Dictatorship and Sport

“The daily spectacle was breath-taking in its beauty and magnificence. The stadium was a tournament of colour and caught the throat.” These words from the American novelist Thomas Wolfe sound as if they could have been said mere months ago in Qatar. But Wolfe was not describing the splendour and colour of Qatar’s World Cup venues; he was writing about the pageantry of the Nazi Olympics in 1936.

Sport undoubtedly has the power to bring people together. One thing it will never be able to do is influence the nature and motivations of autocrats. Prior to Berlin 1936, Congressmen Emanuel Seller said to regard such men as “true guardians of sports… is to invite the possibility that the Olympic games shall be befouled.” The Olympics, and sport in general, are long past being befouled and its desecration continues.

When FIFA’s thoroughly unscrupulous President Gianni Infantino pleaded for people to “not allow football to be dragged into every ideological or political battle that exists” ahead of the Qatar tournament, he was unintentionally echoing the words of the fascist sympathising Avery Brundage, who implored people to not get swept up in a “jew-nazi altercation” prior to the 1936 Games. Both Brundage and Infantino are ‘willing dupes’. At best, they tolerate the abuses. At worst, they may be actively complicit in them.

The 2022 World Cup and 1936 Olympics are certainly not the only controversial hosts. In 1934, Fascist Italy hosted the World Cup, during which Mussolini is alleged to have handpicked the referees. Barely a year later, this was followed by the invasion of Abyssinia. In 1978, Argentina hosted the World Cup, a tournament which came just two years after a military coup under Jorge Videla had toppled its elected government. Videla’s campaign was responsible for the disappearances of thousands, yet matches went ahead all the same.

Five years ago, Putin’s Russia hosted the World Cup, with the dictator stating how thrilled he was “that myths and prejudice” had collapsed as fans flocked to stadiums rumoured to have been partly built with North Korean slave labour. This particular tournament had been preceded by the annexation of Crimea, deaths of opposition leaders, and the attempted murder of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury. Infantino proudly proclaimed that the World Cup had revealed a “changed” Russia; the full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year is testament to the absurdity of this statement.

World Cups in 1934, 1978, and 2018 all served to sanitise, legitimise, and bolster totalitarianism. They did not foster global unity; they did not foster peace and they most certainly did not lead to any positive reform. Each tournament saw cities transformed into colossal stage sets. Sets in which regimes performed tolerance and openness. Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels called on Berliners to “be more charming than the Parisians, more easy going than the Viennese, more cosmopolitan than the Londoners, and more practical than New Yorkers.” Antisemitic publications and signs were removed as Berlin was transformed into the model global city. All the while Germany’s Jews anticipated the withdrawal of the world’s attention after the Olympics “with fear and trembling”.

Autocracies can never be trusted. Their motive is exclusively their own preservation and the oppression of anything that stands in opposition to their existence. Such regimes have always weaponised sport, and they will continue to do so. If they want to host such events it is entirely for illicit purposes and cannot trigger positive change.

This article has initially focused heavily on football. This is in part because it has consistently been the most egregiously complicit. However, this does not mean that other global sports are clean. The Formula One group, the International Tennis Federation (ITF), boxing, and MMA also have long and storied relationships with totalitarian abuses.

Numerous Formula 1 events are held in anti-democratic states. The ITF has also been consistently happy to turn a blind eye so long as they are not pushed to act. Tennis tournaments may have been suspended in China for 2022, but this was due COVID-19 restrictions and pressure resulting from the disappearance of player Peng Shuai. Ongoing ethnic cleansing and the wider nature of China’s government has evidently not been enough to trigger a response. The alleged treatment of Shuai by the Chinese Communist Party should have come as no surprise, and the fact that tournaments had been hosted for years in China shows that the ITF had no problem lining their pockets so long as people turned a blind eye.

It is easy to sit on a moral high horse and decide which states should not be allowed to use sport to legitimise themselves. What is altogether more difficult is deciding where this line should be drawn. The United Kingdom economy depends to a significant degree on its arms industry.

Arms which are sold to Saudi Arabia and used to murder the Yemeni people. The 2012 Olympics was also given to London just two years after the Invasion of Iraq. An invasion founded on lies, the consequent war resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and decades of regional instability. Was it right for the United Kingdom to showcase its best qualities in the wake of such a crime?

The United States will also host the World Cup along with Canada and Mexico in 2026. Its long list of crimes are well known, but suppose an autocrat like Donald Trump were to win the white house in 2024? Should that tournament be allowed to go ahead even though it would underpin a farright theocracy? There is not a sin gle country on earth that is pure and there is nothing anyone can do to change that. What we can do is take away the power these tournaments have in whitewashing totalitarianism. If the countless sycophantic dupes who promote such events - like Infantino, David Beckham, Andrea Pirlo, and Gary Neville did in Qatarare drowned out by critical reporting then sport loses its power to sanitise the image of dictatorships. Sporting bodies certainly have a responsibility to uphold basic levels of integrity, but this is unlikely to ever happen.

It is up to everyone to maintain the critical thinking that was seen in the run up to the 2022 World Cup. There is great power in people questioning the narrative peddled by sporting bodies and the dictatorships they aid and abet. Qatar spent a staggering estimated 200-220 billion dollars on its World Cup. An insane cost they never intended to recuperate. What they wanted was to project the image of a modern and open country. At least to some degree this has failed, and I cannot help but wonder if some within its government feel the money could have been better spent elsewhere.

The spectacle of the 2022 World Cup may have been breath-taking and it is tempting to believe the lie that it has brought the world closer together, but this was never its intention. Its purpose was always to benefit a small, un-elected ruling elite concerned only with their own aggrandisement.

We must stop our tacit acceptance of the sport’s intimate relationship with totalitarianism. If this is done then we are one step further towards prying it away from its clutches.

Daniel Evans