It’s not too late for footballers to boycott Qatar’s World Cup

If you go to Fifa’s website, you’ll find all sorts of things to make your heart sing and tears spring unbidden to your eyes. It’s not just about football, you see, and the making of obscene amounts of money from it. It’s about values. It’s about making football a beacon of good in this wicked world. There are pages of material about how ‘Fifa has been able to use the global popularity of football to spread positive social messages to wider society’.

If you took all this at face value you’d have the impression that football is the means, rather than the end – as if the enrichment of Fifa’s high-ups, the commercial partnerships and the rapacious brand-policing were all just side-effects of its mission to make the world a better place. You’d think, from the way it talks, that Fifa was an NGO or a wearisomely do-gooding department of the United Nations rather than a profit-making private company.