Gianni Infantino has received plenty of mail in recent days. When football officials and political leaders between Paris, London, Moscow and Doha held down the Super League clubs with astonishing ease at the beginning of last week, the president of the International Football Association (Fifa) had actually claimed that his organisation was “built on the true values of sport”.
Christoph Becker (chwb.), Spore Follow I follow
It must have seemed like a keyword. The letters received from Infantino, first from Stockholm, then from Copenhagen, and finally from Oslo, demand action rather than words. It concerns the president of the football associations of the three Scandinavian countries to the World Cup 2022 in Qatar. It is about the human rights situation, the Scandinavians are putting pressure because they themselves are feeling pressure. Norway’s association, the NFF, has to deal with the question of a World Cup boycott at the request of several clubs. A vote will be taken at a general meeting on 20 June.
Also in Denmark, fans demand action, such as that of Brøndby IF in Copenhagen, and also the fan section of the national association, the Dansk Boldspil Union. So the DBU leadership also writes to Infantino. “As the world looks ahead to the preparations for the World Cup,” it says, “we urge them to implement the human and labour rights that are crucial for the football world and are enshrined in Article Three of the Fifa Statutes. We must act now, if football is to remain the beautiful game.”From Stockholm comes the desire for a joint meeting.
And the NFF, the federation of the country, in which the current debate with the start of the World Cup qualifiers by boycotts of various professional clubs had taken up speed, widens the playing field of the debate considerably. While it had previously focused on the rights of migrant workers, the Norwegians are calling on Fifa to investigate the deterioration of press freedom, referring to the ranking of “Reporters without Borders”. Although the emirate climbed by one rank compared to 2020 in the just published report for the current year, from 129th to 128th place. However, in the course of the World Cup preparations, the trend is clearly negative. As the World Cup approached, it went down significantly: in 2014 Qatar was ranked 113th.
