Bread and circuses: life imitates the World Cup, or is it the other way around?

Let's start with the World Cup.

I am writing this article the day after the semi-finals in Qatar.

For football lovers like me (from the sofa, I'm afraid) it has been a splendid exhibition of football, as well as an exciting competition full of surprises.

Euphoria and disappointment abounded.

Let us think, to give just one example, of the Atlas Lions, who justly earned the respect and admiration of the millions of people glued to their televisions.

One more proof, if any were needed, that football is much more than football.

Yesterday, the final also had equally rich emotions beyond the result.

And yet we are all aware that this sports festival was held over a dark moral swamp.

On the surface of the swamp was everything related to the place, Qatar.

The very decision to choose Qatar is mired in a dubious (and worse) procedure.

A motion before a European Parliament committee to call a spade a spade — bribery — was sidetracked by Qatari lobbyists.

If former FIFA president Sepp Blatter, a World Cup hopeful with shady practices, has said that “it was a mistake”, what else is there to say?

And then there is the record of Qatar itself.

The swamp is stained red with the blood of those who built those magnificent stadiums.

Its LGBTQ and women's policies (a woman under 25 needs male approval to travel abroad), to give just two examples, are in clear violation of FIFA's own solemnly proclaimed standards, enshrined, however, in its egregious and public non-compliance.

It is not necessary to extend: it has been news on the first and last page for a long time.

Beneath the Qatari surface of the swamp lies the darker history of FIFA itself.

By the time the FIFA story hits Netflix, the bad news (the tip of the iceberg) is already in the public domain.

High hopes for a “new FIFA” in 2016 under President Gianni Infantino (Qatar resident) have been bitterly dashed.

Speaking of Infantino, his 55-minute apology for Qatar on the Saturday before the World Cup kicks off surpasses anything said in the run-up to the 1936 Berlin Olympics. “How can you compare the Germany of 1933-1939—no I mean the genocidal 1939-45 period—with the Qatar of today?”, I hear the shrieks of protest.

Well yes I can.

There are great differences, but they are differences of degree, not of kind.

A country in which the majority of residents are deprived of civil and human rights?

The persecution and demonization of a minority because of their (sexual) identity?

Homosexuals are not required to wear a pink star, but they can go to jail.

A regime that does not even claim to be democratic?

The list could go on.

How did they get away, do they get away with it?

Why are all the recurring scandals swept under the rug, forgotten and forgiven, as the eruption in Qatar and the endless FIFA scandals no doubt will be?

The World Cup (sorry, the FIFA World Cup) is the purest and most refined example of the power of bread and circuses.

This time, the

part is both literal (those exquisite stadiums) and metaphorical.

And the

thing has an added meaning to the traditional one:

, in colloquial English,

, in colloquial Italian, allude to money.

The billions spent and earned (I ignore the question of redistribution).

FIFA surpasses any Roman emperor in understanding, brilliantly organizing (yes) and exploiting this modern version of

.

And we, yes, me included, we cannot resist the charm.

And so the party will continue and any hope of reforming this organization is doomed.

The

hides its ugly masters.

But let's not fool ourselves into thinking that

is limited to that beautiful game and those ugly masters.

It is ubiquitous, and increasingly so, in the world of power and politics, even in our cherished democracies.

The legitimacy of

or

at the expense of the legitimacy of

or

is on the rise, and not just in so-called slippery democracies.

I will limit myself to quoting one example of the many that I have in my heart, second only to football: our European Union.

I remember my surprise and shock when one of the great constitutionalists and political theorists of recent times, the late and much-missed Paco Rubio Llorente, told me in the heady days of the 1990s and early 2000s: what worried him most about the European Union, he said, is his success.

To my astonished questioning look he replied dryly: he accustoms people to accepting his very poor democratic credentials.

This is how undemocratic regimes corrupt the people.

Make no mistake and don't fall into the polarization trap: Rubio Llorente was not just any Eurosceptic.

Quite the opposite.

It was precisely his belief in the promise and nobility of the European construction that fueled his concern.

Not much has changed in our system of government since he made those comments about 25 years ago.

The EU's democratic credentials remain woefully shaky, as I have argued on numerous occasions already.

And now, to underscore the point, Infantino's apologies have a contender for his unctuous chutzpah in the figure of, no less, a vice-president of the European Parliament (“Qatar is an example for the Gulf region”) and her “socialist” associates. ” of yachts and private jets.

She put the circus.

The Qataris the

.

Naturally and commendably, the EU leaders erupted in all manner of condemnation.

But the laxity of the rules on lobbying at the EU level is notorious.

And it was not the EU institutions themselves that exposed the lobbying scandal that was taking place right under their noses, but the Belgian police and secret services.

The same goes for FIFA.

It is never the organization itself, which of course talks about responsibility and has all the formal institutional paraphernalia, that controls itself.

It took the FBI to bring down the Blatter regime.

The FIFA Governance Committee is in charge of ensuring the integrity of the sport and the organization.

The regulations guarantee their independence and their powers, on paper, are quite broad.

In reality, it's little more than a fig leaf, and often a rubber stamp for all sorts of crap.

To tell the truth, I was part of this Committee for some time in the early days of its existence.

It didn't take me more than a few months to discover the farce that was hidden behind the formal commitment to “independence”.

When the president was removed (“no renewal” they called it)—apparently our Committee was too independent for their liking—several of my colleagues and I resigned.

Navi Pillay, a colleague from the Committee, put it this way in her resignation letter: how can one serve in an institution (FIFA) that does not follow its own rules?

But neither in this case should they be

.

It's us.

We put up with all this because deserts are so seductive.

The power of bread and circuses.

Joseph Weiler

is Professor at New York University School of Law and former President of the European Graduate Institute.

Translation by

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Keep reading

I'm already a subscriber