Could a Norway boycott of the Qatar World Cup change the future of football?

‘Last weekend we saw the Norwegian national team, including goal-scoring sensation Erling Braut Haaland (above) and Arsenal player Martin Ødegaard, in T-shirts championing respect and human rights.’ Photograph: Jon Nazca/Reuters
‘Last weekend we saw the Norwegian national team, including goal-scoring sensation Erling Braut Haaland (above) and Arsenal player Martin Ødegaard, in T-shirts championing respect and human rights.’ Photograph: Jon Nazca/Reuters

“Tromsø IL thinks it is time for football to stop and take a few steps back. We should think about the purpose of football and why so many love our sport. That corruption, modern-day slavery and a high number of workers’ deaths are the fundament to our most important tournament, the World Cup, is totally unacceptable.”

This surprise statement, released by Norwegian top-flight club Tromsø on 26 February, from a city located north of the Arctic Circle, quickly gained national traction. In the days and weeks that followed, six more leading clubs – including the three biggest and best-supported, Rosenborg, Vålerenga and Brann – followed suit, urging the Norwegian FA to formally boycott the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. Fourteen of 16 supporters’ groups in the top flight are joining the demand.

It didn’t stop there. Last weekend, the Norwegian national team, including goal-scoring sensation Erling Braut Haaland and Arsenal player Martin Ødegaard, wore T-shirts championing respect and human rights, while the national teams of Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark had similar initiatives before their games. Now reporters from all over Europe are asking players how they feel about the World Cup in Qatar.

Two important things occurred the same month Tromsø IL declared its stance. A new cross-club supporters’ initiative, Vår Fotball (Our Football), was formed aiming to prevent Norwegian football becoming part of “sportswashing” – and Qatar 2022 is by definition a sportswashing event. And the Guardian published an article stating that more than 6,500 migrant workers had died since Qatar won the hosting rights to the 2022 World Cup in December 2010.

The Norwegian FA rarely and only hesitantly appears in debates. But this time around it probably felt it couldn’t produce a proper reason to decline. Its president, Terje Svendsen, claimed that dialogue with the Qatar government may indeed have made life somehow easier for the migrant workers.

Few were convinced by this. The debates went on. Each day the Norwegian FA produced new responses: if we boycott, we will lose 100m kroner in income. If we boycott, it can have unfortunate consequences for the migrant workers: they might lose their jobs. If we boycott, it can affect all our national teams. We can be expelled from future Fifa tournaments.

The Norwegian FA didn’t win any hearts and minds with these shifting arguments, and making a connection between the loss of life for some of the world’s most vulnerable people and economic loss for itself was deemed too cynical even for football politicians to make.

For a long time Norwegians supporters have felt that football has been taken away from them by the people at the top level, that football’s true values have been sacrificed by greed and corruption, selling its soul to the highest bidder and, conversely, sacrificing the lives of the globe’s poorest.

But grassroots campaigns are nothing new. So why has this boycott movement made the FA’s top brass quiver? Because Norwegian football is a democracy. Clubs are by law owned and run by their members who, once a year, vote on the club’s policies, amendments of its statutes and so on. Any paid-up member over the age of 15 is eligible to vote – the law applies to all clubs, from the smallest community-based outfit to former Champions League regulars Rosenborg.

At the Norwegian FA’s AGM on 14 March, the decision was taken to delay a verdict on the possible boycott, and an extraordinary general meeting will be held on 20 June to decide this one issue. This, of course, gives the pro-boycott movement plenty of time to rally around its cause and gather support.

If the majority of the delegates vote in favour, there will be a boycott. It doesn’t matter, then, that the leadership vehemently opposes a boycott: this leadership is bound by the will of its people.

A line must be drawn somewhere, and for Norwegian football fans, that line is a World Cup in Qatar. Awarding the festival of football to an apartheid-like state accused of practising modern-day slavery is the epitome of the greed and corruption at play in the higher echelons of football governance.

The FA in Norway is viewed by many football fans as a local Fifa department. When Fifa’s president, Gianni Infantino, boasts that Qatar will be the most beautiful World Cup ever, that is the voice of a man our FA helped get elected. And the Norwegian football grassroots finds it macabre that Infantino can utter words like this when he knows the human cost of hosting the World Cup in Qatar.

The boycott movement is first and foremost a protest against how football is run. It is understandable if the Qataris feel singled out. The World Cup 2018 was also a sportswashing event, and in Russia, too, tens of thousands of migrant workers were exploited. But for me the telling moment was at the Fifa congress in Moscow the day before the opening match. In the middle of the congress, it was announced that President Vladmir Putin would make a special appearance. On the stage enters one of the world’s most autocratic leaders, and the vast majority, if not all, of football leaders from every corner of the world rose from their seats and gave him a standing ovation.

This told you all you really needed to know abut where football is at the moment. And as each day passes, it seems football takes another step down the abyss.

In Norway, supporters have decided to draw the line with Qatar. Because if we accept Qatar’s treatment of its migrant workforce, what can come next? World Cup stadiums built by child labourers or maybe North Korea getting the hosting rights?

So are we witnessing a wind of change in international football, or is this all moral window-dressing? The demonstrations against the World Cup in Qatar may backfire. Because, where do you draw the line? Shouldn’t Martin Ødegaard, when protesting against worker exploitation in Qatar, do the same against his club’s most important sponsor, the United Arab Emirates, which treats its migrant workers the same or perhaps worse than Qatar?

But the most important thing here is that football is finally being asked some inconvenient questions.

Håvard Melnæs is editor of Josimar, a Norwegian football magazine (www.josimar.no, www.josimarfootball.com).

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