Qatar’s ‘sports-washing’ World Cup has backfired in PR terms, but it's taken the heat off world football’s corrupted governing body FIFA who gave it a green light in the first place. Mediawatch talks to a whistleblower who became a journalist and publisher herself to get the story out.
Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani of Qatar, left, Fifa president Joseph Blatter and Russia's Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov celebrate the winning bids in 2010. Photo: AFP
The tiny Gulf state of Qatar was obviously ill-suited to hosting a World Cup, but back in 2010 it persuaded delegates of football's world governing body FIFA otherwise.
Qatar has spent a fortune on it since then, but not on the wages of migrant workers who built the facilities, or their health and safety. About 6000 of them have reportedly died building the stadiums since 2010.
But why spend so much money and risk so many lives? In a word: ‘sportswashing’ - whereby a country or organisation seeks to improve its reputation by hosting or sponsoring a big sports event, with the help of the media.
On the podcast The News Agents, veteran political journalist Jon Sopel reckoned Qatar might now now have buyer's remorse.
He said someone who has worked closely with the Qataris said they were now asking why they had bothered.
“We spent 200 billion dollars on this. We are vilified over LGBTQ rights. We are attacked for being corrupt over the manner in which we got the World Cup,” said Jon Sopel, channeling his unnamed source.
‘We are seen as kind of Victorian in the labour laws that we have in the way that guest workers have been treated. Nothing good has come to us as a result of this. And this is all been a giant waste of money. And we wish it would all just go away. But it can't,” said Jon Sopel.
It turns out their football team wasn't competitive either. Qatar was the first team eliminated after just two games - both defeats.
But the spotlight on Qatar has has taken the heat off FIFA, which gave Qatar 2022 a green light in the first place.
More than two dozen FIFA officials and their associates were accused of bribery connected to the awarding of hosting rights for to Russia in 2018 and Qatar this year.
The Guardian’s Barney Ronay was in the room in 2010 when Qatar was announced as the host of the current tournament.
“We've normalized this. There's not supposed to be corruption. But instead, 16 of 22 voting FIFA executive committee (members) have been banned from football since this happened. Two members were ruled out from voting because of proven corruption issues. It is incredible,” Ronay recalled this week.
Whatever it Takes, Bonita Mersiades account of FIFA corruption. Photo: supplied
Bonita Mersiades is one of the whistleblowers who brought the corruption in the bidding process to light.
Mersiades was the Head of Corporate and Public Affairs for Australia's FFA and she worked on the doomed Australian bid for the 2022 World Cup
She was sacked for questioning Australia’s practices and in November 2014 she was one of two whistleblowers identified by the Garcia Report, compiled by a former US attorney general appointed by FIFA to investigate its ethics and corruption.
She published her allegations herself first online, and then in a book called Whatever It Takes. The inside Story of the Fifa Way.
“As a whistleblower, if you want to bring attention to issues you have to be prepared to make yourself extraordinarily unpopular and put yourself out there and raise these issues in the media,” Bonita Mersiades said.
“It wasn't an issue of whether Qatar had a ‘brown paper bag’ moment or something like that. It was much more strategic. That whole bidding process was set up for the types of things that went on the swapping of votes, the currying of favours for that to happen. FIFA allowed that to happen, they knew it would happen,” she said.
“Their way of handling it is to turn a blind eye and pretend it's not happening and try to divert your attention with something else,” she said.
“If Australia had won the 2022 hosting rights, it would have been inappropriate as well. I think one of the best things that happened for world football was for Russia and Qatar to win those votes for 2018 and 2022, respectively,” Bonita Mersiades told Mediawatch.
“It made people focus on what the hell was going on at FIFA. From Australia's perspective, we ran a reputational risk and we did things that we ought not to have done in terms of trying to win that vote,” she said.
“It's good that we are at least focused now on how FIFA is running the integrity of their business decisions, because that would have what that's what it boils down to - and how we now are now playing a World Cup in a country where the sorts of rights that you and I and our compatriots take for granted are just ignored,” she said.
“There's been a small band of media that has maintained the pressure on these issues for the best part of a decade. And I think some of those will continue to do so. But most of the sports media, frankly, only discovered these issues in the past week. They are unlikely to do anything much more about it once the tournament's over,” Bonita Mersiades told Mediawatch.
“Qatar is not this is not going to change because of what some people say in a World Cup tournament - because after all, they haven't changed in the past 12 years. And likewise FIFA is not going to change because of pressure from fans. The only thing that will make FIFA change is pressure from broadcasters and sponsors,” she said.
“10 years ago, when these issues were being raised by me and a few others, there were no media standing with us,” she recalled.
Single-minded journalists like Andrew Jennings - who died earlier this year - investigated corruption at FIFA and the International Olympic Committee for years. In the UK, journalist David Conn is dedicated to investigating football finances - as is and independent German journalist Jens Weinreich, who publishes a magazine called Sport and Politics
Bonita Mersiades recently helped the Global Investigative Journalism Network identify tips for investigating big sports bodies.
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Look for official sources in smaller countries. These sources can have deep global contacts, but often fewer gate-keepers to access.
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Check on the condition of stadiums, safety policies, and changes in budgets.
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Attract whistleblowers by publishing initial, smaller stories on wrongdoing.
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Investigate the increasingly uneven distribution of money in sport.
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Look out for patterns of abuse and cover-ups in the sport – and engage with individual victims with sensitivity.
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Re-examine evidence in plain sight – like photos and annual reports.
Mersiades said looking through photos of football's elites iad power brokers they interacted with helped her piece together important investigative timelines. Simply reading annual reports, she found that one federation board member was receiving a $600,000 annual salary as a volunteer on a second governing board.
“No one had bothered to look at that before, but that was out there in the public,” she said.
“Because I didn't have the resources of a media house I spent an awful lot of time looking at publicly available information. Sometimes you can go down a rabbit hole when it comes to nothing. And other times, it does come to something,” Bonita Mersiades told Mediawatch.