“Everything I know about morality I owe to football.”
Albert Camus
Imagine the meeting between Messi and his old buddy Luis Suárez, or with Dani Alves, the first time they met after Argentina won the World Cup. Pats, laughs, give me a high five. This is how Vladimir Putin greeted Mohamed bin Salman (MBS) weeks after the Saudi boss ordered the death of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
“Way to go! Well played, Mohamed!”
We can assume that if the dictators met today, a few days after Putin ended the life of the martyr Alexei Navalny, they would greet each other with the same effusiveness. The Russian tsar's and MBS's weapons of political persuasion are identical. When power is at stake, terror is the first option. Assassins of the world, unite.
But international sport, in its infinite wisdom, distinguishes between the two. It punishes Russia, expelling it from the Olympic Games and the World Cup, but rewards Saudi Arabia, an oil empire on its way to becoming the circus maximus of sport, including the 2034 World Cup venue.
OK, it's true. Russia invaded a country, while Saudi Arabia only dismembers or beheads its internal opponents, machine-guns “illegal” immigrants on its borders and launches missiles against Yemen with similar enthusiasm as Israel in Gaza.
But, let's see. Maybe the time has come to impose boycotts more rigorously, right? What other countries could it happen to?
Let's start with the most obvious ones. To Israel, for infanticide, to begin with. To Syria, for killing 600,000 people in ten years, with Russian help. To Iran, for the violence they sponsor in the Middle East and the systematic oppression of their women. To China, where a million Uyghurs have been interned in concentration camps for being Muslims (sepulchral silence of MBS and the ayatollahs of Tehran, by the way). And to North Korea for… well, for whatever they want.
In fairness, another candidate would have to be the United States, host of the next World Cup. For the enormous amount of weapons it supplies to Israel and Saudi Arabia and, as retrospective punishment, for the invasion of Iraq, the seed of so many horrors in that region forgotten by Allah.
And how about Spain? Now, I agree, you cannot compare the suffering caused by the current Spanish Government with that of the countries I just mentioned. But, if we took the word of its opponents as a reference, there would be reasons to consider the expulsion of Spanish sport from international competitions. The main opposition party, the PP, and its spiritual allies in Vox have accused Pedro Sánchez and his ministers of being, among other things, “autocrats”, “despots”, “psychopaths” and “caudillos”. Oh, and promoting “apartheid”.
For elementary coherence, the PP and Vox should be the first to call for a sports boycott against Spain as a lesson to the Sanchista regime, just like the black South African parties in their day against the white racist regime.
As for Catalonia, the leaders of FIFA and the International Olympic Committee would have it even easier. Not only opposition politicians, but at least one venerable Spanish judge consider that Catalan lands harbor nests of terrorists led by politicians comparable to the leaders of ETA, the IRA or Hamas. The question would be whether to extend the boycott beyond Catalan players like Lamine Yamal and include foreigners who have sold their souls to Barça or Girona, such as the Polish Robert Lewandowski or the Ukrainian Artem Dovbyk.
There will be those who say – I understand it – that I am going too far in moral purity. That if we continue along the path I propose, we will have to say goodbye to sport as a global spectacle. Well no. There is a way out. That all those whom international authorities identify as lepers go to play in the professional leagues and circuits of Saudi Arabia. Enjoy the sports boom in the desert. Better paid than ever, they will be happy there as long as they close their eyes every time they come across a public beheading or a prison where men and women are imprisoned for sending tweets that are not liked by Tsar Vladimir's colleague, the magnificent and munificent Mohamed bin Salman.
