Fox World Cup Coverage Brought to You by Human Rights Abusers

[Mark Jeffries]

When asked at a press conference whether they would report on the horrible track record regarding human rights of Qatar as part of their FIFA World Cup coverage, Fox Sports said something like "the fans want to see the World Cup" (NBCU's Telemundo, which has the Spanish language rights to the tournament, says they and NBC News in English will report on the home of the event).  Considering that government-owned Qatar Airways is a major sponsor of the coverage and has made it possible for Fox to have live announcers at every venue for every match (while, as in the past, TEL's Andres Cantor will make his trademark "GOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLL!" call from studios at Universal City), it is no surprise that they made the remark--and there was nothing on foxsports.com about the decision to not sell alcohol at venues (while that was on TEL's website):

 https://wapo.st/3EPSeDt

[PGage]

This is helpful. I have watched the first two matches, and currently in the 12th minute of the Wales-US match, and have been waiting for some mention of the human rights issues. So far, nothing. They do show shots of Beckham, but without the obvious context.

Also, I see the Euros decided not to go with the Rainbow armbands?

I was not attending to the fact this was Fox (probably would have guessed ESPN), though yes, now that I think of it I do see the Fox bug in upper left.

On Mon, 21 Nov 2022 at 10:19 AM Mark Jeffries <spotl...@gmail.com> wrote:

When asked at a press conference whether they would report on the horrible track record regarding human rights of Qatar as part of their FIFA World Cup coverage, Fox Sports said something like "the fans want to see the World Cup" (NBCU's Telemundo, which has the Spanish language rights to the tournament, says they and NBC News in English will report on the home of the event).  Considering that government-owned Qatar Airways is a major sponsor of the coverage and has made it possible for Fox to have live announcers at every venue for every match (while, as in the past, TEL's Andres Cantor will make his trademark "GOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLL!" call from studios at Universal City), it is no surprise that they made the remark--and there was nothing on foxsports.com about the decision to not sell alcohol at venues (while that was on TEL's website):

 https://wapo.st/3EPSeDt

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[Joe Hass]

FIFA put the kibosh on the armbands: https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/21/world-cup-one-love-armbands-yellow-cards/

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[PGage]

Fuck FIFA.

I get it (though my understanding is that an in game penalty is unusual if not unheard of for a uniform violation like this). Still, would like to see what kind of WC this would become if FIFA would up disqualifying the Captains of 8 or so European teams.

As a Soccer neophyte: Would it technically have been possible to make like the worst player the Captain and let them take the Yellow Card?

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[Joe Hass]

Two problems:

1. You don't want to waste a substitute (you only have five subs in three opportunities).

2. Yellow cards accumulate both within and outside matches: when you get a second yellow card, you're required to sit out the following match. 

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[Brad Beam]

Mr Oliver is with you on Qatari behavior, but yeah, he’s gonna watch the World Cup as well. 

https://youtu.be/UMqLDhl8PXw

Sent from my iPhone

On Nov 21, 2022, at 16:09, Joe Hass <hassg...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Tom Wolper]

FIFA has always been a corrupt sewer. The corruption was low key and easy enough to ignore before media rights money exploded. So the corruption has become massive and unavoidable to notice but it’s so deeply ingrained in the institution that getting rid of it will mean destroying the organization and trying to start over again and the money people prefer the status quo.

It was openly known and reported on that the choice of countries like Russia and Qatar was the result of bribery. Yet when the games start everybody turns a blind eye to whatever problems are associated with the home country and just concentrate on the soccer. With all of the money Fox Sports invested in carrying the World Cup they are just going to play along like all of the other rights holders. Part of the issue of holding the World Cup in a dictatorial country is the local leader can make any decision they want and FIFA is going to spinelessly accommodate it. The decision about the armbands is one instance and screwing the long time sponsor Budweiser is another. If the Qatari government is unhappy with Fox Sports they can throw them out of the country and nobody can overrule them.

If you want to see stories about the ugly side of the Cup, you can find them in Sports Illustrated, The Ringer, The Athletic, and pretty much anybody else who covers sports.

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[Adam Bowie]

I note that the BBC, also a rights holder, didn't show the opening ceremony on Sunday, instead explaining the background to the tournament and the issues of migrant worker deaths and lack of human rights in the country.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/nov/20/bbc-ignores-world-cup-opening-ceremony-in-favour-of-qatar-criticism

I don't really have an issue with a majority muslim country banning alcohol in the stadiums, although that feels like something that should have been announced more than 48  hours before the event. And if FIFA gets sued by Anheuser-Busch InBev, then I'll laugh. Sadly, I suspect they'll sit on their hands and remember that the 2026 competition is in the US.

Yes, the World Cup has been held in authoritarian countries before - as, on a regular basis, does the Olympics. But I can't sit by and watch a football tournament take place built on modern day slavery, with perhaps as many as 6,500 deaths. (Whatever the real number, it's massive).

So I'm sitting this one out. I didn't watch England today, and sat out Wales/USA this evening. 

And yes - this is my favourite sport. So if England actually does progress far in the tournament, it will be torture. But metaphorical torture. Not actual torture, like building stadia in >50C/120F conditions whilst living in squalour and being paid a pittance.

Adam

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[Kevin M.]

This thread reminds me very much of the height of Covid, when baseball and other American sports insisted on risking the lives of players and stadium workers by having games while thousands of Americans were dying everyday. Several people protested saying they were no longer fans and were done following the games. Turns out they are mostly all fans again. 

There is something about sports, when even the most heinous and egregious acts and behaviors can just be excused or overlooked. Hell, Mike Tyson served time for rape but has his own cartoon series (as well as a new line of recreational drugs he’s releasing with the guy whose ear he bit off). 

A few thousand dead slave workers are meaningless as long as viewers can watch a thrilling 1-1 tie game. U! S! A!

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Kevin M. (RPCV)

[PGage]

I respect your decision very much Adam. I think this is the third WC I have watched seriously, and I am still basically a tourist, without deep emotional ties to the game. I consider the NFL to be guilty of serious crimes and human rights abuses (perhaps not on the scale of Qatar) and have not been able to stop myself from following a season or Super Bowl, in large part due to childhood associations watching games with my father. I considered boycotting this WC, which would be relatively painless for me, but for several reasons, some personal some philosophical, decided against it. But I do respect those who, at great personal cost, chose otherwise.

I am aware of the long history of corruption by FIFA, I think first made aware by John Oliver some years ago, maybe early in his HBO career (I have not yet had a chance to watch his most recent show, I’m sure he addressed it). I don’t know that everybody is ignoring it this time and just enjoying the game though, my understanding is FIFA is still under criminal investigation in several countries.

While heartless dictators largely do what they want, When it comes to something as internationally significant as this event, I think there are constraints. Would Qatar really kick Fox out for offering cursory coverage and even criticism of human rights abuses? Possibly, but I doubt it. Doing that would only amplify the impact of the criticism 100-fold, and shrink the footprint of their big propaganda event.

While I have yet to see any notice taken by Fox commentators of human rights abuses in Qatar, the announcers in the England Match did note that many Iranian fans booed the Iranian national anthem (unlike last WC, which in my memory did show the anthems at the start, so far I am not seeing them, though perhaps that is just because of where the YoutubeTV DVR is starting the recording?

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[Mark Jeffries]

Yesterday the anthems were heard on Fox before the US-Wales match, although that could've been because it was the USA.

Mark Jeffries
spotl...@gmail.com

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[Adam Bowie]

There's no way FIFA would kick out Fox for presenting any kind of critical coverage. Fox has paid big $ for those rights, and those revenues are FIFA's lifeblood. And FIFA has already screwed over the world's broadcasters by playing what was supposed to be a summer tournament in the winter. Obviously, having awarded a competition to a country where it gets dangerously hot during the northern hemisphere's summer, they couldn't do anything else.

I mentioned that the BBC ditched the opening ceremony (you could stream it if you really wanted - although WC opening ceremonies are nothing like Olympic ones) for presenting a wider picture. ITV, the joint UK-rights holder has done the same. So there's nothing stopping Fox apart from perhaps their commercial considerations with Qatar Airways! There was a clip - featured in John Oliver's piece - of a Danish reporter getting stopped during a live broadcast earlier this week which was then picked up globally. I suspect pretty much every European rights holder is covering human rights issues to one extent or another. Then there are the news hooks of the OneLove armbands various European team captains were prevented from wearing at the cost of gaining a yellow card and potentially impacting the field of play.

Even more important than the booing of the Iranian anthem was the Iranian team's refusal to sing their anthem. Who knows what the repercussions will be when those players return home?

I obviously don't know how Fox is doing their coverage, but the whole process of teams entering the stadium, warming up, standing for the anthems and so on, is tightly choreographed to allow commercial broadcasters to go through team line-ups, have introductory comments, and still find time for commercial breaks.

These days, there are loads of good books and documentaries about the history of FIFA and its general corruption. A series I've not seen just dropped on Netflix last week. But I first read about all of this years ago, via a fantastic British journalist called Andrew Jennings, who died at the start of this year. Over nearly 30 years, he wrote books about corruption within the IOC and FIFA, and generally made himself a complete pain, working on TV docs and writing for newspapers alongside his books. I doubt that his work is easy to come by in the US, and much of it will have been supplanted by now, but if you do find a book, they're very readable. 

Adam

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[Bob Jersey]

Whilst shopping for an unrelated book, I looked Jennings up, and found a couple of titles of his on a cheap-used-tome site:

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-dirty-game-uncovering-the-scandal-at-fifa_andrew-jennings/14446182/item/54375378/?gclid=Cj0KCQiAg_KbBhDLARIsANx7wAwruJobogNkV6UufkmdDTKGmSXgJJbcTXd2O4qF82X60al2eEOAmr8aAnnaEALw_wcB#idiq=54375378&edition=59028775
https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/foul-the-secret-world-of-fifa-bribes-vote-rigging-and-ticket-scandals_andrew-jennings/937302/item/44018262/?gclid=Cj0KCQiAg_KbBhDLARIsANx7wAwZACGd7Y5O0E3r1cpkgO334ZfTaWDsUm_TEbHsYoBEsjEWKi-6i-kaArFlEALw_wcB#idiq=44018262&edition=56832654 (links)

IYC.

B

Adam Bowie, in part, Nov 22nd:

[Adam Bowie]

I thought this was an interesting piece, on the World Cup facing off against the NFL. There's no competition of course, but there's also barely any overlap.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/nov/23/world-cup-2022-qatar-soccer-nfl-football-tv-ratings

But in the midst of this was a reminder that FIFA gave the North American rights holders a roll-over for the next tournament in return for them not suing FIFA for moving from summer to winter:

"In 2015, Fifa rewarded Fox, Telemundo, and Bell Media (Canada) with a third cycle of World Cup events in a no-bid deal to avoid facing lawsuits from their decision to shift the World Cup in Qatar from the sweltering summer heat to a winter kickoff. Reports suggested Fox paid a 10% increase of $467m on its current deal for 2026 broadcasting rights, netting an extra 24 games at a discount price as the expanded North American edition jumps from 32 to 48 teams and 58 to 80 matches."

The 2026 tournament would otherwise have been massively more lucrative if it had gone to an open tender. 

(The extra games are another bit of FIFA nonsense. Yes - more teams get to play, but the new system becomes open to "gaming", with teams potentially in the position of being able to "agree" a mutually beneficial result in early stages. This is why the final group games in the World Cup kick off simultaneously. There was a famous case in 1982 between West Germany and Austria played, safe in the knowledge that a 1-0 Germany win would see both sides through to the next round. Germany went 1-0 up in the first ten minutes and then both sides played a gentle kick-around to see out time. They both progressed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disgrace_of_Gij%C3%B3n for more.)

Adam

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[Adam Bowie]

For those interested, there's a new documentary on Amazon Prime Video (at least in the UK) called Kickback. I think it dropped in the last week.

It tells the recent history of FIFA corruption and the now deceased investigative reporter, Andrew Jennings, is the star of the film.

There are lots of clips of Jennings' docs for the BBC, as well as other clips from his media appearances and conference speeches.

If anything, the doc tries to squeeze too much into one 90 minute film. So sometimes it feels a bit scattergun. But overall it's pretty decent if you want to get caught up.

Adam

[Bob Jersey]

Not available in North America yet. Trailer: https://youtu.be/HIVU6A0j4P4 (link)

B

Adam Bowie, Nov 25th: