armchairlawyer wrote: ↑Sun Nov 20, 2022 10:17 am
Not sure why FIFA's website omits some names such as Emirates

Jerry Atrick wrote: ↑Sun Nov 20, 2022 2:59 pm The fake fans are hilarious - every country of the world is represented by the Indian subcontinent

Freightdog wrote: ↑Sun Nov 20, 2022 4:19 pm

armchairlawyer wrote: ↑Sun Nov 20, 2022 10:17 am
Not sure why FIFA's website omits some names such as Emirates

I wonder if that isn’t related to the legal battles and restrictions that several MEN national were engaged in, against QATAR, a few years ago. 2017~2020ish. QATAR airways were restricted from certain airspace and squeezed a bit. But QATAR has the holy grail, and so they probably influence the advertising.

I’m not a fan of football, but this whole thing makes for bizarre occasional reading. I have a feeling that once emotions are tweaked by the upcoming events, and lacklustre refreshments and accommodations take their toll, the fans will provide plenty of headaches for various nations’ foreign offices. There may well be a very interesting clash of cultures.

I do wonder what sudden restrictions on social media are going to occur, also. The Middle East national are not shy in disabling certain types of traffic. Several types of VOIP and messaging platforms have been periodically restricted in the past in various places under the guise of “preventing human trafficking”, “morality” and “corruption”.

armchairlawyer wrote: ↑Mon Nov 21, 2022 12:07 pm English footballers used to have an exemption from the realities of life. Nobody expected them to produce anything but disgraceful tabloid headlines. A tacit understanding enclosed them all. These were athletes, not serious people. They were entertainers, not spokesmen. Adding to the gaiety of the nation, not changing the nation for the better, was why they existed.
Then something remarkable happened to English football. England, for the first time since the 1990s, stopped being rubbish. The charlatans who managed the national team were replaced by Gareth Southgate in 2016. He was thoughtful, kind, sensible. Crucially, he was successful too. He led England to the semi-finals of the World Cup in 2018, and the final of Euro 2020. England’s players changed too. They became as serious as their manager. The tawdry English footballers who defined the Noughties — Ashley Cole and Wayne Rooney — were replaced by a new generation. They did not use their high status to party hard and get laid. Suddenly the realities of life, and changing them for the better, motivated England’s footballers.
There was the Manchester United striker Marcus Rashford. During the pandemic Rashford began campaigning for free school lunch programmes to have their funding extended. Rashford’s message was simple. “This is not politics, this is humanity,” he tweeted. As the country trudged through lockdown, Matt Hancock ordered footballers to “play their part” by taking a pay cut. He had the Noughties footballers like Rooney in his mind when he said that — but they were gone. Hancock and the government were outflanked by Rashford, who forced them into excruciating policy U-turns. Hancock, meanwhile, became tabloid fodder. Politicians and footballers swapped places.
A template established itself. Every footballer in England had a cause, a burning injustice to slay. Manchester City’s Raheem Sterling backed Black Lives Matter. Aston Villa’s Tyrone Mings lectured the then home secretary Priti Patel about racism on Twitter. The Liverpool captain, Jordan Henderson, and Tottenham Hotspur’s captain, Harry Kane, started talking about LGBTQ rights. Rainbow laces tied players’ boots — though not a single Premier League player was made comfortable enough by this gesture to come out as gay.
All at once the game spoke in an ethical voice about inclusion, values and equality. Football no longer stuck to football. Athletes were recast as moral gurus, or “activist super-players”, wise beyond their years. Southgate encouraged the change and guarded his players from criticism. “It’s their duty to continue to interact with the public on matters such as equality, inclusivity and racial injustice,” he wrote in a relentlessly sincere essay.
These interactions were not quite the player’s own though. Rashford’s school meal campaign was designed by his personal publicist Kelly Hogarth, and his (then) PR agency Roc Nation Sports. The impression of spontaneity that made Rashford appear more authentic than the politicians he battled against was calibrated by 20 “subject-matter experts” who worked for Roc Nation in Fitzrovia. Their efforts helped secure Rashford a 65 per cent increase in Twitter followers, an MBE and a British Vogue cover.
Footballers had not become more socially conscious overnight. With hindsight, you could see this was a sentimental narrative. Rather, the PR industry realised, in culturally progressive times, there were ways to entwine social justice and sport, the better to have clients like Rashford act as a pipeline for the sale of expensive apparel and branded content. Simon Oliveira, a long-term adviser to David Beckham, described Roc Nation’s immaculate work with Rashford as “genius”. He sensed what most of the public and press could not. This was business, not activism. A fresh way to market footballers, and to bank millions doing so.
At the World Cup in Qatar the sentimental narrative ends. The notion that footballers are more than entertainers, and that football can change the world for the better, is going to its grave. Qatar is a micro sharia state with a track record of beating its gay subjects. An unknown number of migrant workers died constructing the stadiums for this tournament — unknown because either the authorities did not bother to count them or has decided not to disclose the number. There is no moral ambiguity here: English footballers’ social consciences should stop them from playing in Qatar.
Perhaps their moral qualms were soothed over the weekend by Fifa’s president, Gianni Infantino. In an hour-long rant, Infantino defended Qatar’s record on gay rights and migrant workers, saying he knew what discrimination was like. “As a child I was bullied because I had red hair and freckles.” (Helpfully, Infantino added: “I am not Qatari, Arab, African, gay, disabled or a migrant worker”.) Earlier this month he wrote to each of the 32 competing teams, urging them not to allow “football to be dragged into every ideological or political battle”.
England, whether it is Southgate or Rashford, have been doing just that for years now. It would have been beautiful — genuinely moving — if Southgate and the FA had withdrawn the team from this World Cup because it was being held in Qatar. (And rescued the nation from the agony of watching England bathetically exit the tournament in the knockout stages.) Rashford might have retweeted himself as they refused to board the team plane to Doha: “This is not politics, this is humanity.” The activist super players might have shown themselves to be more than the creations of PR committee rooms. They might have shown that ethics can triumph, just this once, over money.
“Show me a hero,” Scott Fitzgerald scribbled in his notebooks, “and I’ll write you a tragedy.” There was Southgate’s face as he handed out gifts to a team of migrant workers, handpicked by the Qatari government, at England’s training camp last week. Southgate used to be a hero. He had believed his players could use their fame for good. Yet here they were as playthings, shredding their reputations, roped into an authoritarian government’s attempts to distract from its abysmal human rights record. These England players, who are supposed to be different, and had publicly proclaimed it for years, are not even hypocrites. They’re smaller than that. They are just athletes, and they do what their sponsors and the PR companies expect of them.
“These decisions were made above us,” seems to be the cowardly line England are sticking to. In a way this is liberating. In Qatar we will watch more than a World Cup. We will watch the shattering of an illusion. Once more, we do not have to expect much from England’s footballers, other than disappointment.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/qata ... -ndj7sbvkv