My annual soccer tirade

by David Benjamin

“I am lucky enough in my life to come across some of the most talented athletes in soccer. And President Trump is made of the same sort of fibre.” —Gianni Infantino, FIFA president

PARIS—Largely because I depend on its frequent flyer program for early boarding and free luggage, I’ve been “loyal” to American Airlines for decades. But I hesitate to suggest that I’m actually fond of AA, nor would I want to be found dead in a shirt bearing the airline’s logo.

So, it was with a measure of dismay that on Saturday past, as I wandered Paris, I encountered veritable throngs of people voluntarily serving as walking billboards—all-caps, 120-point Times Roman—for QATAR Airways.

If you weren’t up on current events in France, you might look around the streets and say, “Whoa, with all these fans, that must be one kickass, fly-me-to-the-moon airline!”

Which it is not.

Luckily, I’m somewhat aware of what’s happenin’ now, so I understood that none of these throngs of Parisfolk—zero!—who appear to be wildly passionate about Qatar Airways had ever flown on one of its planes and didn’t give a rat’s ass about the outfit. Half of them couldn’t spot Qatar on a map. If Qatar were to be suddenly blown to smithereens by a colossal natural gas leak while the tiny country’s emir, Tamim ben Hamad Al Thani, was lighting cigarettes for his three wives, no one in France would shed a tear.

So, why the sartorial fad—in France—for a Muslim dictatorship that sends women to jail for crossing their legs?

The first clue to this conundrum is printed, although subtly, right there on all these shirts. Up above, and to the left of the giant “QATAR”, there’s a circle surrounding a stylized image of the Eiffel Tower, above which, faintly visible in 18-point type, is a clue. “Paris,” it says. Under the circle, reduced tastefully to 14-point Helvetica, are the words, “Saint-Germain.”

The Paris Saint-Germain football club, you see, is the city’s Premier League soccer team. The Fightin’ Saints (they actually don’t have a nickname) are equivalent—in U.S. football terms—to the New York Giants. To explain why all the PSG replica jerseys and t-shirts sported by the team’s fans say “QATAR” and sublimate “Paris,” you have to be aware that FIFA, the international governing body of professional soccer, is the second most corrupt sporting organization, right behind the International Olympic Committee, in the world (although LIV Golf is rising fast in the ranks).

Although soccer, among all the world’s athletic pastimes, is the cheapest sport to play. The only equipment you need is one ball, an open space and four sticks to mark two goalmouths. Ironically, however, it’s also the costliest, and richest, sport ever there was. Because soccer is the world’s most popular game, FIFA has drawn to its leadership some of the world’s least principled extortionists. Because being associated with a major soccer team—like PSG—bestows spectacular prestige on a commercial brand, the potentates of FIFA, led by its president Gianni Infantino, can hawk sponsorships to its most glamorous teams for a pharaoh’s ransom. This allows FIFA’s top teams to offer obscene salaries to the most famous soccer players, which encourages a constant churn of star-poaching. All this money, of course, favors rich dictators, like the emir of Qatar, to grease Infantino and the FIFA dons, with seven- and eight-figure bribes when the committee meets to decide which nation will host an upcoming World Cup tournament. This explains why last year’s event occurred in—guess where!—Qatar, where the average temperature between April and October is 104 degrees Fahrenheit.

Ice hockey, anyone?

Finally, of course, this vortex of greed explains why all those soccer-crazy non -Qataris were strutting the democratic streets of Paris in celebration of a nation that has never held an election and has been frequently condemned by Western nations as a state sponsor of terrorism. It explains why one of the most Islamophobic countries in Europe (France, okay?) sells thousands of shirts bearing the name of a Muslim nation whose laws are based in a Sharia system that denies its denizens (citizens would be too kind a word) freedoms of speech, assembly, press and faith, and which discourages its women from doing much with their lives except breeding (hopefully) male Qataris. This explains—well, no—it doesn’t—why Parisians, who were shattered and enraged by terrorist attacks, launched by Islamist fanatics in 2015 and 2016—killing 90 at the Bataclan music club, twelve Charlie Hebdo journalists, and 86 innocent people run down on the streets of Nice—were perfectly happy to forgive and forget when their team (wearing jerseys that glorify one of the nations whose people cheered all those 188 murders) made it to the UEFA championship game.

Blood under the bridge.

I’ve been critical of FIFA for decades because it has allowed one of the most popular and egalitarian—and potentially exciting—sports ever conceived to devolve into a frustrating exercise in cowardly coaching and mass tedium. Soccer has not changed with the times, has not adapted to the heightened athleticism of its players, has not changed a single line in its rulebook in countless years. But it has gotten exponentially richer, more and more corrupt and more accommodating to the dictators, oligarchs and plutocrats who sate its gilded appetite. It is the game of the people, played by millionaires, governed by billionaires.

It explains why three of the teams—Arsenal in England, Lyon in France and Real Madrid in Spain—in this year’s UEFA championship brackets all wore jerseys that advertise Emirates airline (Qatar’s neighbor). And why the Italian team that PSG beat in the final was billed as the fighting Digitalbits. Never mind what city they came from.

And the people? The devotees of the Digitalbits and the mighty Standard Chartered eleven? They swallow the propaganda that their exorbitant ticket prices grant them witness to a “beautiful game,” sublime and artistic because it does not stoop to the profligate scoring that looks so ugly in basketball, cricket, American football, tennis, volleyball… Scrabble. They cheer, they sit through scoreless tie after scoreless tie, thrilled when the match ends in the static anticlimax of a kicking contest. They believe the lie that soccer players—who, if they can’t break a tie, are spared the physical trauma of multiple overtimes—are the “best conditioned” jocks in the world. The diehard fans of PSG do not hesitate, as would probably the fans of the Green Bay Teslas or the New York Citibanks, to fork over $40 for a shirt emblazoned not with their team, nor of “Paris the City of Light,’ nor of “La Belle France” but with the name of a 4,500-square mile desert peninsula whose king just unloaded a $400 million used airplane on Donald Trump.

Even trying to explain this civic oblivion in a nation that burned the Bastille and beheaded royalty in the cause of liberty, equality and fraternity, is hard. The simplest alibi is that these folks are fans, and fans suffer a sort of cognitive paralysis whose closest analog is … in the words of literary critic Terry Eagleton, a lifelong soccer observer and one of its keenest skeptics: “[F]or the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine.”

Eagleton has also said the game should be abolished. I wouldn’t go so far (People could get killed.) But I’d change enough rules that the fans can have as much fun during games, in the stadium, as they do in the streets afterwards.

And I’d get the goddamn advertising off the jerseys.