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A year ago, the national team caused a stir with this action before an international match against Iceland
Photo: via www.imago-images.de / imago images/ActionPictures
When the national team invites guest speakers, they tend to be motivational artists from the sport who tell the footballers how they can get a few percent more out of their performance: extreme sailors, climbers, adventurers.
So people.
On Tuesday evening, however, the national players will hear something else: it will be about minimum wages, forced labour, freedom of the press and human rights.
Representatives of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are expected in the quarters in the evening to provide information about the next World Cup host Qatar, and captain Manuel Neuer "is even looking forward to it, because we have to form our own opinion of things out of our own interest «.
The World Cup organizer Qatar has once again been targeted by the Ukraine war.
On the one hand, the Green Economics Minister Robert Habeck is traveling to the emirate to negotiate gas supplies from Qatar.
Qatar is something of a war profiteer.
On the other hand, the experiences with the World Cup hosts Russia four years ago warn: Is football stepping into the next trap here with its eyes wide open?
And then, afterwards, do the officials act as if they were falling out of nowhere?
The new DFB boss is also honored
So there will be a lot to talk about in the evening at the DFB hotel in Neu-Isenburg, and the newly elected DFB President Bernd Neuendorf has also announced that he will be informed about Qatar "from the professionals" (Neuer).
DFB director Oliver Bierhoff organized the meeting nine months before the start of the World Cup, "because I don't like to let things happen passively," as he emphasized to the press on Tuesday.
It is the start of a whole series of events that the DFB is planning on the subject.
So far, Bierhoff has not necessarily attracted attention with his radical criticism of Qatar. At the end of the year, he spoke cautiously about the subject in a media round and only spoke plainly about the boycott.
"A boycott is useless," he emphasized there: "We want to give the tournament a chance."
Since then he has been there twice. According to his own information, he held talks there with the German ambassador, with labor organizations and the Qatar Foundation, after all it was "important not to look at things only from German perspective".
»Contacts very restrictive«
So he decided above all to get a picture of himself in the emirate, "I've been abroad a lot, then you learn tolerance."
The conversations with people have so far "always been enriching for me", one has "learned to appreciate and love people": "And one asks oneself: what kind of prejudices have you had up to now?"
But in Qatar, Bierhoff has reached his limits with this strategy: "Contact with the locals is handled very restrictively there." So the talks so far have been thrown back at the level of the political leadership or FIFA.
Things are complicated.
In fact, as was already evident at the press conference on Tuesday, the Habeck trip played into the hands of the DFB.
The pressure on the association has suddenly decreased somewhat.
When politicians are trying to establish good relations with Qatar, Bierhoff can say that "the subject has changed slightly."
Qatar is "an important partner for Germany in the Arab world," the DFB director pointed out, "a driver of developments."
So the 2022 World Cup all of a sudden: the world visiting friends?
It's not quite like that yet, you could still hear that with Bierhoff.
Although things have changed for the better: He cited the introduction of minimum wages and the easier opportunity to change jobs, all of this is happening "slower than anyone could have hoped for".
Conclusion: "Things are not great, but the World Cup can help."
Has the situation in the country improved at all?
Most recently, the human rights organization Amnesty International described how superficially and insufficiently the reforms in Qatar are still being implemented, monitored and observed despite the award of the World Cup to the emirate.
The organization even notes that there have been steps backwards in labor law, and “practices that violate human rights” have also resurfaced.
"In fact, the situation for many migrant workers has hardly improved," the authors write in their report a year before the start of the World Cup.
It has often been the postulate of sport that major events that draw the eye of the world public to a regime really produce improvements: Fifa argued similarly after awarding the 2018 World Cup to Russia, the same applies to the IOC in relation to the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing The result is known.