There are many who feel that the Saudi Arabian record on human rights is sufficiently bad to refuse their hosting of major sporting tournaments like the FIFA World Cup announced for 2034 in the last 24 hours.
There are others who would feel that the United States is no shining example in this area and they will be hosting the 2026 edition the draw for qualifying to which from Europe takes place tomorrow.
Just as beauty is said to be in the eye of the beholder, so too does does the definition of a bad state come from your own perspective, and that of the background from which you come that has nurtured it.
It is illegal to be gay in Saudi, just as it was in Ireland at the time of Italia ’90. Sometimes we forget that our own history is littered with wrongs that would cast us as a failed state in many eyes.
But change happens, and it happens most when you open up to outside ideas and influences.
Qatar is a much smaller state but in hosting the World Cup in 2022 it is more likely to become more liberal through enduring the scrutiny and the global debate that sparked.
The sporting world at its highest level has become an enormous burden to host in financial and social energy terms. The 2026 World Cup is being played across the United States, Canada and Mexico. In 2013 it will be played across Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. Not the most climate friendly nod there from sport to the watching world.
The three countries that have the political strength at home to spend as they wish on such events are probably China, Russia and Saudi Arabia. Of the three how bad does Saudi look by comparison in human rights or geopolitical influence?
We want sport to be bigger and better at this level, but are we willing to pay the price when it comes to footing the bill?
Saudi Arabia is and sport is grateful for that. If we want to say no on a red line of society and how it is run then we had better be absolutely certain that the idea of western democracy and a dominant christian faith system is really so much better than the multiple differences to it in the majority of the world.
Change comes from engagement and a willingness to see other perspectives.
This is not to apologise for FIFA, and the decision to award Saudi is mired in trying to make everything fit so that it was the only bidder, but before we all climb onto the high moral ground we might be well served to check that the rungs of the ladder we are climbing are not made out of the rewards of the sins of the past that might look abhorrent now but which once were deemed to be perfectly normal, and imperfect in so many ways.
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