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LONDON: The English Football Association really is an astonishing body. Almost from the moment it was founded in December 1863, it has lurched from embarrassment to embarrassment, plumbing new depths.
The latest farrago is signing a memorandum of understanding with the Qatar Football Association.
The FA will no doubt seek to justify the decision by pointing out that the 2022 World Cup is in Qatar, so it makes sense to be on good terms with the country’s FA in the build-up to the tournament. There will be friendlies. Training camps perhaps can be arranged to get England’s players used to conditions there (assuming they qualify).
“We have a long history of collaboration with various national associations to share knowledge and experience to support the development of football,” said the FA chairman Greg Clarke. “For Qatar, developing the game across the country is a key objective as they approach the hosting of the Fifa World Cup in 2022.”
That Clarke remains in his job is remarkable. In October, he gave a humiliating performance in front of House of Commons select committee investigating claims of racism and sexism within the FA. It was his jitteriness that led to Sam Allardyce being forced to resign as England manager after vague allegations of not a lot were made in the Daily Telegraph.
The circumstances behind the dismissal of the England women’s coach Mark Sampson, meanwhile, remain baffling. It was justified on the back of a two-year-old internal report into his conduct at Bristol Academy, the club he had coached before England, but was instigated by the racism claims.
The process of finding a successor was protracted and the eventual appointment of Phil Neville mystifying given his lack of experience in the women’s game. But perhaps even more damning was that the FA did not anticipate the public skepticism; only very belatedly was there any attempt at explanation.
Clarke is by no means the first FA chairman to panic in the face of a potential media storm, but few have been quite so supine, and none surely has so misjudged the national mood as he did before the select committee when referring to allegations of institutional racism as “fluff.”
Any sense that the FA can stand as a moral arbiter, leading English football, has vanished; they blow with the wind as though incapable of independent thought, of determining for themselves a decent code of behavior.
But this link-up with Qatar feels like a new low. Clarke’s predecessor, Greg Dyke, after all, described the awarding of hosting rights for 2022 to Qatar as “the worst day in Fifa’s history.” That bid is still under criminal investigation in both the US and Switzerland. As the tournament approaches, there are only going to be more questions about the morality of playing a World Cup in a country with a questionable human rights record, especially when so many of those questions are being asked about the treatment of workers building the stadiums in which the World Cup will be played.
At around the same time Clarke was visiting Doha, a group of British MPs was meeting Qatar’s National Human Rights Committee. For what reason remains unclear but there must be a fear as Britain stares into an impoverished post-Brexit future that the need to do deals will increasingly outweigh ethical considerations. But even if that is not the case, how now can the FA criticize Qatar? How can it ask the right questions?
There was hope that the corruption allegations that blighted the campaigns to host both 2018 and 2022 might lead to a sweep that went beyond the resignation of a handful of officials and a few court cases in the US involving South American officials. One that actually led to a change of the culture within Fifa.
How can the FA pretend it cares, how can it pretend it wants to help clean up the game when it is prepared to do deals with an organization whose conduct in winning the World Cup bid remains dubious? What is anybody to think other than that the FA will deal with you if they think there’s something in it for them? And what sort of morality is that?