Garvan Walshe is a former National and International Security Policy Adviser to the Conservative Party
“In the name of God, creator of rainbows” began Iran’s football captain, Ehsan Hajsafi, “ I want to say condolences to all the grieving families in Iran… we want them to know we are with them and by their side and share their pain.”
Iranians have been in revolt for two and a half months now, since Mahsa Amini was killed in police custody. The repression – shooting people in the streets, security raping boys and girls who fall into their clutches, and full-scale military attacks in Iraqi Kurdistan – is failing. Iranians have risen in rebellion against the petro-dictators of the Islamic Republic, just as Ukrainians have been fighting for freedom from the Kremlin.
Oil money is the root of this evil. The vast sums obtained by selling it are easily accumulated in government budgets, without the need to tax economically productive citizens. Once there it buys support, the security infrastructure to repress dissent, and propaganda infrastructure such Press TV, Russia Today or Al Jazeera.
Qatar, Al Jazeera’s patron, is indeed a petro-dictatorship – and, futhermore, one that secured the right to host the world cup from football’s notoriously corrupt world governing body. Though it is hardly conceivable that Moscow did not bribe its way to hosting the 2018 tournament, Russia had at least inherited parts of the Soviet footballing tradition, and met some basic requirements, like having a national football team, and stadiums in which to put on the games.
Awarding the two world cups to Russia and Qatar will come to be seen as the high mark of oil producers’ strategic gamesmanship, the system that had Gerhard Schröder, the former German Chancellor, working for Gazprom; plus François Fillon, but for the grace of God in the Elysée.
What links these politicians is the weakness that comes from believing that their self-worth is a monetary phenomenon. From this derives their need to be associated with the ultra rich, if only as ‘strategic advisers’ or some other kind of intellectualised butler.
They form the apex of the pyramid that clients’ hydrocarbon regimes built up, involving networks of yes men, accountants and PR fluffers (well guarded by vigilant libel lawyers), If the oil producers’ greatest achievement was keeping Germany dependent on Russian gas, getting the French to sell them an amphibious landing ship (the sale was cancelled after the Little Green Men appeared outside Sevastopol) would also have had considerable value.
This activity is far from a Russian monopoly. The murder of Jamal Kashoggi by agents of the Saudi state in Saudi Arabia’s Istanbul consulate, did not stop prince Mohamed bin Salman, however implausibly, attempting to reinvent the country as a techno futurist paradise and bidder to host the next World Cup.
This is not so much sportswashing (hardly anyone has been convinced that Russia is a democracy or Saudi Arabia been transformed into a LGBTQ playground), but the indirect buying of influence. It enables German officials to wonder whether sending modern tanks to Ukraine could count as escalation, or British ones to pay attention to the low financial price of a Chinese nuclear power station, and ignore its much greater geopolitical cost.
It works because many people, most of the time, have a price. They have children in school, and mortgages to pay, albeit in the footballers’ case in mansions rather than mere houses. So the Western football federations acquiesced to FIFA’s ban on rainbow armbands. Not worth a yellow card. Where, in the name of God, is their courage?
Theirs is the same calculating mindset that prompted Washington to offer Volodymyr Zelensky an escape from Kyiv only to be rebuffed with a demand for ammunition. It is the attitude that causes them to fret about war fatigue, or exaggerate small extremist, or Moscow-backed, demonstrations, as though they were major public discontent.
And perhaps the former politicians who make a good living burnishing the image of dodgy regimes, or the footballers earning hundreds of thousands a week have, indeed, gone soft.
It seems that the rest of us are made of sterner stuff. We’re bearing the higher heating bills this winter — and blaming Putin for them. We’re sending money and collecting supplies for Ukraine. We’re struggling, it;s true, to know how we could possibly help Iranians in their unequal struggle for Women, Life and Freedom, but it’s those brave young women and men, not the cosseted calculating machines of the football bureaucracy, that we admire.
If the Western football associations’ meekness in the face of the football hierarchy betrays their plan for rainbow armbands as virtue signalling, Hajsafi standing up to his regime’s enforcers reminded us that true virtue still exists.