Booze ban and paid-for fans snub a Qatar harbinger in ‘a World Cup like no other’

With booze bans and the non-payment of money to fans who were to be paid to promote it, this certainly is a World Cup like no other.

Of course, it isn’t really about the booze. The news that Qatar decided, with just a couple of days that their grand jamboree starts, that to allow supporters to have a beer while wilting in the November heat of their country was just a step too far for them is, really, something or nothing. No-one will really be shedding too many tears over that.

Having a beer may well be part of the culture of football the world over, but that was a whole part of the objections to the tournament going there in the first place, wasn’t it? Qatar doesn’t have that football culture in the first place. In a way, the alcohol ban is just a matter of Qatar being consistent. This is, after all, a Muslim country in which the consumption of alcohol is forbidden. Why should that change, just because the World Cup is being hosted there?

Even fewer people will have that much time for the complaints of sponsors, who were happy enough to climb aboard this grubby bandwagon in the first place, and whose caterwauling now seems blissfully unaware of the fact that their money is part of what made this cavalcade of decadence so unappealing in the first place. When Budweiser tweet ‘Well, this is awkward’, the obvious reply is, ‘Well, perhaps you shouldn’t have got involved in this grubby little mess in the first place, should you?’ They were quite happy to bask in the beer monopoly that FIFA had afforded them. Now they know how it feels to be frozen out, too.

It isn’t really about the non-payment of the Fan Payment Money that had been promised to supporters who have travelled to the place for this tournament, either. Few will have enormous amounts of sympathy for those who accepted the Qatari shilling in the first place, who were prepared to go out to bat for a country with a poor human rights record, missing out on the few extra dollars that they’d been promised per day. The organisers had blamed the decision on the bad press which followed the revelation that fans were being paid. ‘If you dance with the devil, then you haven’t got a clue, for you think you’ll change the devil, but the devil changes you.’

And if FIFA are left with egg on their faces by the single-mindedness of the tournament organisers and the government of the country in which the tournament is taking, well, there won’t be a great deal of sympathy there,…