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In 2018 Russia hosted the World Cup while it was brutally invading Syria (and bombing hospitals in my family’s hometown of Aleppo).
Russia spent the 2010s openly flouting international law: annexing Crimea, committing war crimes in Syria, and poisoning Sergei and
Yulia Skripal
in Great Britain. Russia was not held to account by the international media that flocked to Moscow for the World Cup.
FIFA President
Gianni Infantino
has claimed that FIFA is an organization that seeks to “unite the world.” There should be no doubt that handing the host baton to such countries as Russia—and now to Qatar, the 2022 host of the World Cup—helps normalize regimes that violate human rights. Mr. Infantino has even suggested that North Korea could host the World Cup, a scenario that would see international soccer players playing on fields only miles away from forced-labor camps.
FIFA isn’t uniting the world. It’s handing out gold stars to human-rights abusers.
—Kareem Rifai, University of Michigan, international security
The Beautiful Game
The World Cup has been one of the most unifying traditions in the world because soccer is a global sport that can be followed in nearly every country. Not only a beautiful game, it’s also known to many as the world’s game. Stories are told of bitter enemies stopping to play a game of soccer with each other even during war. Take the Christmas Truce of 1914, when German and English troops climbed out of trenches, into no-man’s-land, to exchange greetings and play a game of soccer.
The sport is not the problem. FIFA, the governing body behind soccer, however, is a problem. FIFA has a long and well-documented history of corruption, from claims of fixed matches to accusations of countries having to pay for the chance…
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