is being played out at the World Cup here in Qatar. Among the many exposes and investigations carried out by sections of the western media, was the ‘revelation’ that the Qatari authorities had hired ‘paid fans’ to show support for the teams, and thus, depict a healthy following as the World Cup kick-off neared.
The implicit assumption, mainly from the white world that since the fans didn’t look like them, or the European teams that they were welcoming with song and dance and thus couldn’t be genuine, hasn’t gone down well with the large population of south Asian extraction that forms the bulk of the workforce here in Qatar.

But was it being politicised by the masters of the sport here a day before the most controversial World Cup was set to kick off, to make a point in what was becoming a personal battle of oneupmanship between the European media and FIFA over the hosting of the mega-event in a discriminatory regime as Qatar’s?
On Saturday, FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, using his unique global position, bore in on this flawed sense of privilege, among many others, to launch an astonishing counter-offensive against the western media telling to look within before pointing fingers at the rest of the world first. “We’ve been told many lessons, from Europeans from the Western World. I’m European. What Europe has done to the world for the last 3000 years they should be apologising for the next 3000 years. This one-sided moral lesson-giving is just hypocrisy,” he said.
“Why can’t a fan who looks like an Indian and not English, support a team that is English or Spanish or French? This is racism, this is pure racism,” he said, “I think he can cheer for whoever he wants to. This is what people want. Tolerance starts with ourselves first and we shouldn’t spread aggression.”
It is a fine line Infantino was treading. After all, he began by saying that he had nothing to do with the awarding of the tournament to Qatar in 2010. “I was not there. In fact, I was known as a critic of FIFA back then,” said the former UEFA boss. Yet, he seemed to have prepared well for this meeting, having picked his arguments well. The Western media could not deny the charges being made, the ‘Oh, that may all be true, but that’s not the point here’ defence seemed feeble especially when one of their own chose to show them the mirror. On the threshold of a third unopposed term, Infantino then was summoning the symbolic support of his newfound partners – in particular, India – and his own origins as son of an Italian migrant in Switzerland, to address the issues of migrant labour, mishap compensation, LGBT rights to fire away at the media.
“I have been very quiet for the past few months. Mainly, I have been working behind the scenes, observing what was going on, trying to do my best with the team. But I have very strong feelings. Today, I feel Qatari, I feel Arab. Today, I feel African, Today, I feel gay. Today, I feel like a migrant worker.”
Infantino, you could say, took it all personally. Predictably, the subject of his ire, an unsuspecting, if not entirely smug European media, took it personally too. Even as he was ripping into them, Twitter was raging with his comments being posted and reactions to them coming in by the bucketloads. They were still pouring in as we went into print.
“And I feel all this because I’ve been seeing things, been told things. I don’t read because (then) I’ll be depressed.”
How you received Infantino’s outburst depended, of course, on which of the divide you stood. Expect him to be cut to ribbons by the mostly officious English media on Sunday, that he was only parroting what Qatar wanted him to. Somebody even asked him whether England should play Iran, with all its current human rights oppression on Monday. It was a gimme ball for the FIFA boss. “These are not two regimes playing football. These are two teams playing the game,” he said.
Whatever the true intention of Infantino’s lengthy riposte on Saturday – the scheduled 45-minute meeting went on for over an hour and half – it did provide a glimmer of hope for football’s backwaters and a stout defence of the migrant labour from Asia’s Third World that has practically built this World Cup from scratch.
“We have to engage, to unite not to hammer, to divide,” he told the media. “If we look at this refugee situation with hundreds of thousands of men and women who want to work to give a future to their families back home, Qatar is offering that opportunity. People from developing countries come here and earn 10 times more than back home to help families survive. It’s legal. In Europe, we close our borders and don’t allow them to work. There are illegal workers in Europe living in conditions that are not the best.”
The press conference was expected to be cornered by the last-minute alcohol ban. “If for three hours a day, you cannot drink a beer you can survive. The same rules apply in France and other countries, but in Qatar it is an issue because it is a Muslim country?”
On the Qatar’s discriminatory laws against the LGBTQ community, Infantino said, “In the 1954 World Cup in Switzerland, the same rules had applied then. It has taken time to progress to today. In Qatar, we have to welcome everyone. We’re not the United Nations, or the world police. The only weapon we have is the ball.”